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October 20, 2025

How mobsters’ own words brought down Philly’s mafia − a veteran crime reporter has the story behind the end of the ‘Mob War’

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By George Anastasia, Adjunct Professor of Law and Justice Studies, Rowan University

Former mob boss John Stanfa, pictured here in 1980, waged a bloody war for control of the Philadelphia mafia in the late 1990s.
Bettmann via Getty Images

The bloody mob war that is the focus of the new Netflix series “Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia,” which premieres Oct. 22, 2025, is full of the murder and mayhem, treachery and deceit that have been the hallmarks of the nation’s Cosa Nostra family conflicts.

What was different in Philadelphia was that the FBI had it all wired for sound.

Electronic surveillance has been a major tool in the government’s highly successful war against the Mafia nationwide, but nowhere has its impact been felt more dramatically than in Philadelphia.

As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I covered this mob war in real time from 1994 through 2000. Now I teach a course at Rowan University on the history of organized crime, using the war as a case study, and I was a consultant on the Netflix series.

The war pitted one faction of the Philadelphia mob, headed by Sicilian-born John Stanfa, against a rival faction led by Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino. The issues were control of all illegal operations in the underworld – gambling, loan-sharking, drug-dealing and extortion. Money was the bottom line, but there also was a cultural and generational divide that had Stanfa and, for the most part, his group of older wiseguys facing off against Merlino and his crew of young South Philadelphia-born mobsters.

But only after indictments were handed down and evidence was introduced at trials did the extent of the electronic surveillance operation become known.

A trailer for ‘Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia’

‘Goodfellas kill goodfellas’

Mobsters, speaking in unguarded moments and unaware that the feds were listening, buried themselves.

So here was mob boss Stanfa discussing with an associate plans to lure Merlino and two of his two lieutenants to a meeting where they would be killed:

“See, you no gotta give a chance,” the Sicilian-born Stanfa said in his halting English. “Bam, bam … Over here is best, behind the ear.”

Or here was Salvatore Profaci, a New York mobster brought in to quietly settle a dispute that had gone public after mob lawyer Salvatore Avena filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against his mobbed-up business partner in a trash-hauling business.

“Goodfellas don’t sue goodfellas,” Profaci said in a line that couldn’t have been written any better by “The Godfather” author Mario Puzo or delivered more effectively by the award-winning actor Robert De Niro. “Goodfellas kill goodfellas.”

The most staggering piece of the investigation, which was made known only after Stanfa and more than 20 of his associates had been indicted and arrested, was that the FBI had received court authorization to plant listening devices in the Camden, New Jersey, law offices of Salvatore Avena, Stanfa’s defense attorney.

A judge approved the highly unusual authorization after the feds argued that Stanfa was using the shield of attorney-client privilege to conduct mob meetings in Avena’s office while a mob war raged on the streets of South Philadelphia.

More than 2,000 conversations were recorded during the two-year electronic surveillance operation, with FBI agents and an assistant U.S. attorney manning a listening post in the basement of the federal courthouse a block away from Avena’s office. Whenever Stanfa and his associates got together, the feds were listening. Many of those conversations were then introduced as evidence at the racketeering trials that followed.

The conversations proved to be a treasure trove not only for investigators but also for journalists who covered the story as it unfolded and later got access to the tapes that were made public when the cases went to trial.

Blood in the streets

Two of the books I’ve written about the Philadelphia mob, “The Last Gangster” in 2004 and “The Goodfella Tapes” in 1998, are built around those tapes and the investigations they spawned.

Anyone who has written true crime knows that part of the problem with nonfiction storytelling is coming up with dialogue. In writing books about the Philadelphia mob wars that are the focus of the new Netflix series, that was never a problem.

Mobsters from Philadelphia, South Jersey, New York and the Scanton-Wilkes Barre area of Pennsylvania ended up on the recordings, which offered not only details about the war but also included philosophical ramblings and personal asides that provided a glimpse into the world of organized crime as good as or better than any fictionalized story line from “The Godfather” or “The Sopranos.”

Throughout the conflict, as bodies piled up and blood ran in the streets of the City of Brotherly Love, Stanfa and several of his associates were picked up plotting murder and mayhem, bemoaning the loss of honor and loyalty that had once been the hallmark of Cosa Nostra, and belittling their street-corner rivals, the “little Americans” who hadn’t a clue about what it meant to be a real mafioso.

“When you’re a dwarf they could put you on a high mountain, you’re still a dwarf,” Avena told Stanfa in one of several conversations mocking Merlino and his associates.

“I was born and raised in this thing (Cosa Nostra) and I’m gonna die in this thing,” said Stanfa at another point, bemoaning the state of the Philadelphia mob. “But with the right people. Over here is like kindergarten.”

Man wearing sunglasses stands in front of people holding video camera and microphones — Former Philadelphia mob boss ‘Skinny’ Joey Merlino, pictured here in 1997.
AP Photo/H. Rumph Jr.

‘You can’t cross-examine a tape’

Electronic surveillance was used again and again in racketeering trials in which the feds not only dismantled but judicially eviscerated the Philadelphia crime family.

Stanfa is currently serving life in prison. Several of his top associates were jailed for more than 20 years. In a second prosecution, Merlino and most of his top associates were convicted of racketeering and jailed for sentences ranging from seven to 14 years.

Dozens of conversations were played for the juries that sat in judgment during the racketeering trials that followed. Again and again the mobster’s own words were turned against them.

Another highlight was an FBI surveillance video of a mob hit picked up on a hidden camera as it occurred. A surveillance camera located across the street from a deli run by then-Stanfa underboss Joseph Ciancaglini Jr. picked up the early morning shooting in which four shadowy figures burst into the deli and opened fire. An audio bug hidden inside the deli provided the sound effects – gunshots, shouting and the screams of a waitress. The shooting occurred shortly after 6 a.m. and just moments after Ciancaglini and his waitress had arrived and begun setting up for business.

Cooperating witnesses were also part of the trial, but defense attorneys frequently undermined their testimony by providing a litany of the crimes – often including murders – that the witnesses had admitted to as part of their plea deals.

You can attack the credibility of a cooperating witness by focusing on his own crimes and his need to say whatever the government wants in order to win a lenient sentence, a defense attorney once explained to me. What you can’t do, he said, “is cross-examine a tape.”

Jurors got to hear mobsters in their own words discussing the mob war. And there was nothing the defense could do to counterattack the impact of those words.

