Category: The Conversation – Global Perspectives

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By David Coghill, Financial Markets Foundation Chair of Developmental Mental Health, The University of Melbourne

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects around 2.5% of adults and 7% of children. It causes difficulties with attention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.

If unrecognised and untreated, ADHD can significantly impact educational and work achievements, and social and emotional wellbeing. It can also increase the risks of serious accidents and injuries, offending, mental illness and substance abuse.

When accurately identified and appropriately treated, these negative outcomes can be significantly reduced.

But as a recent article in the Medical Journal of Australia highlights, some people struggle to access and afford diagnoses and treatment the disorder.

Meanwhile, some popular social media channels that provide online “tests” for ADHD are sponsored by private clinics that, once you have screened positive, direct you to their sites for an online assessment. This has raised concern about potential over-diagnosis.

So, what is ADHD diagnosis actually based on? A key component is functional impairment. Let’s take a look at what that means.

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Put a finger down if TikTok has made you think you have ADHD

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Why a brief assessment isn’t enough

In Australia, there are reports of business models where clinics are charging several thousand dollars for a quick, brief online assessment and diagnosis.

These brief assessments don’t comply with evidence-based guidelines and are problematic because they:

• focus solely on ADHD and don’t attempt to assess other aspects of a person’s difficulties

• rely heavily on information from the person being assessed and don’t seek the opinions of significant others

• rely heavily on information about symptoms, gathered through questionnaires, and don’t assess their impact on day-to-day functioning.

This is important because a core requirement for a diagnosis of ADHD is evidence that the:

symptoms must interfere significantly with social, academic, or occupational functioning.

No matter how many symptoms you have, if they’re not having an impact on your day-to-day life, a diagnosis of ADHD shouldn’t be made.

So what is a comprehensive assessment?

To make an accurate diagnosis of ADHD, a comprehensive assessment is needed. This includes a clinical interview to evaluate the current and past presence (or absence) of each of the 18 core ADHD symptoms and associated impairment.

While there are scales such as the Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale and the World Health Organisation Disability Assessment Schedule that can aid assessment, these are best used as conversation starters rather than stand-alone tools.

A comprehensive assessment also includes a broader assessment for current mental and physical health problems, developmental history, personal and family mental health, substance use, addiction and, where appropriate, interactions with the justice system.

This interview shouldn’t be conducted as a simple tick-box exercise, with yes and no answers. A detailed interview is needed to explore and identify symptoms, and evaluate their impact on functioning.

It’s also strongly recommended the clinician hears from one or more people who can speak to the person’s childhood and current functioning.

What counts as ‘functional impairment’ is very individual

The diagnostic manuals don’t give detailed accounts of what counts as significant enough impairment to be diagnosed with ADHD.

This has led some commentators to complain that lack of a standardised definition could lead to over-diagnosis.

But the impacts of ADHD are so broad it would be very difficult to formulate a clear, comprehensive and encompassing list of valid impairments.

Such a list would also fail to capture the very personalised nature of these impairments. What is impairing for me may not be for you and vice versa.

So a rigid definition would likely result in missed as well as mis-diagnoses.

How do clinicians determine if someone is impaired?

Clinicians are very used to assessing the impact of symptoms on functioning. They do so for many other mental and physical health conditions, including depression and anxiety.

Research has identified several common themes in ADHD:

• impaired romantic, peer and professional relationships
• parenting problems
• impaired educational and occupational achievements
• increased accidents and unintentional injuries
• driving offences
• broader offending
• substance use and abuse
• risky sexual behaviours.

ADHD symptoms are often associated with:

• emotional dysregulation
• exhausting levels of mental and physical restlessness
• low self-esteem
• fatigue
• high stress levels.

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Read more:
Parents are increasingly saying their child is ‘dysregulated’. What does that actually mean?

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One caveat is that some people are receiving a lot of support and scaffolding or have found ways to compensate for their difficulties. Whether or not this should count as impairment depends on the circumstances and requires considerable thought.

However, ADHD shouldn’t be ruled out on the basis of high levels of achievement in certain aspects of life like school or work. A person may be under-achieving relative to their potential, or having to put in extreme levels of effort to keep afloat.

An adult with ADHD, for example, may be excelling at work but by the end of the workday is too exhausted to do anything but sleep. They may also be experiencing impairments in other aspects of their lives that aren’t obvious unless specifically asked about.

