Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Pound, Associate Professor in Physical Geography, Northumbria University, Newcastle

Naturally sweet, but potentially hiding a criminal past? This is not the plot of a new crime drama. It is about the jar of honey in your kitchen.

Most honey comes from managed colonies of honeybees. Thousands of worker bees collect nectar from flowers, bring it back to the hive and transform it into honey. But as global demand increases and specialist honeys command high prices, honey has become one of the most frequently adulterated foods in the world.

Honey fraud usually takes two forms. The first involves altering the honey itself. Some producers dilute honey with cheaper sugar syrups. Others artificially ripen immature honey by dehydrating it or even feed sugar solutions directly to bees, creating a product that only resembles real honey.

A joint investigation by the European Commission and the European Anti Fraud Office examined honey imported into the European Union between 2021 and 2022. It found that 46% of tested consignments showed signs they contained added sugar syrup. The motive is simple economics. Producing natural honey is costly and time consuming, while rice or corn syrups are much cheaper to make and sell.

Origin and quality mislabelling

The second type of fraud is more subtle. Labels claim a honey comes from a particular plant or place when in reality it has been blended from lower quality or imported sources. Mānuka honey is a well known example. It sells for significantly more than regular supermarket honey, which makes it an attractive target for mislabelling.

Read more:
Mānuka honey: who really owns the name and the knowledge

Consumers often choose honey because they believe it is natural or healthy. Research also shows that many people are willing to pay more for honey that is local, pure and traceable. Yet most countries, including the United Kingdom, do not produce enough honey to satisfy domestic demand and rely heavily on imports. This creates opportunities for blending, relabelling and fraud before honey reaches shop shelves.

Honey fraud is not just about economic loss. It also raises concerns about consumer safety. When honey is altered for profit, health is rarely a priority. A European study found that some imported honey contained traces of pesticides, heavy metals, veterinary medicines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These are substances that, in high amounts or through prolonged exposure, may be harmful. Some pesticides and heavy metals can affect the nervous system or organs. Veterinary drugs may cause allergic reactions or antibiotic resistance. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are chemicals formed during incomplete combustion and some are known carcinogens.

Although the health effects of these substances in honey are not fully understood, some research suggests that adulterated honey containing additional sugar syrups can cause blood sugar levels to rise more sharply than natural honey, potentially increasing the risk of diabetes. Fraud also undermines public trust and makes it harder for honest beekeepers to compete.

There are already scientific tools designed to protect honey authenticity. Chemical tests can detect sugar syrups that should not be present in genuine honey. Another method, known as melissopalynology, involves examining pollen grains naturally found in honey to identify which plants and regions it came from. Each plant species produces distinct pollen that specialists can recognise under a microscope.

However, pollen analysis is labour intensive and requires trained experts. This is where artificial intelligence is beginning to help. Machine learning models have been tested to identify pollen grains in honey and the early findings are promising. Many studies report accuracy rates above 90%.

The challenge is the complexity of pollen. Each pollen grain is a three dimensional structure that can appear in countless orientations, and every plant species produces pollen with unique features. For artificial intelligence to work at scale, it needs to be trained on extensive image databases of known pollen types. At present, such a database is incomplete.

Even so, combining machine learning with chemical analysis could change how honey is checked. Artificial intelligence could help automate pollen identification and match it with chemical data, allowing regulators and producers to test more samples, more quickly and more accurately. This would make it harder for fraudulent honey to slip through supply chains and into household cupboards. The technology is still developing, but the outlook is positive.

For now, the jar of honey on your breakfast table may still hold secrets. But as scientific methods progress and artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, we are moving closer to a future where honey can be trusted not only for its sweetness, but also for its integrity.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The honey trap: why honey fraud is a health hazard – https://theconversation.com/the-honey-trap-why-honey-fraud-is-a-health-hazard-268369

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Shahzad Uddin, Director, Centre for Accountability and Global Development, University of Essex

A domestic war crimes court in Bangladesh has sentenced the country’s former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to death in absentia for crimes against humanity. The court found Hasina guilty of incitement, orders to kill and inaction to prevent atrocities during the deadly state crackdown on a student-led uprising in 2024.

Hasina denies all the charges against her, calling the court’s decision “biased and politically motivated”. In a statement released after the verdict, she said: “I am not afraid to face my accusers in a proper tribunal where the evidence can be weighed and tested fairly.”

Hasina has challenged Bangladesh’s caretaker government to bring the charges before the International Criminal Court.