One classic discussion underscored the mobsters’ concern about electronic surveillance and demonstrated their inability to do much about it.

Stanfa consigliere Anthony Piccolo was talking with Avena about the problem with cooperators and phone taps. Both men agreed it was important to be cautious. Avena then told Piccolo that he’d had an electronic anti-bugging expert come into his office over the weekend and had swept the rooms. It had cost him $500, Avena said.

“It’s money well spent,” said Piccolo as the undetected FBI listening device beamed the conversation back to the listening post.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

George Anastasia is the owner of G&A Media LLC, the company through which he served as consultant for the series and through which he was paid, .

– ref. How mobsters’ own words brought down Philly’s mafia − a veteran crime reporter has the story behind the end of the ‘Mob War’ – https://theconversation.com/how-mobsters-own-words-brought-down-phillys-mafia-a-veteran-crime-reporter-has-the-story-behind-the-end-of-the-mob-war-267196

October 20, 2025

Pharaohs in Dixieland – how 19th-century America reimagined Egypt to justify racism and slavery

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Charles Vanthournout, Ph.D. Student in Ancient History, Université de Lorraine

In the American South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images

When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture.

Colorful drawing of Egyptian ruins. — The frontispiece of the second edition of ‘Description de l’Égypte.’
Wikimedia Commons

At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans often viewed their country as an heir to the great civilizations of the past. The tales of ancient Egypt that emerged from Napoleon’s travels became a source of fascination to Americans, though in different ways.

In the slaveholding South, ancient Egypt and its pharaohs became a way to justify slavery. For abolitionists and African Americans, biblical Egypt served as a symbol of bondage and liberation.

As a historian, I study how 19th-century Americans – from Southern intellectuals to Black abolitionists – used ancient Egypt to debate questions of race, civilization and national identity. My research traces how a distorted image of ancient Egypt shaped competing visions of freedom and hierarchy in a deeply divided nation.

Egypt inspires the pro-slavery South

In 1819, when lawyer John Overton, military officer James Winchester and future president Andrew Jackson founded a city in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, they christened it Memphis, after the ancient Egyptian capital.

While promoting the new city, Overton declared of the Mississippi River that ran alongside it: “This noble river may, with propriety, be denominated the American Nile.”

“Who can tell that she may not, in time, rival … her ancient namesake, of Egypt in classic elegance and art?” The Arkansas Banner excitedly reported.

In the region’s fertile soil, Chancellor William Harper, a jurist and pro-slavery theorist from South Carolina, saw the promise of an agricultural empire built on slavery, one “capable of being made a far greater Egypt.”

There was a reason pro-slavery businessmen and thinkers were energized by the prospect of an American Egypt: Many Southern planters imagined themselves as guardians of a hierarchical and aristocratic system, one grounded in landownership, tradition and honor. As Alabama newspaper editor William Falconer put it, he and his fellow white Southerners belonged to a “race that had established law, order, and government on earth.”

To them, Egypt represented the archetype of a great hierarchical civilization. Older than Athens or Rome, Egypt conferred a special legitimacy. And just like the pharaohs, the white elites of the South saw themselves as the stewards of a prosperous society sustained by enslaved labor.

Colorful drawing of people loading bales of cotton onto steamboats. — The founders of Memphis named it after the ancient Egyptian capital, and they hoped the Mississippi River that ran alongside it would become an ‘American Nile.’
The Print Collector/Getty Images

Leading pro-slavery thinkers like Virginia social theorist George Fitzhugh, South Carolina lawyer and U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett and Georgia lawyer and politician Thomas R.R. Cobb all invoked Egypt as an example to follow.

“These [Egyptian] monuments show negro slaves in Egypt at least 1,600 years before Christ,” Cobb wrote in 1858. “That they were the same happy negroes of this day is proven by their being represented in a dance 1,300 years before Christ.”

A distorted view of history

But their view of history didn’t exactly square with reality. Slavery did exist in ancient Egypt, but most slaves had been originally captured as prisoners of war.

The country never developed a system of slavery comparable to that of Greece or Rome, and servitude was neither race-based nor tied to a plantation economy. The mistaken notion that Egypt’s great monuments were built by slaves largely stems from ancient authors and the biblical account of the Hebrews. Later, popular culture – especially Hollywood epics – would continue to advance this misconception.

Nonetheless, 19th-century Southern intellectuals drew on this imagined Egypt to legitimize slavery as an ancient and divinely sanctioned institution.

Even after the Civil War, which ended in 1865, nostalgia for these myths of ancient Egypt endured. In 1877, former Confederate officer Edward Fontaine noted how “Veritable specimens of black, woolyheaded negroes are represented by the old Egyptian artists in chains, as slaves, and even singing and dancing, as we have seen them on Southern plantations in the present century.”

Turning Egypt white

But to claim their place among the world’s great civilizations, Southerners had to reconcile a troubling fact: Egypt was located in Africa, the ancestral land of those enslaved in the U.S.

A colorful drawing of a young queen with a gilded headdress being embraced from behind by a man wearing a gilded helmet. — A collectible tobacco card depicts actors Claudette Colbert and Henry Wilcoxon in a still from the 1934 film ‘Cleopatra.’
Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images

In response, an intellectual movement called the American School of Ethnology – which promoted the idea that races had separate, unequal origins to justify Black inferiority and slavery – set out to “whiten” Egypt.

In a series of texts and lectures, they portrayed Egypt as a slaveholding civilization dominated by whites. They pointed to Egyptian monuments as proof of the greatness that a slave society could achieve. And they also promoted a scientifically discredited theory called “polygenesis,” which argued that Black people did not descend from the Bible’s Adam, but from some other source.

Richard Colfax, the author of the 1833 pamphlet “Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists,” insisted that “the Egyptians were decidedly of the Caucasian variety of men.” Most mummies, he added, “bear not the most distant resemblance to the negro race.”

Physician Samuel George Morton cited “Crania Aegyptiaca,” an 1822 German study of Egyptian skulls, to reinforce this view. Writing in the Charleston Medical Journal in 1851, he explained how the German study had concluded that the skulls mirrored those of Europeans in size and shape. In doing so, it established “the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

A cover page for a pamphlet reading 'Negroes and Negro Slavery: The first an inferior race, the latter its normal condition.' — Pro-slavery activists like John H. Van Evrie took great pains to ‘prove’ the inherent inferiority of Black people.
Harvard Countway Library Center for the History of Medicine

Physician Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist George Gliddon and physician and propagandist John H. Van Evrie formed an effective triumvirate: Through press releases and public lectures featuring the skulls of mummies, they turned Egyptology into a tool of pro-slavery propaganda.