Others will present multiple impacts that, when explored, aren’t true functional impairments.

So it’s crucial clinicians drill down into the details until they’re confident that it is or isn’t a genuine impairment related to the core ADHD symptoms.

Clinician training is essential

The skill of accurately assessing impairments in ADHD is not difficult to train or learn. This is done by observing experienced clinicians and practising with structured protocols.

Newly trained clinicians quickly become confident in assessing impairment and there is generally close agreement between different professionals about whether an ADHD diagnosis should be made.

However, few health professionals currently get high-quality training in ADHD either during their core or more advanced training. This must change if we’re going to improve the accuracy of assessment and reduce missed and mis-diagnoses.

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Read more:
You might have heard ADHD risks being over-diagnosed. Here’s why that’s not the case

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David Coghill has received honoraria from Medice, Novartis, Takeda and Servier and royalties from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. He receives research funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the Australian Medical Research Futures Fund, and the Financial Markets Foundation for Children. He is the President and a director of the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association.

– ref. Adult ADHD is diagnosed when you are ‘functionally impaired’. But what does that mean? – https://theconversation.com/adult-adhd-is-diagnosed-when-you-are-functionally-impaired-but-what-does-that-mean-268092

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney

On October 29, Comet 3I/ATLAS reached its closest point to the Sun.

This point, known as perihelion, was around 210 million kilometres from the Sun, or 1.4 times the distance between the Sun and Earth, and it was on the opposite side of the Sun to Earth. This means the Sun has been blocking the comet from our view (from Earth). There are already reports it’s been detected again using ground-based telescopes.

The comet is the third interstellar object (hence the “3I”) we’ve detected flying through our Solar System.

When it was first detected on July 1 2025 by the Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System (or “ATLAS”), one of the first questions people asked was “but is it aliens?”.

This isn’t the first time the alien question has come up in the context of a new astronomical discovery. But although it might be fun, it can also detract from the real (and very cool) science, and fuel misinformation.

A long history of speculation

Similar alien speculation arose when the first two interstellar objects were discovered: 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua and Comet 2I/Borisov.

And it doesn’t just happen for interstellar objects.

In 2019, I wrote my first public article about a discovery I made as a PhD student. I had found radio light coming from a binary star system, the first object found by the MeerKAT telescope to be changing brightness over time. Even though this had nothing to do with aliens, the editor asked me to include speculation about them.

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a PhD student, discovered a rapidly repeating flash of radio light.

As a joke, she labelled it LGM 1 for “Little Green Men”, but the astronomers working on it did not really believe they had discovered aliens. They were, however, concerned about the possibility that alien-related media coverage would sensationalise the discovery and hinder their scientific investigations.

A 7 billion-year-old visitor

This concern remains for astronomers today.

Comet 3I/ATLAS is possibly the oldest thing we’ve ever seen in our Solar System. Our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, while recent research points to Comet 3I/ATLAS possibly being more than 7 billion years old.

It has spent a lot of that time zipping through the universe just to spend a few months in our Solar System. When the comet reached perihelion, that’s probably the closest it’s been to a star in at least millions of years.

Research has shown the comet has more carbon dioxide in its outer layers than has been seen in most comets in our Solar System. It also has a higher ratio of nickel to other elements than has been seen in local comets.

These chemical signatures give us a unique insight into the chemical composition of the cloud of gas that formed the solar system where the comet came from.

This is one of the key reasons why we should only be asking about aliens when all other possibilities are exhausted. When we talk about aliens first, we might miss all this amazing information.

As astronomer Carl Sagan said (in his rewording of a principle by French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace), “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. It’s true we can’t completely explain every detail of the comet yet, but not knowing everything is not evidence of aliens.

Embrace the uncertainties

Talking about aliens also leaves room for misinformation to spread.

For example, there have been claims of things such as trajectory shifts and Comet 3I/ATLAS “hiding” behind the Sun. Despite no evidence to support this, I received many questions along these lines when I spoke about the comet online. This demonstrates how easy it is for misinformation to be generated and spread when we’re talking about “aliens”.

There are ways to see the comet while it’s on the other side of the Sun. For example, the European Space Agency plans to observe the comet using the Mars Express, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.

And if you’d like to see the trajectory of Comet 3I/ATLAS and find out where it is right now, you can.

