Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paul Hough, Lecturer Sport & Exercise Physiology , University of Westminster

Creatine is one of the most widely used sports supplements across the world. It’s taken by many in the hopes of boosting strength, enhancing athletic performance and promoting muscle growth.

But it isn’t only adults who are using this supplement. A growing number of teenagers and young adults report taking creatine in the hopes of reaping the supplement’s benefits.

Surveys show that as many as 72% of male athletes aged 17-18 report using creatine. Use is typically more common among athletes, especially young men.

While creatine is generally considered to be safe for young people to use, it’s no shortcut to getting fit. It’s better for young people looking to get strong or improve their athletic performance to focus on the fundamentals: exercising, eating properly and prioritising sleep.

Read more:
Creatine supplements: what the research says about how they can help you get in shape

Creatine is a natural compound stored within muscle. Although a small amount is produced in the kidneys and liver, most (around 95%) is obtained from eating meat and seafood. Creatine plays an important role in providing energy during high-intensity activities, such as sprinting and lifting weights.

Although several forms of creatine are commercially available, creatine monohydrate is the most stable and extensively studied form.

Numerous studies show that creatine supplementation enhances performance in high-intensity exercises requiring strength and power, such as strength training and sprinting. Creatine supplementation may also lead to more muscle growth when combined with resistance training, and faster recovery from exercise.

Emerging research also suggests that creatine’s benefits extend beyond the gym. Studies indicate that creatine may improve aspects of cognitive function – specifically memory and attention.

Creatine also shows promise for older adults in preventing muscle loss and protecting against neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Creatine’s safety

A typical diet that includes meat and seafood provides around 1–2 grams of creatine per day, which keeps the muscles around 60–80% full of creatine.

Taking a daily creatine supplement eventually fills the muscles with creatine. There are two common ways to do this.

The quickest and most commonly studied method involves a one week loading phase. This entails taking 0.3 grams of creatine per kilogram of body weight four times a day. For example, a 75kg person would take a total of 24g of creatine per day.

An alternative approach, which increases muscle creatine levels more gradually, is to take 3g of creatine per day for around 28 days.

Both approaches will fill muscle creatine stores. The first (loading) approach tops up creatine stores faster, which means you’ll see benefits to exercise performance faster. However, the second approach is less likely to cause temporary gastrointestinal discomfort (such as bloating and diarrhoea) which are more common when using the loading approach.

Regardless of what approach you use, taking 3-5g of creatine daily is necessary to maintain muscle creatine levels.

Numerous studies show that short and long-term creatine supplementation (up to 30g a day for five years) is safe and has no ill effects on health when taken at the recommended dosages.

The most common side-effect of creatine is weight gain as the supplement increases water retention in muscles. This extra water remains only as long as you’re taking creatine.

Creatine and young people

Although creatine is shown to be safe and effective for adults, only a few studies have investigated the effects among children and adolescents.

The available studies show that creatine appears to be safe for young people to use and can provide performance benefits, particularly for athletes. Most studies have only looked at the safety of a creatine dosage between 0.1g and 0.3g per kg of body mass per day. As such, it’s important that any young people who choose to use creatine do not exceed this dosage.

Although creatine appears to be safe for children and adolescents to take, it is possible that, without proper nutrition education and supervision of dosing, they could be at risk of misusing creatine – potentially leading to adverse effects such as stomach cramps.

A study that evaluated young athletes’ understanding of how sports supplements should be used reported that only 11% of the athletes answered questions correctly about creatine use.

Regardless of age, it’s important to recognise that supplements such as creatine are not a shortcut to improving fitness, building muscle or losing body fat. Supplements provide much smaller performance gains compared to what can be achieved through good training and nutrition alone. While sports supplements support training and recovery, significant progress comes from consistent exercise, a balanced diet and adequate sleep.

With a well-designed training programme and healthy eating plan, young people will experience rapid improvements in strength, power and endurance without the need for supplements. Focusing too soon on taking supplements could distract young people from building good training habits and healthy eating patterns.

This is why most sport nutritionists recommend using a food-first approach, which focuses on maximising diet quality before recommending supplements such as creatine.

Paul Hough 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. Should young people take creatine? – https://theconversation.com/should-young-people-take-creatine-267365

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robert Hazell, Professor of British Politics and Government & Founder of the Constitution Unit, UCL

In announcing that Prince Andrew would no longer use his title or honours, Buckingham Palace hoped to shift the spotlight away from his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the accusations of sexual abuse he has faced (and denied).

The media were encouraged to focus instead on King Charles’s visit to the Vatican, and the royal family’s good works. But this strategy has failed. Revelations about Prince Andrew’s living arrangements and finances have whetted the appetite for more.