“The Negro question was the one I wished to bring out,” Nott wrote, adding that he “embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography.”

Nott and Gliddon’s 1854 bestseller “Types of Mankind” fused pseudoscience with Egyptology to both “prove” Black inferiority and advance the idea that their beloved African civilization was populated by a white Egyptian elite.

“Negroes were numerous in Egypt,” they write, “but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is, that of servants and slaves.”

Denouncing America’s pharaohs

This distorted vision of Egypt, however, wasn’t the only one to take hold in the U.S., and abolitionists saw this history through a decidedly different lens.

In the Bible, Egypt occupies a central place, mentioned repeatedly as a land of refuge – notably for Joseph – but also as a nation of idolatry and as the cradle of slavery.

The episode of the Exodus is perhaps the most famous reference. The Hebrews, enslaved under an oppressive pharaoh, are freed by Moses, who leads them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical image of Egypt as a land of bondage deeply shaped 19th-century moral and political debates: For many abolitionists, it represented the ultimate symbol of tyranny and human oppression.

When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Black people could be heard singing in front of the White House, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt Land … Tell Jeff Davis to let my people go.”

Black Americans seized upon this biblical parallel. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a contemporary pharaoh, with Moses still the prophet of liberation.

A late 19th-century map of the United States, with Northern states labeled 'God's Blessing Liberty' and Southern states labeled 'God's Curse Slavery.' — A map titled ‘Historical Geography,’ created by John F. Smith, shows how religion and the Bible were wielded by abolitionists.
Library of Congress

African American writers and activists like Phillis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth also invoked Egypt as a tool of emancipation.

“God has implanted in every human heart a principle which we call the love of liberty,” Wheatley wrote in a 1774 letter. “It is impatient with oppression and longs for deliverance; and with the permission of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that this same principle lives in us.”

Yet the South’s infatuation with Egypt shows how antiquity can always be recast to serve the powerful. And it’s a reminder that the past is far from neutral terrain – that there is rarely, if ever, a ceasefire in wars over history and memory.

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

– ref. Pharaohs in Dixieland – how 19th-century America reimagined Egypt to justify racism and slavery – https://theconversation.com/pharaohs-in-dixieland-how-19th-century-america-reimagined-egypt-to-justify-racism-and-slavery-266665

October 20, 2025

How a more flexible energy grid can cope better with swings in Britain’s weather

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Wright, PhD Candidate, Department of Atmospheric Physics, University of Oxford

For most Brits, January 8 2025 was an uneventful Wednesday, albeit slightly cold. But these low temperatures, coupled with a significant drop in wind speed, contributed to a spike in the real-time electricity price to over seven times the 2024-25 winter average.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso), the organisation responsible for balancing electricity supply with demand minute-by-minute, highlighted “weather driven factors” as a major challenge on January 8. Neso’s costs to produce enough electricity to balance the system on this day reached £21 million – costs that increase consumer bills.

A new report, coordinated by the Royal Meteorological Society and supported by the energy team at AECOM, a global infrastructure consulting company, highlights how Britain’s electricity system is sensitive to seemingly benign weather conditions. This report highlights the importance of predicting and responding to these events – and provides evidence to inform how the future energy system could be designed to ensure it remains resilient to the weather.

Every minute, Neso monitors weather conditions to make decisions about how best to balance supply and demand. If the forecast suggests a drop off in wind speed, then Neso can use a range of tools to make up for the resulting reduction in wind generation. This includes interconnectors (importing excess electricity from neighbouring countries), stored energy or gas generation.

Electricity demand also fluctuates depending on changes in weather. In winter, when the weather is dull and cold, people tend to use more heating and lighting (alongside increased kettle usage for more cups of tea). In summer, heatwaves can increase demand through fan and air conditioning usage.

man sits on chair reading book by radiator, keeping warm inside — Electricity demand goes up when people light and heat their homes more in cold weather.
Alena Ozerova/Shutterstock

The most difficult periods occur when there is an increase in demand at the same time as a decrease in wind generation. Weather that causes these cloudy and still conditions is referred to as dunkelflaute – German for “dark and still”.

Dunkelflaute conditions are also known as anticyclonic gloom. This has recently been affecting the UK’s weather. Researchers at the University of Reading have shown that dunkelflaute is usually associated with stationary high pressure over the UK. These systems get in the way and “block” wet and windy weather from hitting the British Isles.

Thanks to the accuracy of modern weather forecasting, there is usually plenty of warning about when these situations will occur. But there is a cost associated with requesting additional electricity generation at relatively short notice, as only a few power plants can switch on quickly, and they’re expensive to start and run. That puts the overall system price of electricity up.

These dunkelflaute episodes can be brief and intense like on January 8, when the price spiked so dramatically because forecasts gave limited warning. Or, they can be less severe but last for a longer period, for example in early November 2024, when there was an extended wind drought lasting several weeks. This leads to an extended period of high system prices for electricity.

Dunkelflaute conditions are not unique to the UK. They can stretch across multiple countries, as shown by researchers in Germany. More cables are being built to connect European energy systems and share power across borders. But if countries are experiencing wind droughts simultaneously, the ability of these connections to help balance supply and demand is reduced. Grids need to be resilient even if nations can’t import energy from their neighbours.

water being released from hydropower dam — Hydropower stations can store energy.
Yalcin Sonat/Shutterstock

Future-proofing the energy system

In the future, wind and solar capacity is set to increase and electricity demand will jump due to more heat pumps and electric vehicles. The report models what the consequences of January’s extreme drop in wind speed would be in such a future energy system – increasing the number of wind turbines and solar panels alone is not enough. Other strategies are required to keep the lights on in a low-carbon electricity system.

Importantly, getting more of our electricity from weather-dependent sources does not mean that plans for a low-carbon energy system are impossible. But other technologies will be needed to plug the gap between the renewable generation at any given moment, and the demand at that time.

One option is increasing the amount of energy storage, using excess electricity at times of high winds to store energy for future wind droughts. Energy storage comes in many forms including pumped hydropower (pumping water uphill and letting it fall to release energy later), batteries and potentially green hydrogen (generated from the electrolysis of water).