There might be something to be learned from poets here. Romantic poet John Keats wrote about something he called “negative capability”. It’s a strange name, but the concept is about being able to sit with “uncertainties, mysteries and doubts” and be content with not knowing.

There’s a lot we don’t know about Comet 3I/ATLAS and about the universe. It wouldn’t be much fun to be an astronomer if we knew everything already. But when there’s something unknown, we humans like to fill that gap.

For astronomy mysteries, the gap tends to be filled with aliens. However, not knowing all the answers is not proof of aliens. It just means that we have work to do.

Laura Nicole Driessen is an ambassador for the Orbit Centre of Imagination at the Rise and Shine Kindergarten, in Sydney’s Inner West.

– ref. Is it aliens? Why that’s the least important question about interstellar objects – https://theconversation.com/is-it-aliens-why-thats-the-least-important-question-about-interstellar-objects-268665

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Alan McPherson, Professor of History, Temple University

A massive military buildup in the Caribbean has sparked speculation that the U.S. is now engaged in its latest chapter of direct intervention in Latin America.

For now, at least, President Donald Trump has walked back suggestions that Washington is eyeing strikes inside Venezuela, seemingly content with attacking numerous naval vessels under the guise of a counter-narcotics operation. But nonetheless, U.S. presence in the region will enlarge further in the coming weeks with the arrival of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

As a scholar of U.S.-Latin American relations, I know the actions of the current U.S. administration smack of a long history of interventions in the region. Should escalation develop from attacks on ships into direct military confrontation with Venezuela, such aggression would appear to be par for the course in inter-American relations.

And certainly, governments across Latin America – in and out of Venezuela – will place it in this historical context.

But while it does hearken back to some quasi-piratical practices of the U.S. Navy, the military buildup now is in key respects both unprecedented and shocking. It could also damage U.S. relations with the rest of the hemisphere for a generation to come.

A history of intervention

In the most obvious way, deploying a flotilla of warships to the southern Caribbean evokes dark echoes of “gunboat diplomacy” – the unilateral dispatch of marines or soldiers to strong-arm foreign governments that was especially prevalent in Latin America. One reliable account tallies 41 of these in the region from 1898 to 1994.

Of these, 17 were direct U.S. cases of aggression against sovereign nations and 24 were U.S. forces supporting Latin American dictators or military regimes. Many ended in the overthrow of democratic governments and the deaths of thousands. From 1915 to 1934, for example, the U.S. invaded and then occupied Haiti and may have killed as many as 11,500 people.

During World War II and the Cold War, Washington continued to dictate Latin America’s politics, showing an eagerness to respond to any perceived threat to U.S. investments or markets and backing pro-Washington dictatorships such as Augusto Pinochet’s rule over Chile from 1973 to 1990.

Latin Americans have, by and large, chafed at such naked displays of Washington’s power. This opposition from Latin American governments was the main reason that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave up interventions with his “Good Neighbor” policy in the 1930s. Intervention continued, though, throughout the Cold War, with moves against leftist governments in Nicaragua and Grenada in the 1980s.

The end of the Cold War did not quite end military interventions. Some U.S. armed forces still operated in the hemisphere, but, since 1994, they had done so as part of multilateral forces, as in Haiti, or responding to invitations or collaborated with host nations, for instance in anti-narcotics operations in the Andes and Central America.

Showing respect for national sovereignty and non-intervention – both sacred principles in the hemisphere – especially in the context of rising drug violence, has largely quieted the resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in the largest nations in the hemisphere, such as Mexico and Brazil.

No mere Monroe Doctrine reboot

So is Trump merely reviving a long-abandoned stance on the U.S. role in the region?

Not even close. In two key ways, aggression against Venezuela or any other Latin American country now – rationalized by Washington as a response to insufficient law enforcement against drug-running – would be dangerously unprecedented.

First, it would blow out of the water the age-old justification for U.S. armed intervention called the Monroe Doctrine.

Since 1823, when President James Monroe announced it, the U.S. has aimed to keep outside powers out of the republics of the hemisphere.

Once a Latin American people won its independence, Washington believed, it had the right to keep it, and the U.S. Navy helped in any way it could.

By the early 20th century, that purported help took on the look of a policeman patrolling the Caribbean Sea on a beat, wielding what then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called a “big stick” and keeping Europeans from landing and, say, collecting debts. Sometimes this was done by having the Marines land first and move a country’s gold to Wall Street.