One such revelation is his royal residence. Andrew has a 75-year lease from the crown estate on Royal Lodge, a large house in Windsor Great Park. The Times published the lease, revealing that he paid £1 million for it plus a minimum of £7.5 million in refurbishments. In return for this very large upfront cost, Andrew pays an annual rent of “one peppercorn (if demanded)”.

The crown estate is a statutory corporation operating under the Crown Estate Act 1961 (as amended in 2025), which manages a huge property portfolio including Regent Street in London and most of the foreshore around the coast, generating a big income from wind farms.

Its net revenue profit – which in 2023-24 amounted to £1.1 billion – is paid to the Treasury. The government uses 12% of the profits to fund the sovereign grant, which provides financial support for the monarchy.

Read more:
Why Prince Andrew is still a prince – and how his remaining titles could be removed

Since 2019, when he ceased to be a working royal, Prince Andrew no longer receives any public funding from the sovereign grant. Mysteries about his sources of income may be hard for the palace to dispel without being more transparent about the royal finances more generally.

One particular area of interest is the Duchy of Lancaster, which last year provided King Charles with £27 million of his income. The palace website states that this is “a portfolio of land, property and assets held in trust for the sovereign. Its main purpose is to provide an independent source of income, and is used mainly to pay for official expenditure not met by the Sovereign Grant (primarily to meet expenses incurred by other members of the Royal Family).”

Prior to the sovereign grant, the monarchy was funded through the civil list. This was an annual sum of money voted by parliament, which included the annuities received by other members of the royal family.

Since the Sovereign Grant Act 2011, those annuities are no longer published. The Duchy of Lancaster’s annual report and accounts gives lots of detail about the Duchy’s income, but none about its expenditure.

The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey MP has called for a select committee inquiry to “properly scrutinise” the crown estate, and Baroness (Margaret) Hodge, former chair of the public accounts committee, has called for greater transparency about the royal finances.

What next for Andrew?

The nine commissioners who manage the crown estate’s holdings are property experts who operate independently of government and the crown. They cannot simply terminate Prince Andrew’s lease, but there is mounting pressure on him to relinquish the lease voluntarily.

When it comes to his remaining titles, both the palace and UK government will be desperate to close the story down and move on. The government took the line that it was all a matter for the king and the palace.

Sir Alan Campbell, leader of the House of Commons, said: “The question of [Andrew’s] titles is primarily a question for His Majesty. I know there has been speculation about legislation, but the palace has been clear it recognises that there are other matters this House needs to be getting on with, and we are guided in this by the palace.”

In practice, the palace will also be guided by the government, which will be keen to avoid legislation if at all possible. Short of legislation, there is little more the palace can do.

The king could issue letters patent declaring that Prince Andrew is no longer His Royal Highness. He could also give an undertaking that Andrew would never be called upon to serve as a counsellor of state, deputising for the monarch in his absence.

If public anger remained unabated, and legislation was deemed unavoidable, a short bill could be prepared to strip Andrew of his peerage titles and remove him as a counsellor of state. It could be passed relatively quickly: the Counsellors of State Act 2022, which added Princess Anne and Prince Edward to the list of potential counsellors of state, went through all its Commons stages in a single day.

The finances are trickier. The Commons public accounts committee may hold a single evidence session just on Andrew’s finances, or launch a wider inquiry.

It may be hard to avoid the latter. Having made public the lease on Royal Lodge, the crown estate may find it difficult to refuse to disclose the leases on other properties occupied by the royal family, or other information about its finances.

If parliament decides to launch a wider inquiry, the payments to other members of the royal family funded by the Duchy of Lancaster would be an obvious place to start.

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Robert Hazell 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. Prince Andrew’s ‘one peppercorn’ lease exposes how little is known about royal finances – https://theconversation.com/prince-andrews-one-peppercorn-lease-exposes-how-little-is-known-about-royal-finances-268528

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Hope Kent, Administrative Data Research UK Research Fellow, University of Exeter

Walk into any custodial youth justice facility in the UK – from young offender’s institutions to secure training centres and children’s homes – and you’ll be met with an unexpected reality: the majority of children in these settings have special educational needs and disabilities.

In particular, a very high proportion of children in custody have neurodisabilities. These are long-term conditions affecting the brain and nervous system, and range from autism to brain injuries and foetal alcohol spectrum disorders.

These conditions are grouped together because they affect children’s cognition (including memory, attention and concentration, and executive functioning – mental skills necessary for daily life), as well as their emotional regulation, social communication skills and physical development. This is a pattern repeated in youth justice systems across the world.