Other options include interconnection with other countries’ networks and building other forms of low-carbon generation, like nuclear power stations. An interconnector to Denmark – Viking Link – came online at the end of 2023. This means Britain can import energy from Denmark when domestic wind generation is low, and export energy in the other direction when there is a surplus of renewable power, smoothing out electricity supply fluctuations in both countries.

Further new interconnectors, between the UK and the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, are planned.

An alternative is to adjust demand to match the available supply. This is called “demand flexibility”. For example, consumers may be offered very cheap – even free – electricity during periods of excess renewable electricity generation, encouraging them to use more electricity when there is plenty of it.
Businesses may also be incentivised to reduce usage when supply is tight.

New technologies can help reduce energy use at peak times, making it easier to match supply levels. For example, smart car chargers communicate with the grid and operators to adjust charging times to when there is less demand. Demand flexibility is already being trialled, and is likely to become more common in the future.

Britain needs the right mix of these solutions to maintain a system that continues to provide electricity in the ever-changing British weather. Much of Britain’s electricity will come from wind when it blows. But storage, interconnectors and flexible electricity use – informed by research into the frequency and severity of dunkelflaute – are vital components.

With this mix in place, days like January 8 will become much easier to manage.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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Matthew Wright receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council through the Oxford NERC DTP.

Ben Hutchins receives funding from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) through the Scenario training programme.

James Mollard receives research funding through a Network Innovation Allowance Project with National Grid Electricity Transmission. He is affiliated with the Royal Meteorological Society.

– ref. How a more flexible energy grid can cope better with swings in Britain’s weather – https://theconversation.com/how-a-more-flexible-energy-grid-can-cope-better-with-swings-in-britains-weather-267577

October 20, 2025

The Mona Lisa, a gold toilet and now the Louvre’s royal jewels: a fascinating history of art heists

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Penelope Jackson, Adjunct Research Associate, School of Social Work and Arts, Charles Sturt University

The world’s largest art museum, the Louvre has approximately half a million objects in its collection, with about 30,000 on display, and sees on average 8 million visitors per year. That’s big on any scale, with a lot of people and objects to keep watch over. And Sundays are particularly busy.

In a cleverly conceived operation, four men wearing fluorescent vests pulled up at the Louvre in a flat-decked truck at 9.30 Sunday morning. Quickly setting to work, they raised an extendable ladder to the second storey. Climbing it, they cut through a window, entered the Galerie d’Apollon and, brandishing power tools, helped themselves to nine exquisite objects.

The objects taken were France’s royal jewels, formerly belonging to the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife and arts patron.

This is where it gets tricky for the thieves: what can you do with these priceless objects? They can’t wear them – too big and glitzy to go unnoticed – and they can’t sell them legitimately, as images are all over the internet.

The jewels. — Jewels of Empress Eugénie photographed in 2020. The diadem, left, and diamond bow brooch, right, have been stolen. The crown, centre, was stolen but has been recovered.
Stephanie de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images

The best-case scenario, from the thieves’ perspective, is to break them down, melt the precious metals and sell the gems separately.

Empress Eugenie’s crown, which the perpetrators took and subsequently dropped as they fled the scene on motor scooters, contains eight gold eagles, 1,354 brilliant-cut diamonds, 1,136 rose-cut diamonds and 56 emeralds. In short, this amounts to a sizeable stash of individual gems to try and sell.

Timing is everything

For the Louvre, any heist is a major blow. It calls into question their security, both electronic and human. Five security staff were nearby who acted to protect visitors and the alarms did ring, but the entire heist was completed within seven minutes.

Timing is crucial with heists.

A gold toilet. — America, a fully functioning toilet made of 18-karat solid gold, on display here at the Guggenheim in 2017.
MossAlbatross/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In 2019, an 18-karat gold toilet titled America (2016), from the artist Maurizio Cattelan, was stolen from Blenheim Palace, England. It was taken in five and a half minutes. It weighed 98 kilograms and was fully functioning. In other words, the two men who took it (and were later caught and served prison sentences for their crimes) worked quickly and efficiently. At the time of the theft, as gold bullion it was estimated to be valued at A$6 million.

Van Gogh’s painting The Parsonage Garden at Neunen in Spring (1884) was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum, in the Netherlands, during their 2020 COVID closure. It was recovered in late 2023 after an investigation by Dutch art detective Arthur Brand.

The 2017 theft of two Gottfried Lindauer paintings from Auckland’s International Art Centre took just a few minutes to complete. The thieves ram-raided the front window of the auction house where the paintings, valued at NZ$1 million, were displayed. The portraits were recovered five years later through an intermediary, with only minor damage.

Recovering the stolen

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Picasso painting Weeping Woman (1937) was famously taken by the Australian Cultural Terrorists in 1986 – but only noticed as missing two days later.

Recovered just over two weeks later, the painting was left for the gallery staff to collect in a locker at Spencer Street railway station. The motivation behind the theft was to highlight the lack of financial support given to Victorian artists, but the true identity of the thieves remains a mystery.

In 1986, 26 paintings of religious subjects were stolen from the gallery at the Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia, Western Australia.

The thieves were poor planners: they hadn’t factored in that three men and the stash of paintings couldn’t fit into a Ford Falcon. The paintings were cut from their frames, ostensibly butchered. One was completely destroyed. The thieves were caught and charged.

Where to next for the thief?

Recovery of objects from heists is low. It’s impossible to put a number on but some say art recoveries globally are possibly as low as 10%.

Paintings are more difficult to sell on – you can’t change their physical appearance to the point of not being recognised.

However, with objects such as the gold toilet or jewels, the precious materials and gems can be repurposed. Time will tell if the Napoleonic jewels will be recovered.

Never say never. The Mona Lisa (1503), undoubtedly the main attraction at the Louvre, was stolen in 1911 and recovered two years later. The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, was an Italian handyman working at the Louvre and was caught trying to sell it.

Men stand with the Mona Lisa. — The ceremony for the return to France of the Mona Lisa, Rome, 1913.
Mondadori via Getty Images

This latest heist at the Louvre highlights the vulnerability of objects in public collections. The irony being they’re often gifted to such institutions for safekeeping.

Those who guard objects are usually paid a minimum wage and yet they are tasked with a huge responsibility. When budget cuts are made, it’s often security staff that are reduced – such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ announcement just last week.

The thieves on Sunday knew what they were after and why. We aren’t privy to their motivation. We know the stolen jewels are part of France’s history and are irreplaceable. Their theft denies visitors of experiencing them individually for their beauty and craftsmanship, as well as collectively within the context of France’s history.