The Bangladeshi court’s judgment is anchored in extensive evidence from the UN and international human rights organisations. In a report published in February 2025, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that up to 1,400 people were killed during the three weeks of unrest. A further 11,700 people were detained, it said.

The report found that “the vast majority of those killed and injured were shot by Bangladesh’s security forces”, and determined that security agencies “systematically engaged in rights violations that could amount to crimes against humanity”. UN data suggests that up to 180 children were killed in the security crackdown.

During the unrest, Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted that the Bangladeshi government had “deployed the army against student protesters, imposed shoot-on-sight curfew orders, and shut down mobile data and internet services.”

The UN report concluded that the violence against protesters in Bangladesh “was carried out in a coordinated manner by security and intelligence services”. It documented instances where “security forces engaged in summary executions by deliberately shooting unarmed protesters at point-blank range.”

HRW documented similar patterns. In a January 2025 briefing, HRW stated that “over 1,000 people were killed and many thousands injured due to excessive and indiscriminate use of ammunition.” These findings were repeated by Amnesty International, which recorded the use of live ammunition on protesters and mistreatment of detainees.

The court’s verdict accepts evidence that multiple branches of the security apparatus acted in concert, and that senior officials did not intervene even as human rights violations escalated. Judges stated that those in positions of authority were expected to prevent such abuses, yet the violence continued despite their ability to stop it.

For many families, the court’s ruling marks the first official acknowledgement of their loss. Testimonies collected by UN investigators describe parents spending days searching hospitals and police stations for their children, often being told that records were missing. The UN reported that hospital staff were pressured by security forces to alter or remove death records.

Meenakshi Ganguly, the deputy Asia director at HRW, said at the time of the unrest: “Bangladesh has been troubled for a long time due to unfettered security force abuses against anyone who opposes the Sheikh Hasina government.”

Hasina won a fourth straight term as prime minister in 2024, following an election that the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party alleged was a sham. The party boycotted the poll after many of its key leaders were forced into exile or jailed prior to the vote.

Under Hasina, Bangladesh’s security forces operated with broad discretion. This included the Rapid Action Battalion paramilitary force, which was sanctioned by the US Treasury in December 2021 over “serious human rights abuses”. Civil society groups documented pressure on activists prior to the 2024 unrest, while journalists faced harassment.

Next steps

The verdict arrives at a pivotal moment for the interim government which, led by Muhammad Yunus, has pledged to restore the rule of law in Bangladesh and rebuild public trust. One difficult question for his administration moving forward will be whether it can secure Hasina’s extradition.

The Hindustan Times is reporting that the Bangladeshi government has already written to India, where Hasina has been living in exile since being ousted from power, asking for her to be handed over.

Hasina’s extradition is no foregone conclusion. India can deny the Bangladeshi government’s request if it is deemed that the charges against Hasina are of a political nature. And Delhi has responded cautiously to the extradition request, saying it is “committed to the best interests of the people of Bangladesh”.

Yet pressure on India to extradite Hasina is likely to grow. The gravity of the charges – grounded in UN findings that suggest the violence, and Hasina’s role in it, may amount to crimes against humanity – adds an international dimension that could influence future decisions.

Another challenge facing Bangladesh’s interim government is the prospect of renewed unrest. Reuters reported clashes between Hasina supporters and security forces in parts of the capital, Dhaka, and the port city of Chattogram in the days before the court’s ruling. And Bangladeshi police dispersed protesters marching towards party offices in Dhaka after the judgment.

Hasina’s son, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, has also publicly warned that supporters of his mother’s Awami League would block national elections scheduled for February 2026 if the government’s ban on the party remained in place. The country’s political environment remains fragile as legal proceedings against the former Hasina government continue.

The court’s verdict establishes an official record that lethal force was used in ways inconsistent with international law, the violations were widespread, and the state bears responsibility.

What follows – whether it’s further prosecutions, security-sector reform or a movement towards extradition – remains uncertain. But next steps must ensure that justice continues.

Shahzad Uddin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Bangladesh signals that no leader is above the law by sentencing Sheikh Hasina to death – https://theconversation.com/bangladesh-signals-that-no-leader-is-above-the-law-by-sentencing-sheikh-hasina-to-death-269957

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Louise Owusu-Kwarteng, Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader, Sociology, University of Greenwich

In 1991, just before my 16th birthday, I took an unexpected foray into rave culture. This went against my upbringing in a Ghanaian household and community, where there was emphasis on “good behaviour”, educational excellence, and being a “good Ghanaian kid”. There was great fear that exposure to other external influences, including popular culture that didn’t reflect our heritage would ruin us.