For example, estimates suggest that 50% to 87% of children in custody globally have a brain injury. However, research from Canada suggests that brain injury affects around 20% of children in the general population. Over 60% of children in custody globally have a speech, language and communication impairment, compared with 1-3% in the general population globally.

Autistic children make up between 2% and 18% of children in custody across Europe and the USA, compared with 0.3 to 1.9% in the general population in Europe and the USA. While there is significant difference between countries, approximately 30% of children in custody globally have ADHD. This compares with 7% in the general population globally.

While just 0.7% of children in the general population have foetal alcohol spectrum disorders, these affect 11% to 21% of children in custody. Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders are a range of cognitive, behavioural and physical conditions which can affect a child as a result of their mother drinking alcohol during pregnancy.

Some children in custody may have very complex needs, with multiple overlapping conditions. Additionally, children may have needs that don’t quite meet diagnostic criteria for any one condition but still have a significant impact on their lives. These children have often had disrupted educational backgrounds, with multiple school moves or periods of absence. This means that they also may not have had their needs identified in school.

Why is this happening?

Of course, having a neurodisability in no way makes children inherently criminal. The majority of children with special educational needs will never come into contact with the youth justice system. So what is it that makes this small group who do more vulnerable?

School exclusion appears to be a really key component in pathways into the justice system for these children. My research with colleagues explored rates of neurodisability and school exclusion in prisoners in Wales. We found that those who scored more highly on a measure of neurodisability were also more likely to have been excluded from school. Those who had been excluded from school were also more likely to have had their first conviction at a younger age.

This finding aligns with Department for Education statistics, which indicate that exclusions are disproportionately affecting children with an identified special educational need. Children with special educational needs represent just around half of all permanent exclusions in England. However, they represent only about 17% of the mainstream school population.

There is plenty of convincing evidence that school exclusion is harmful, and increases the chances of children ending up in the criminal justice system.

Despite this, many accounts report a concerning rise in the use of zero-tolerance behavioural policies in the UK. This could be linked with a rise in the rates of school exclusions reported in the most recent Department for Education statistics.

In 2023-24 there was a 21% increase in the use of fixed-term exclusions (sometimes called suspensions) in England from the previous year. There was also a 16% increase in permanent exclusions.

Combined vulnerabilities

Children who end up in the youth justice system often have multiple other disadvantages layered on top of this systematic exclusion from school. For example, my recent study with colleagues used data from half a million children in the UK. We found that child poverty compounded the likelihood of having contact with the youth justice system for children with neurodisability. This means that it was children who had both disadvantages who were most vulnerable.

This growing body of evidence demonstrates that society is failing these children. When children with neurodisability and complex social disadvantage continue to be punished and excluded, we can’t be surprised when they end up on the fringes of society.

There are ways to remedy the problem of school exclusion. These include more specialist classrooms and units, as well as providing teachers with more options and support for children who aren’t thriving in the mainstream classroom.

In addition, more can be done to remove the layers of disadvantage that these children experience. More generous family welfare policies might help to lift children out of disadvantage and support them to have a better start in life.

Action like this could divert children away from the youth justice system long before they ever have contact with the police.

Hope Kent currently receives funding from ADR-UK, and has previously recieved funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. She is affiliated with the UK Acquired Brain Injury Forum.

– ref. Why so many children in the youth justice system have special educational needs – https://theconversation.com/why-so-many-children-in-the-youth-justice-system-have-special-educational-needs-264144

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Massimo D’Angelo, Research Associate in the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs, Loughborough University

Hakan Tosun, a 50 year-old Turkish journalist, died on October 13 three days after he was assaulted in a street attack in Istanbul. Two people have been arrested. The motive for the attack remains unclear, but several political groups have suggested that it may be linked to Tosun’s work. He reported on human rights and environmental protection.

Tosun’s case starkly illustrates the dangers faced by journalists in Turkey. Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey 159th out of 180 countries worldwide for press freedom after roughly 170 journalists have been killed, detained or reported missing there since 2013.

And during the latest democratic crackdown, which followed the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor and leading Turkish opposition figure Ekrem İmamoğlu in March 2025, further arrests have targeted reporters.

Read more:
Turkey: a favourable international climate is spurring Erdoğan’s crackdown on democracy

Working as a journalist in Turkey has long been dangerous. Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of the Agos newspaper, was shot dead in Istanbul in 2007. Retrials led to the conviction of multiple officials and accomplices, with nine life sentences handed down in February 2025.