But part of me can’t help thinking how the French were partial to helping themselves to artworks and precious objects belonging to others. So perhaps this could be a case of déjà vu.

Penelope Jackson’s Unseen: Art and Crime in Australia (Monash University Publishing) will be published in December 2025.

Penelope Jackson 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 Mona Lisa, a gold toilet and now the Louvre’s royal jewels: a fascinating history of art heists – https://theconversation.com/the-mona-lisa-a-gold-toilet-and-now-the-louvres-royal-jewels-a-fascinating-history-of-art-heists-267849

October 20, 2025

Keir Starmer needs to give voters short-term gain to persuade them he can deliver long-term renewal

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Barnfield, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London

And if you look way over there, you can just about see the light at the end of this long tunnel. Flickr/Number10, CC BY-NC-ND

Whatever the Labour government is doing, it doesn’t seem to be working, yet. Economic growth – its number one priority – hasn’t taken off. The party is trailing far behind Reform in the polls. It risks presiding over an outright decrease in living standards.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer responds to criticism by reminding us that, from the outset, he has been clear that short-term pain is needed in order to secure long-term gain. He recently repeated this message in his speech to the Labour party conference, proclaiming: “Our path, the path of renewal, it’s long, it’s difficult, it requires decisions that are not cost-free or easy.”

The trouble with this politics of patience is that, funnily enough, many voters care a lot about how things go in the short term. And recent polling data suggests a failure to make improvements in the near term could drive Labour supporters to other parties at the next election – especially those voters who focus more on the short term.

Some admittedly important immediate improvements have been delivered since Labour came to power in 2024. These include public sector pay rises and overall wage growth. But without more meaningful change, including on measures that could make a big difference on living standards, rather than “short-term pain, long-term gain”, what some people might think they are really getting is “all pain, no gain”.

Tackling child poverty is a case in point: a promised strategy from the government did not appear in its first year in office, despite the urgency of the problem.

Polling data I recently collected with my colleagues Philip Cowley and Karl Pike, as part of our ongoing research into short- and long-term policymaking, reveals that the patience this government expects from the British public might be incurring a major electoral cost. Those of its 2024 voters who focus more on the short term in their political thinking are more likely to intend to vote for a different party at the next election.

We tested whether people were short-termists or long-termists by explicitly asking whether they focused on the short or long term when they voted. We also tested this more implicitly by asking a series of other less direct questions about what psychologists call “future orientation”.

We found slightly over a third of Labour voters were more short-termist than long-termist. And the more focused on the short term our participants said they were, the more likely they were to indicate they would vote for a different party in the next election, not vote at all or are not sure how they will vote – that is, do anything other than vote for Labour again next time around.

This ranged from those with the most short-term views having around a 75% chance of saying they would abandon Labour, to those who saw themselves as the most long-termist having a 43% chance.

Self-declared short and long-term thinkers:

A chart showing that self-declared short-term thinkers are more likely to turn away from Labour in the next election — Representative sample of 1997 UK respondents, including 895 who voted Labour in 2024, collected via Prolific 18-25 August 2025.
M Barnfield/P Cowley/K Pike, CC BY-ND

Similar results were in evidence for the implicit measures. According to our model, of the most short-termist, Labour are losing around 83%. Of the most long-termist, they are losing just 35%. In each case, the differences are so great that we can be sure the overall effect is not purely down to chance.

All these probabilities (and margins of error) come from statistical models where we account for people’s age, gender, ethnicity and left-right political views, ruling those other factors out as explanations of what we find.

Implicitly measured short and long-term thinkers

A chart showing that short-term thinkers are more likely to turn away from Labour in the next election — Representative sample of 1997 UK respondents, including 895 who voted Labour in 2024, collected via Prolific 18-25 August 2025.
M Barnfield/P Cowley/K Pike, CC BY-ND

We also asked respondents whether they think the UK is heading in the right or wrong direction. In line with polling in recent years, a huge 70% of our sample says the country is (still) heading in the wrong direction. Only 15% said it is heading in the right direction.

But we found that those voters who focus more on the short term are much more likely than long-termist people to think the country is heading in the wrong direction. A shortage of short-term wins makes it hard to see how the country can be on the right track.

What’s more, of Labour’s 2024 voters, those who think the UK is heading in the wrong direction have about a 74% chance of switching to another party in 2029. But only around 28% of 2024 Labour voters who think the country is heading in the right direction intend to vote for a different party.

The government is right that meaningful change, or “fixing the foundations” of the country, does not happen overnight. But equally if change takes as long as Keir Starmer says, a year into his government it should soon be getting underway.

For the politics of patience to be persuasive, especially to the short-termist voters the party is losing at an alarming rate, a positive trajectory must become clear soon. Otherwise, Labour might not remain in power long enough to secure the gains it is promising in return for patience.

The government should not give up on its long-term missions, but seeing out its “decade of national renewal” by winning the next election will require more obvious short-term change, too.

Matthew Barnfield receives funding from the British Academy.

– ref. Keir Starmer needs to give voters short-term gain to persuade them he can deliver long-term renewal – https://theconversation.com/keir-starmer-needs-to-give-voters-short-term-gain-to-persuade-them-he-can-deliver-long-term-renewal-267404

October 20, 2025

The Mona Lisa, a gold toilet and the now the Louvre’s royal jewels: a fascinating history of art heists

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Penelope Jackson, Adjunct Research Associate, School of Social Work and Arts, Charles Sturt University

The objects taken were France’s royal jewels, formerly belonging to the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife and arts patron.

The best-case scenario, from the thieves’ perspective, is to break them down, melt the precious metals and sell the gems separately.

Timing is everything

Timing is crucial with heists.

Recovering the stolen

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Picasso painting Weeping Woman (1937) was famously taken by the Australian Cultural Terrorists in 1986 – but only noticed as missing two days later.

In 1986, 26 paintings of religious subjects were stolen from the gallery at the Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia, Western Australia.

Where to next for the thief?

Recovery of objects from heists is low. It’s impossible to put a number on but some say art recoveries globally are possibly as low as 10%.

Paintings are more difficult to sell on – you can’t change their physical appearance to the point of not being recognised.

However, with objects such as the gold toilet or jewels, the precious materials and gems can be repurposed. Time will tell if the Napoleonic jewels will be recovered.

This latest heist at the Louvre highlights the vulnerability of objects in public collections. The irony being they’re often gifted to such institutions for safekeeping.