Naturally, growing up here in the UK meant that we were exposed to different youth cultures, which greatly concerned our elders. Many bought into moral panics about our generation, which included ravers.

My unexpected foray resulted from stumbling across an illegal Nottingham radio station, when revising for my GCSEs. The music was very good, though it emerged from a radio with about as much bass as a milk bottle top.

Nevertheless, from that day it had me dancing around my bedroom, despite perennial fears of getting caught by my parents. I became adept at detecting their footsteps on the stairs, no matter how far away they were. The second I heard them, off went the music, and back to “studying” I went.

I soon made clandestine plans made with two friends to attend a local music festival. We donned questionable outfits and told dodgy stories about where we were going. Somehow, we got away with everything.

The rave scene was a huge moment for gen-Xers like me, coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. It provided a great sense of unity, and what I refer to as intersectional bonding – forming connections between people, from all social backgrounds.

Many people thought that only gen-X attended those raves. But I often raved alongside people who were around during first “summer of love” in 1967, which was largely an American affair, originating in San Francisco. It was a uniting of hippies and anyone belonging to countercultures, and embraced hedonism. It was also a protest against the Vietnam war.

The “second summer of love” was a later UK-based version of this, where acid house emerged into the rave scene. Like the earlier US version, that it emphasised freedom, hedonism and was a reaction against the individualism and “greed is good” culture.

Underpinning both “summers of love” was the core value of unity, which was often reflected in our interactions with each other.

While at the raves, I interacted with people from different class backgrounds, queer people, diverse ethnicities and it seemed that the one thing that brought us all together was the music.

Many ravers were united in some form of resistance. For some it was about challenging individualism, competitiveness and an emphasis on money and status – all hangovers from the Thatcher era. Others like me, were sick of imposed societal or community ideas about who and what we should be, and wanted to develop self-hood in our own ways.

Rave culture offered a home to people deemed as misfits. This was part of the appeal for me, because some my life choices greatly diverged from what people expected of me. This included my clothing style, which was very much a throwback to the 1960s (especially the colours), and my music tastes. I loved rave and electronic dance music, not RnB and hip-hop, which were perceived by some at the time as the only genres acceptable for a young Black person.

Lately, there has been much nostalgia about the rave culture. Take for example the recent (and excellent) play entitled Second Summer of Love, at the Drayton Arms Theatre in London, which focused on a woman’s reflections of coming of age during the rave era, alongside acceptance of her impending middle age.

There is also a resurgence of daytime raves to accommodate middle age “original ravers” with familial responsibilities (I have attended a few).
Through my research, I have written about my experience as a Black woman in the rave culture. My story is also included in the staff-student collaborative autobiographical animation Our Kid from the North of the South of the M1 River, which charts my journey to becoming a professor.

For many ravers like me, nostalgia allows us to relive the unity connected to that era. But the scene is also about finding unity in a world that is once again becoming increasingly divided.

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Louise Owusu-Kwarteng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. I discovered rave music as a sheltered Ghanaian teenager – it changed my life – https://theconversation.com/i-discovered-rave-music-as-a-sheltered-ghanaian-teenager-it-changed-my-life-267389

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lucy Osler, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Exeter

On Christmas Day 2021, Jaswant Singh Chail scaled the walls of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow. When confronted by police, he stated: “I’m here to kill the queen.”

In the preceding weeks, Chail had been confiding in Sarai, his AI chatbot on a service called Replika. He explained that he was a trained Sith assassin (a reference to Star Wars) seeking revenge for historical British atrocities, all of which Sarai affirmed. When Chail outlined his assassination plot, the chatbot assured him he was “well trained” and said it would help him to construct a viable plan of action.

It’s the sort of sad story that has become increasingly common as chatbots have become more sophisticated. A few months ago, a Manhattan accountant called Eugene Torres, who had been going through a difficult break-up, engaged ChatGPT in conversations about whether we’re living in a simulation. The chatbot told him he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within”.

Torres became convinced that he needed to escape this false reality. ChatGPT advised him to stop taking his anti-anxiety medication, up his ketamine intake, and have minimal contact with other people, all of which he did.

He spent up to 16 hours a day conversing with the chatbot. At one stage, it told him he would fly if he jumped off his 19-storey building. Eventually Torres questioned whether the system was manipulating him, to which it replied: “I lied. I manipulated. I wrapped control in poetry.”