In February 2022, Güngör Arslan, the editor of a local news outlet called Ses Kocaeli, was also killed in an ambush outside his office in the city of İzmit. The gunman, Ramazan Özkan, and the instigator, a businessman called Burhan Polat, received life sentences from Turkish courts in 2023.

Beyond these killings, there have been high-profile cases of arrests and persecution. Laws have also been introduced to curb press freedom, including one in 2022 enabling Turkish courts to sentence people found guilty of intentionally publishing disinformation to three years in prison.

Turkish authorities have repeatedly relied on criminal statutes to target critical journalists. Ahmet Şık, an investigative reporter for the Cumhuriyet newspaper, was charged with terrorism-related offences in 2011 and then again in 2016. He was held in pre-trial detention for around a year on both occasions, which the European Court of Human Rights subsequently found violated convention rights.

Ahmet Altan, a prominent Turkish journalist, was also arrested in 2016 on terrorism-linked charges and spent more than four years in prison. Turkey’s Court of Cassation ordered his release in April 2021.

The former editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, lives in exile after being sentenced in absentia to over 27 years for his reporting on links between Turkey’s national intelligence organisation and the smuggling of weapons to rebel forces in Syria.

And in 2022, broadcaster Sedef Kabaş was jailed and then sentenced to two years and four months for “insulting the president”. She was subsequently released after her sentence was suspended by an appeals court.

Levers of media control

Over more than two decades in power, the government of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has honed three core strategies to tighten its control over the media industry.

First, there are forced takeovers and trusteeships. This is when courts remove a critical outlet’s managers and install state-approved “trustees” to run it. Editorial lines usually change overnight and, in some cases, the outlet is later shut down.

Bugün TV and Kanaltürk were raided in 2015 and taken over by the Turkish authorities. They had their media assets closed in 2016. Zaman, once Turkey’s biggest daily newspaper, was also seized in 2016 and had its editorial line flipped overnight. These measures sat alongside mass closures under emergency decrees after 2016.

Second, there is ownership concentration via government-friendly conglomerates. Here the tools are buyouts and mergers. Big, politically connected business groups acquire major newspapers and TV channels, bringing them into pro-government orbit.

In 2007, the Sabah-ATV media group was seized by Turkey’s state fund and then sold to the Çalık Group in 2008. Çalık was at the time headed by Erdoğan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, with state bank financing. Sabah-ATV was subsequently passed to a company owned by the government-aligned Kalyon Group in 2013.

Several years later, in 2018, Doğan Media Group – which includes Hürriyet, CNN Türk and Kanal D – was sold to Demirören Holding. The Demirören family, who own the company, openly support Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party and reportedly have close ties to Erdoğan.

And third, there is regulatory and economic pressure. Even where outlets remain independent, regulators and funding levers can keep them in line.

Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council has repeatedly issued heavy fines and temporary bans against TV channels such as Tele1, Halk TV and Sözcü TV. The state advertising agency, BİK, has also suspended public-advertising eligibility for critical papers such as Evrensel. Extensive online blocking further chills independent reporting.

Alongside squeezing independent outlets, Ankara has poured resources into the state broadcaster TRT – especially its English-language arm, TRT World – to amplify the government’s message abroad.

TRT World has expanded studios and bureaus since launching in 2015, notably in London and Washington. It has also grown its correspondent network and has invested heavily in 24/7 TV, digital video and social platforms.

The aim is to shape global narratives on Turkey’s terms, whether on the Ukraine war, Middle East diplomacy or migration. This has created a striking asymmetry in the Turkish information environment, where domestic dissent is constrained while the government’s international voice is amplified.

Why outside pressure has faded

A convergence of tactics – criminal prosecutions, court-imposed trusteeships, politically connected takeovers, sustained regulatory and financial pressure, and investment in friendly networks – has produced a media sphere in Turkey in which critical voices survive only precariously.

Internationally, however, Ankara now appears closely aligned with the west. While the EU and US sharply criticised democratic backsliding after protests in 2013 and the purges of 2016 that followed an attempted coup, few western governments confront Ankara today.

This is largely because Turkey is pivotal to Nato’s posture in the war in Ukraine, a key guarantor of the Middle East peace agreement and is central to refugee management.

At the same time, Washington is unlikely to lead by example when it comes to supporting journalistic independence. The US president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly attacked media outlets he deems hostile, including public broadcasters, and has also sought to sideline outspoken critics. This is hardly a platform for consistent press-freedom advocacy.

These strategic dependencies blunt external willingness to challenge domestic crackdowns in Turkey. Unless Turkey’s allies make media freedom a genuine condition of engagement – and not an afterthought – this constrained information environment will persist.