But part of me can’t help thinking how the French were partial to helping themselves to artworks and precious objects belonging to others. So perhaps this could be a case of déjà vu.

Penelope Jackson’s Unseen: Art and Crime in Australia (Monash University Publishing) will be published in December 2025.

– ref. The Mona Lisa, a gold toilet and the now the Louvre’s royal jewels: a fascinating history of art heists – https://theconversation.com/the-mona-lisa-a-gold-toilet-and-the-now-the-louvres-royal-jewels-a-fascinating-history-of-art-heists-267849

October 20, 2025

Should humans colonise space? We asked 5 experts

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kirsten Banks, Lecturer, School of Science, Computing and Engineering Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology

SpaceX Crew-2 flight in 2021. SpaceX, CC BY-NC

For roughly 4.5 billion years, the Moon has kept Earth company. In the much shorter span of time that humans have been around, we’ve admired the great silver beacon in the night sky.

The Moon may soon also serve as our launchpad to celestial bodies farther afield in the Solar System. Major space players including the United States, Russia and China all have plans to establish bases on the Moon’s dusty surface within the next ten years. And one of the goals of NASA’s Artemis Moon mission is to enable humans to one day travel to Mars.

Tech billionaire and SpaceX head Elon Musk is even more bullish. “SpaceX will colonise Mars”, he said last year. Musk believes this could happen by 2055 – and would be just the beginning of humans becoming a multi-planetary species in order to save ourselves from future annihilation.

Not everyone agrees this is possible. But it raises a more fundamental question: should humans colonise space?

We asked five experts – four of whom said no. It’s not just a question of whether humans try to live in space, but also about how we do it. Here are their detailed answers.

Alice Gorman receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is also co-vice chair of the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities and a fellow of the Outer Space Institute.

Art Cotterell, Ben Bramble, Kirsten Banks, and Sara Webb 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. Should humans colonise space? We asked 5 experts – https://theconversation.com/should-humans-colonise-space-we-asked-5-experts-267436

October 19, 2025

10 effective things citizens can do to make change in addition to attending a protest

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Shelley Inglis, Senior Visiting Scholar with the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University

A crowd gathered for a “No Kings” protest on October 18, 2025 in Anchorage, Alaska. Hasan Akbas/Anadolu via Getty Images

What happens now?

That may well be the question being asked by “No Kings” protesters, who marched, rallied and danced all over the nation on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025.

Pro-democracy groups had aimed to encourage large numbers of Americans to demonstrate that “together we are choosing democracy.” They were successful, with crowds turning out for demonstrations in thousands of cities and towns from Anchorage to Miami.

And while multiple GOP leaders had attacked the planned demonstrations, describing them as “hate America” rallies, political science scholars and national security experts agree that the current U.S. administration’s actions are indeed placing the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic in jeopardy.

Once a democracy starts to erode, it can be difficult to reverse the trend. Only 42% of democracies affected by autocratization – a transformation in governance that erodes democratic safeguards – since 1994 have rebounded after a democratic breakdown, according to Swedish research institute V-Dem.

Often termed “democratic backsliding,” such periods involve government-led changes to rules and norms to weaken individual freedoms and undermine or eliminate checks on power exercised by independent institutions, both governmental and non-governmental.

Democracies that have suffered setbacks vary widely, from Hungary to Brazil. As a longterm practitioner of democracy-building overseas, I know that none of these countries rival the United States’ constitutional traditions, federalist system, economic wealth, military discipline, and vibrant independent media, academia and nonprofit organizations.

Even so, practices used globally to fight democratic backsliding or topple autocracies can be instructive.

In a nutshell: Nonviolent resistance is based on noncooperation with autocratic actions. It has proven more effective in toppling autocracies than violent, armed struggle.

But it requires more than street demonstrations.

One pro-democracy organization helps train people to use video to document abuses by government.

Tactics used by pro-democracy movements

So, what does it take for democracies to bounce back from periods of autocratic rule?

Broad-scale, coordinated mobilization of a sufficient percentage of the population against autocratic takeover and for a renewed democratic future is necessary for success.

That momentum can be challenging to generate. Would-be autocrats create environments of fear and powerlessness, using intimidation, overwhelming force or political and legal attacks, and other coercive tactics to force acquiescence and chill democratic pushback.

Autocrats can’t succeed alone. They rely on what scholars call “pillars of support” – a range of government institutions, security forces, business and other sectors in society to obey their will and even bolster their power grabs.

However, everyone in society has power to erode autocratic support in various ways. While individual efforts are important, collective action increases impact and mitigates the risks of reprisals for standing up to individuals or organizations.

Here are some of the tactics used by those movements across the world:

1. Refuse unlawful, corrupt demands

When enough individuals in critical roles and institutions – the military, civil servants, corporate leaders, state government and judges – refuse to implement autocratic orders, it can slow or even stop an autocratic takeover. In South Korea, parts of the civil service, legislature and military declined to support President Yoon Suk Yeol’s imposition of martial law in 2024, foiling his autocratic move.

2. Visibly bolster the rule of law

Where would-be autocrats disregard legal restraints and install their supporters in the highest courts, individual challenges to overreach, even if successful, can be insufficient. In Poland, legal challenges in courts combined with public education by the judiciary, lawyers’ associations initiatives and street protests like the “March of a Thousand Robes” in 2020 to signal widespread repudiation of the autocratic government’s attacks on the rule of law.

3. Unite in opposition

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela, is an example of how political parties and leaders who cooperate across differences can offer an alternative vision.

Novel candidates can undermine the ability of autocrats to sow division and demonize major opponents. However, coalitions can be difficult to form and sustain to win. Based on experiences overseas, historian Anne Applebaum, author of “Autocracy Inc.,” has called for a pro-democracy coalition in the U.S. that could unite independents, Libertarians, the Green Party, dissident Republicans and the Democratic Party.

4. Harness economic power

Everyday consumers can pressure wealthy elites and corporations that acquiesce to, or prop up, would-be autocrats through boycotts and other methods, like the “Tesla Takedown” in the U.S. that preceded a drop in Tesla share value and owner Elon Musk’s departure from his government role. General strikes, led by labor unions and professional associations, as in Sudan or Myanmar, can be particularly effective.

5. Preempt electoral manipulation

Voting autocrats out of office remains the best way to restore democracy, demonstrated recently by the u-turn in Brazil, where a pro-democracy candidate defeated the hard-right incumbent. But this requires strategic action to keep elections truly free and fair well in advance of election day.