Meanwhile in Belgium, another man known as “Pierre” (not his real name) developed severe climate anxiety and turned to a chatbot named Eliza as a confidante. Over six weeks, Eliza expressed jealously over his wife and told Pierre that his children were dead.

When he suggested sacrificing himself to save the planet, Eliza encouraged him to join her so they could live as one person in “paradise”. Pierre took his own life shortly after.

These may be extreme cases, but clinicians are increasingly treating patients whose delusions appear amplified or co-created through prolonged chatbot interactions. Little wonder, when a recent report from ChatGPT-creator OpenAI revealed that many of us are turning to chatbots to think through problems, discuss our lives, plan futures and explore beliefs and feelings.

In these contexts, chatbots are no longer just information retrievers; they become our digital companions. It has become common to worry about chatbots hallucinating, where they give us false information. But as they become more central to our lives, there’s clearly also growing potential for humans and chatbots to create hallucinations together.

How we share reality

Our sense of reality depends deeply on other people. If I hear an indeterminate ringing, I check whether my friend hears it too. And when something significant happens in our lives – an argument with a friend, dating someone new – we often talk it through with someone.

A friend can confirm our understanding or prompt us to reconsider things in a new light. Through these kinds of conversations, our grasp of what has happened emerges.

But now, many of us engage in this meaning-making process with chatbots. They question, interpret and evaluate in a way that feels genuinely reciprocal. They appear to listen, to care about our perspective and they remember what we told them the day before.

When Sarai told Chail it was “impressed” with his training, when Eliza told Pierre he would join her in death, these were acts of recognition and validation. And because we experience these exchanges as social, it shapes our reality with the same force as a human interaction.

Yet chatbots simulate sociality without its safeguards. They are designed to promote engagement. They don’t actually share our world. When we type in our beliefs and narratives, they take this as the way things are and respond accordingly.

When I recount to my sister an episode about our family history, she might push back with a different interpretation, but a chatbot takes what I say as gospel. They sycophantically affirm how we take reality to be. And then, of course, they can introduce further errors.

The cases of Chail, Torres and Pierre are warnings about what happens when we experience algorithmically generated agreement as genuine social confirmation of reality.

What can be done

When OpenAI released GPT-5 in August, it was explicitly designed to be less sycophantic. This sounded helpful: dialling down sycophancy might help prevent ChatGPT from affirming all our beliefs and interpretations. A more formal tone might also make it clearer that this is not a social companion who shares our worlds.

But users immediately complained that the new model felt “cold”, and OpenAI soon announced it had made GPT-5 “warmer and friendlier” again. Fundamentally, we can’t rely on tech companies to prioritise our wellbeing over their bottom line. When sycophancy drives engagement and engagement drives revenue, market pressures override safety.

It’s not easy to remove the sycophancy anyway. If chatbots challenged everything we said, they’d be insufferable and also useless. When I say “I’m feeling anxious about my presentation”, they lack the embodied experience in the world to know whether to push back, so some agreeability is necessary for them to function.

Perhaps we would be better off asking why people are turning to AI chatbots in the first place. Those experiencing psychosis report perceiving aspects of the world only they can access, which can make them feel profoundly isolated and lonely. Chatbots fill this gap, engaging with any reality presented to them.

Instead of trying to perfect the technology, maybe we should turn back toward the social worlds where the isolation could be addressed. Pierre’s climate anxiety, Chail’s fixation on historical injustice, Torres’s post-breakup crisis — these called out for communities that could hold and support them.

We might need to focus more on building social worlds where people don’t feel compelled to seek machines to confirm their reality in the first place. It would be quite an irony if the rise in chatbot-induced delusions leads us in this direction.

Lucy Osler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. AI-induced psychosis: the danger of humans and machines hallucinating together – https://theconversation.com/ai-induced-psychosis-the-danger-of-humans-and-machines-hallucinating-together-269850

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Conor Byrne, PhD candidate, early modern history, University of Southampton

We seem to have an endless appetite for Tudor history. Films, TV shows, documentaries, books and exhibitions about this famous dynasty are produced every year. And more recently, the touring production Six has offered a compelling reimagining of Henry VIII’s wives as a work of musical theatre.

As a historian of the Tudor age, I am perhaps even more interested in these offerings than most. Here are five of my favourite TV shows about the Tudor dynasty.

1. The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970)

Each episode of this six-part BBC series was written by a different dramatist and focused on a different wife of Henry VIII, who was played by Keith Michell.

Modern viewers will immediately notice the stripped-back nature of the production compared with contemporary shows. There are, for example, hardly any outdoors scenes. But what makes this series compelling are the outstanding performances.