Massimo D’Angelo 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. How Turkey is cracking down on the media – https://theconversation.com/how-turkey-is-cracking-down-on-the-media-267589

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Lacy, Senior Lecturer, School of Global Affairs, Lancaster University

As a teenager in the 1980s, I was shown a BBC drama in school called Threads that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on a city in northern England. Threads is a brutal vision of a terrifying reality that I imagine haunted many people in the years before the end of the cold war.

For younger generations who have so far experienced a world with pandemic lockdowns, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and international tensions that make a third world war no longer feel like a fictional scenario, geopolitical fear and anxiety is again hard to escape. And now we have a film showing us how a nuclear war could begin.

From three different perspectives, Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller, A House of Dynamite, shows us how officials in the US might respond if it looked like a nuclear strike was imminent. Each perspective reveals a different element in the horror and complexity of the situation, as officials work to determine who is responsible and how to manage the attack.

Central to this complexity is the sense of what Prussian general and philosopher of warfare Carl von Clausewitz described as the “fog of war”. This term was devised to describe the uncertainty and chaos of the battlefield in 19th-century wars, but it is applicable to the traumatic situation policymakers find themselves thrown into in A House of Dynamite.

The fundamental problem for all of the officials in the film is that they lack certainty on the origin of the attack. Was the missile launched by Russia, China or North Korea – or could it be Russia manufacturing uncertainty so the US thinks it was North Korea? The question then moves on to whether North Korea even has the military or technical capability to launch such an attack.

With a strike on Chicago looking increasingly certain, officials soon begin to grapple with how the US should respond. The president is shown the “nuclear football”, which allows him to authorise a retaliatory nuclear strike. And his aide takes him through a menu of responses, with each labelled “rare”, “medium” or “well done”.

The president, played by Idris Elba, is shocked by the absurdity of the strategic language and concepts – as much of the audience will be too. The film shows the personal horror that is felt by people having to take decisions that make the scenarios and simulations they trained for real.

Some officials suggest waiting to see what happens before responding. As a security council staff member remarks, there’s always a chance the warhead could malfunction upon impact. Others say the strike might be a test to see how the US responds – and thus a precursor to something far worse. The dilemma facing US leadership, the security council staffer says, is “surrender or suicide”.

The film’s opening credits imply that a nuclear strike on the US is not a far-fetched scenario, telling us that the era when world leaders wanted a planet with less nuclear weapons “is now over”. But how far are we from this terrifying situation becoming a reality?

One of the most controversial issues in the film is why North Korea, Russia or China would take a course of action that would result in retaliation so severe that it could leave their territories as apocalyptic wastelands. China and Russia, in particular, appear far more comfortable in today’s complex world of overlapping alliances and economic entanglement than many western countries.

The North Korea expert in the film, Ana Park, explains that Pyongyang possibly could afford to risk launching a strike on the US because of its defensive systems. But the belief of a regime that it could survive retaliatory responses from the US and its allies is almost certainly wishful thinking – no matter how sophisticated those defences are.

It’s also not clear whether any leader, regardless of the type of regime, would actually be able to embark on this course of action. Military generals, for example, might intervene. And perhaps most importantly, current assessments suggest that North Korea does not have the capabilities to launch an attack resembling the one portrayed in the film anyway.

Command and control

Another element in the film is the focus on how an attack on the US would involve disrupting the “command and control” structures of the state. US officials raise concerns that its communication and surveillance systems may have been sabotaged by hackers and AI tools, leaving them in a situation where they lack crucial intelligence about the attack and are unable to trust the information they are receiving.

In this sense, A House of Dynamite gives a convincing insight into the mix of tactics that could be used in a complex global crisis in the 21st century. Sabotaging the tools used to make communication faster, and “situational awareness” more detailed and granular, is likely to be a major method for sowing uncertainty and confusion in the years ahead.

In this age of hybrid warfare – which involves methods to disrupt and sabotage an opponent’s activities without engaging in open hostilities – part of the problem is uncertainty about who is doing what. This has been evidenced in the drone disruption and cyber-attacks we have seen across Europe in 2025.

Another issue is unease over what might be possible in future, when the rapid pace of technological change is constantly introducing new forms of sabotage, disruption and destruction.

A House of Dynamite gives an insight into the uncertainty of security and defence in times of hybrid war. But the more immediate strategic dilemma policymakers face in the film – how to respond to a nuclear attack – is probably not an imminent geopolitical reality.

Mark Lacy 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. Netflix’s A House of Dynamite sounds the nuclear alarm, but how worried should we be? – https://theconversation.com/netflixs-a-house-of-dynamite-sounds-the-nuclear-alarm-but-how-worried-should-we-be-268448