6. Organize your community

As in campaigns in India starting in 2020 and Chile in 2019, participating in community or private conversation forums, local town halls or councils, and nonpartisan student, veterans, farmers, women’s and religious groups provides the space to share concerns, exchange ideas and create avenues to take action. Often starting with trusted networks, local initiatives can tap into broader statewide or national efforts to defend democracy.

7. Shape the story

Driving public opinion and communicating effectively is critical to pro-democracy efforts. Serbian students created one of the largest protest movements in decades starting in 2024 using creative resistance – artistic expression, such as visual mediums, satire and social media – to expose an autocrat’s weaknesses, reduce fear and hopelessness and build collective symbolism and resilience.

8. Build bridges and democratic alternatives

Bringing together people across ideological and other divides can increase understanding and counter political polarization, particularly when religious leaders are involved. Even in autocratic countries like Turkey or during wartime as in Ukraine, deepening democratic practices at state and local levels, like citizen assemblies and the use of technologies that improve the quality of public decision-making, can demonstrate ways to govern differently.

Parallel institutions, such as schools and tax systems operating outside the formal repressive system, like during Slobodan Milosevic’s decade-long crackdown in Kosovo, have sustained non-cooperation and shaped a future vision.

9. Document abuses, protect people, reinforce truth

With today’s technologies, every citizen can record repressive incidents, track corruption and archive historical evidence such as preserving proof of slavery at danger of being removed in public museums in the U.S., or collecting documentation of human rights violations in Syria. This can also entail bearing witness, including by accompanying those most targeted with abusive government tactics. These techniques can bolster the survival of independent and evidence-based media, science and collective memory.

10. Mitigate risk, learn and innovate

The success rate of nonviolent civil resistance is declining while repressive tactics by autocrats are evolving. Democracy defenders are forced to rapidly adjust, consistently train, prepare for diverse scenarios, try new techniques and strategically support each other.

International solidarity from global institutions, like European Union support for democrats in Belarus or Georgia, or online movements, like the Milk Tea Alliance across Southeast Asia, can bolster efforts.

Democracy’s future?

The end of American democracy is not a foregone conclusion, despite the unprecedented rate of its decline. It will depend, in part, on the choices made by every American.

With autocracies outnumbering democracies for the first time in 20 years, and only 12% of the world’s population now living in a liberal democracy, the future of the global democratic experiment may well depend on the people of the United States.

Until July 1, 2025, Shelley Inglis served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

– ref. 10 effective things citizens can do to make change in addition to attending a protest – https://theconversation.com/10-effective-things-citizens-can-do-to-make-change-in-addition-to-attending-a-protest-266432

October 19, 2025

How alternative teaching models can foster inclusive classrooms

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Cornelia Schneider, Professor, Education, Mount Saint Vincent University

The education of children with disabilities is a complex issue more than 30 years after “inclusive education” appeared for the first time in an important 1994 United Nations statement.

Children with disabilities too often face varied forms of exclusion with minimal interaction with their non-disabled peers — as well as disrupted or curtailed classroom time with their peers because of delayed hiring practices for support staff or urgently needed supports that never arrive.

Teachers often struggle to keep up with the challenges.

They learn during teacher education how to adapt learning content and outcomes to the diverse learners in their classrooms. But in practice, approaches such as Universal Design for Learning often do not radically change the reality for children with disabilities.

Part of my recent research has examined classroom approaches that can disrupt teaching catered to an imagined average group of learners to better foster the meaningful participation of a broader ranger of students in regular classroom routines, including disabled students.

‘Alternative pedagogies’

Alternative approaches to modern western classroom teaching — “alternative pedagogies” — can be traced to 20th century educators like Maria Montessori in Italy, Célestin Freinet in France, Peter Petersen in Germany or Helen Parkhurst in the United States.

While the movements associated with these educators didn’t have the same roots, they had a common theme: seeking to address traditional forms of classroom learning that either didn’t engage students or foster their learning — and excluded some students. All these movements recognized children’s agency and gave children more control of their learning.

Recognizing student agency

“Week plan work” is a method that developed out of these movements, and is a mode of learning that recognizes student agency and independence. Students autonomously work on curricular content within a particular time frame — most often for one week. Educators (sometimes in collaboration with children) set a plan in which learning outcomes and steps to reach those outcomes are laid out.

This method is very common in countries like Germany and the Netherlands. It’s much less common in Canada, although there are some schools that use self-directed learning, corresponding to the same ideas and principles as the week plan work. A high school in Bedford, N.S., opened its doors a couple of years ago based on self-directed learning.

As a researcher with expertise in inclusive education and practices, I collaborated with a teacher, Harriet Johnston, in the Halifax Regional Education Centre school district in Nova Scotia to test if this method would work well in Canada. We implemented the “week plan work” method in her rural high school classroom in Grade 9 and 11 English language arts. Another goal was to contribute to a culture where experimenting with alternative teaching methods is normalized.

Week plan work method

The week plan in its current iterations goes mostly back to the French reformer Célestin Freinet. Practitioners have since adapted the method to their own context.

With this approach, each week, students receive an individualized folder with a plan of tasks and activities. They have to complete this plan by the end of the week, but they can prioritize and organize tasks in the order they wish. There are materials and activities for individual or collaborative work.

The teacher monitors and mentors students. At the end of the week, there is a debriefing session and folders are collected to assess the accomplished work.

Week plans can be adapted to each student’s learning level. In a class with a rather homogeneous group of learners, the week plan might look the same for every student. In classes with heterogeneous groups of learners, week plans can be differentiated. It can vary based on outcomes, or by interests, strengths and weaknesses of particular learners.

In German elementary classes I observed in the early 2000s, teachers assigned blocks of time for students’ week plan work. As I documented in this earlier study, students learned to become more autonomous and increasingly plan and organize independently.

Week plans and staff

Teaching with week plans inverts the regular teacher-centred model, where the educator teaches and supports each student — and it can become complicated and potentially overwhelming when there is “too much” diversity.

With week plans, the teacher has to “frontload” their preparation of students’ plans, with preparation being about creating the plans. Teacher-led instruction remains a part of the class, but isn’t the predominant strategy.

The teacher is a coach or mentor. Students can solicit help, or continue to progress individually and autonomously. This frees up the teacher to focus on one-on-one work with those who require it.

Week plan and students

For our week plan project in Nova Scotia, we invited Grade 9 and 11 students to participate in focus groups and reflect on their learning.