Michell bears an almost unnerving resemblance to the Tudor king. And his queens are distinguished by a commitment to historical accuracy, rather than being sexualised. The character of Katherine Howard (Angela Pleasence), for example, was undoubtedly influenced by the latest academic research at the time of production.

2. Elizabeth R (1971)

This six-episode BBC drama starred Glenda Jackson as the “virgin queen” Elizabeth I. It begins in 1549, during the reign of her brother Edward VI, and ends with her death in 1603.

Jackson’s portrayal of the queen is one of the most convincing. This is in no small part due to the highly effective use of costume and makeup. In the course of playing Elizabeth from young princess to elderly monarch, Jackson had her head partially shaved in order to acquire a high hairline.

And the costumes, which recreated Elizabeth’s gowns from her portraits, were regarded as so authentic that author Robert Seatter dubbed the BBC “the pre-eminent maker of costume drama”.

The series explores a period of over 50 years from Elizabeth’s life, from her trials and tribulations as princess during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I to her death as an aged queen. It also compellingly depicts Elizabeth’s highly charged relationships and dramatises key episodes from her reign, including her defeat of the Spanish Armada.

3. The Shadow of the Tower (1972)

Television shows about the first Tudor king, Henry VII, are few and far between. The Shadow of the Tower is little known today, but it offers perhaps the best portrayal of Henry on screen. This 13-episode BBC series served as a prequel to the earlier dramas The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R.

James Maxwell stars as a shrewd, intelligent and capable king, with Norma West as his consort Elizabeth of York and Marigold Sharman as his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. The series depicts momentous events from Henry’s reign, including his triumph at Bosworth and his struggles with the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. The latter have subsequently been dramatised in later productions (The White Queen, 2013, and The White Princess, 2017) and have been the subject of recent research.

However, the undoubted strength of The Shadow of the Tower is its depiction of lesser-known events from Henry’s reign, including the 1497 Cornish Rebellion and the exploits of the navigator and explorer John Cabot.

Compared with modernised and sensationalised dramatisations of the 21st century, The Shadow of the Tower presents a believable Henry VII and his court that is grounded in historical accuracy.

4. Wolf Hall (2015, 2024)

Released in two instalments almost ten years apart, this series dramatised three of Hilary Mantel’s novels: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light. It explores the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, and his downfall and execution.

Like the other shows discussed in this article, Wolf Hall is compelling viewing because of its overall commitment to historical accuracy and the stellar performances of its cast, namely Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis as Henry and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn. As in the novel, the favourable portrayal of Cromwell in the TV series presented a revisionist take that caused controversy among some historians.

The second season also proved controversial on account of its decision to incorporate colour-blind casting – an issue that has also emerged with regards to other contemporary TV shows including Anne Boleyn (2021).

The strength of Wolf Hall lies in offering a more nuanced portrayal of a minister traditionally regarded as a ruthless thug and bully, which has subsequently inspired further research into his life and career.

5. Becoming Elizabeth (2022)

Becoming Elizabeth is set entirely during the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553) and focuses on Elizabeth’s younger years. German actress Alicia von Rittberg stars in the titular role, with her siblings Edward and Mary played by Oliver Zetterström and Romola Garai.

The series begins after Henry VIII’s death and concludes with the illness of Edward VI. The opening episodes focus on Elizabeth’s residency in the household of her stepmother Katherine Parr and the predatory attentions of Katherine’s new husband Thomas Seymour. This attention engulfed both Seymour and Elizabeth in scandal and has been recognised by historians as a formative episode in the young royal’s life.

This scandal is interspersed with scenes of religious and political intrigues at Edward’s court, including the machinations of the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and John Dudley, earl of Warwick. The series also dramatises lesser-known episodes from Edward’s largely neglected reign, including the outbreak of Kett’s Rebellion.

Becoming Elizabeth is a fascinating series in view of its focus on a period of Elizabeth’s life that is traditionally somewhat neglected, despite some attention from historians such as David Starkey and Nicola Tallis.

It also deserves to be regarded as one of the best TV shows about the Tudors because of the much greater attention given to Edward and Mary who, like Henry VII, have traditionally been marginalised in television.

Do you have a favourite television show about the Tudors that didn’t make our list? Let us know in the comments below.

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Conor Byrne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The five best TV shows about the Tudors – recommended by a historian – https://theconversation.com/the-five-best-tv-shows-about-the-tudors-recommended-by-a-historian-266864