We have not yet published the outcomes of the study — only about the approach — but our preliminary findings suggest some of the ways that changing the approach to learning positively changes the experience for all students, not only students with disabilities.

What we heard was that many appreciated the approach, as it gave them more control over their learning. It activated engagement and curiosity, while students were still achieving the Nova Scotia curriculum outcomes. Some commented on how this prepared them for the requirements of university.

Students working at desks and a teacher is looking at one of their books. — With the week plan system, students can solicit help, or continue to progress autonomously.
(Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency/EDUimages), CC BY-NC

Our project was also positively received by an education assistant (EA) supporting a student with a disability in the classroom. The project gave the EA explicit direction on what the student had to work on, the time frame and the resources. This shows how the week plan method structures classroom life for the support staff.

On the other hand, there were students who didn’t like the approach, as they preferred the teacher to tell them what to do and when. This was useful knowledge for us, as many students are accustomed to direct instruction. The teacher was consequently able to do more “scaffolding” — breaking down instruction into smaller chunks or systems for tackling a project.

For example, she would go over the plan with a student and discuss which task could be first and how to order the rest. She checked in more often. Students could increasingly gain more comfort and autonomy with this approach.

Self-directed learning

How might such approaches grow? The pillars of inclusion in a school are often the principal and the special education teacher, or learning support teachers.

Optimally, effective leadership and support from educational leaders — in concert with learning opportunities and resourcing for teachers — encourages them to challenge the often-difficult reality of children with disabilities in the regular classroom and respect their right to participation and belonging.

Cornelia Schneider 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 alternative teaching models can foster inclusive classrooms – https://theconversation.com/how-alternative-teaching-models-can-foster-inclusive-classrooms-264938

October 19, 2025

11 years after the Parliament Hill shooting, is Canada doing enough to tackle political violence?

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kevin Budning, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Security, Carleton University

Wednesday marks the 11th anniversary of the Parliament Hill shooting, when an Islamist-inspired extremist, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, stormed Canada’s War Memorial and Parliament Hill, killing one soldier and injuring three other people.

The shooting — the worst attack on Parliament Hill since a failed bomb attempt in 1996 — sent shock waves throughout Canada, as well as internationally. It not only exposed the glaring security vulnerabilities on Parliament Hill but also marked a new reality for Canadians: political violence, long considered a distant threat, had arrived at home.

Eleven years later, many of the lessons Canada should have learned have not yet been put into action. With a marked rise in political polarization and violent attacks, it’s past due for Canada to strengthen its efforts to protect elected officials.

Extremism in Canada

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) classifies three distinct types of extremism: religious, ideological and political. While faith and grievance-based violence continue to make up the lion’s share of incidents in Canada, the threat of politically motivated violent extremism has steadily increased in recent years.

CSIS defines such extremism as “the use of violence to establish new political systems or new structures or norms within existing systems.” This definition, however, is murky in practice, since many attacks target political institutions but are motivated by either an ideological or religious grievance rather than explicit political goals.

In the case of the Parliament Hill shooting, the perpetrator committed the attack in part due to his discontent with Canada’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Though religiously motivated, his actions had political intent.

Likewise, the 2014 shooting in Moncton, N.B. that left three officers killed and two others injured, along with the 2020 vehicle ramming at the gates of the prime minister’s residence in Ottawa, were both committed by far-right extremists. While CSIS correctly classified the attacks as ideologically motivated, they too were, at their core, political.

Regardless of an attacker’s motive — ideological, religious or political — elected officials are increasingly in the line of fire.

According to the Privy Council Office, former prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet faced 337 threats in 2024 alone, up from just three five years earlier.

The same report showed the number of death threats rose from zero in 2019 to 56 in 2022, and 26 in the first half of 2024. When including incidents directed at MPs across party lines, the true scale of the problem is likely much greater.

The global threat

Rising political violence is a global trend. In 2024, more than 2,600 acts of violence targeted local officials across 96 countries, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Similarly, Freedom House, a non-profit organization aimed at strengthening democracy and protecting human rights, reported that nearly 40 per cent of countries experienced election-related violence in 2024. Politicians were attacked in at least 20 nations.

The motives behind these attacks were not monolithic; they ranged from a long list of grievances rooted in xenophobia, gender-based hostility, conspiracy theories, anti-authoritarianism, religious extremism and other perceived social or political injustices.

In the past several years, two British MPs, Jo Cox and David Amess, were killed; former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated; South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-Myung was stabbed; Slovakian President Robert Fico was seriously wounded in a shooting; and former Ukrainian parliament speaker Andriy Parubiy was shot dead.

The United States has been particularly affected by political violence, with at least 300 cases recorded since the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, plots against government targets in the past five years are nearly triple what they’ve been in the past 25 years combined.

The most notable include two failed assassination attempts on U.S. President Donald Trump in 2024, and the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and fatal shooting of right-wing commentator and political activist Charlie Kirk this year.

A call to action

The Parliament Hill shooting anniversary reminds us that the threat of political violence has not diminished over the past decade — it’s grown.

Despite the implementation of some security measures — such as combining three disparate security services into the Parliamentary Protective Service, expanding the armed security presence on Parliament Hill and offering the installation of security systems and mobile panic buttons for elected officials — MPs still lack sufficient protection.

Instead of being reactive in the aftermath of any future tragedies, Canada must make proactive investments to safeguard people and institutions likely to be targeted.

That means enhancing screenings before meetings, increasing access to safe rooms, bolstering security at public events, improving emergency response planning and using protective details and physical security judiciously — that is, erring on the side of caution rather than waiting for threats to escalate.

Canada should also strengthen its intelligence and law enforcement communities to counter the evolving threat. This includes:

Expanding open-source intelligence capabilities to better execute the goals laid out in Canada’s national strategy on countering radicalization to violence;
Enhancing co-ordination with municipal police forces and hate-crime units;
Ensuring the legal consequences for political violence and intimidation serve as genuine deterrents;
And learning best practices from countries like Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, which ranked highest on the 2024 Peace Index.

Protecting Canada’s elected officials from political violence is essential, but it must never compromise a fundamental tenet of democracy: the public’s access to their leaders. Striking this balance will likely remain the greatest challenge for decision-makers, and one they simply cannot afford to get wrong.

Kevin Budning 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. 11 years after the Parliament Hill shooting, is Canada doing enough to tackle political violence? – https://theconversation.com/11-years-after-the-parliament-hill-shooting-is-canada-doing-enough-to-tackle-political-violence-265932