An expansion of the Panama precedent

Even during the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine could be logically invoked to keep the Soviets out of the hemisphere – whether in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965 or Grenada in 1983.

Often, as in Guatemala, the Soviet link was weak, even nonexistent. But there was still a thin thread of keeping out a “foreign ideology” that seemed to keep Monroe relevant.

The doctrine died a surer death with the 1989 invasion of Panama to remove its rogue leader, Manuel Noriega, convicted of drug-running and guilty of trouncing his country’s democracy. No one fingered an extra-hemispheric accomplice.

Noriega’s removal by about 26,000 U.S. troops might be the closest parallel to Trump’s targeting of alleged drugs boats in the Caribbean. Trump has already – and repeatedly – alleged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is, like Noriega, not the head of state of his own country and therefore indictable. More fantastically, he has alleged that the Venezuelan leader is the head of the Tren de Aragua gang that has been designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by U.S. authorities. It is not too big a leap from there to calling for – and participating in – the overthrow of Maduro on the grounds of removing an international “narco-terrorist.”

But even there, the parallel with Panama diverges in a crucial way: A U.S. attack on Venezuela would be far different in scale and geography. Maduro’s country is 12 times larger, with about six times the population. Its active troops number at least 100,000.

Another Iraq?

In all of the U.S. invasions and occupations of Latin America, none has occurred in South America or in a large country.

To be sure, troops from “the colossus of the north” invaded Mexico several times, beginning in 1846, but never did they hold the entire country. In the Mexican War, U.S. troops soon retreated after 1848. In 1914, they occupied a single city, Veracruz, and in 1916, they chased around a bandit in the Punitive Expedition.

In all these episodes, it found taking parts of Mexico expensive and unproductive.

And a U.S.-provoked regime change in a sovereign country today, such as in Venezuela, would likely trigger a massive resistance not only from its military but throughout the country.

Maduro’s threat of a “republic in arms” should the U.S. invade might be bluster. But it might not. Many experts predict that such an invasion would meet with disaster. Maduro has already asked for military assistance from Russia, China and even Iran. Even without such help, the mobilization of U.S. assets in the Caribbean is no guarantee of success.

And while many governments in the rest of the hemisphere would no doubt love to see Maduro gone, they would dislike more the method of his going. The presidents of Colombia and Mexico have criticized the attacks, and others have warned of the resentment in the hemisphere were an intervention to follow.

In part, this is informed by the U.S. interventionist past in Latin America, but it also comes from a place of self-preservation, particularly among the left-leaning governments who have already drawn Trump’s ire. As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said, “If this becomes a trend, if each one thinks they can invade another’s territory to do whatever they want, where is the respect for the sovereignty of nations?”

Venezuela is, contrary to the White House’s statements, not much of a producer or trans-shipment point of narcotics. What if Trump turned his sights on other government even more compromised by drug corruption, such as Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru?

The concern there will be over becoming the next domino in line.

Alan McPherson 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. Trump’s squeeze of Venezuela goes beyond ‘Monroe doctrine’ – in ideology, intent and scale, it’s unprecedented – https://theconversation.com/trumps-squeeze-of-venezuela-goes-beyond-monroe-doctrine-in-ideology-intent-and-scale-its-unprecedented-268845

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Robert Muggah, Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow na Bosch Academy e Co-fundador, Instituto Igarapé; Princeton University

The U.S. military buildup along South America’s northern rim is, Washington insists, aimed at “narco-terrorists.” A growing chorus of analysts aren’t convinced; they suspect what the Trump administration is really after is regime change in Venezuela.

Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader since 2013, is taking no chances. In recent weeks he responded to the Trump administration’s moves as if invasion were imminent. After a September emergency decree and martial rhetoric about a “republic in arms,” the Venezuelan president says militias and reservists are now mobilized nationwide.

The leftist leader has ordered armed forces, police and militia to deploy across 284 battlefronts – a national defense posture that surges troops on sensitive borders. He has also massed 25,000 soldiers near Colombia, a likely vector for infiltration.

In addition, roughly 4.5 million members of the National Bolivarian Militia, an auxiliary force created in 2005 and made up of civilian volunteers and reservists, have reportedly mobilized. Civilians are being trained by the armed forces in weapons handling and tactics sessions to knit local “people’s defense” committees into the defense architecture.

This placing of Venezuela on a war footing follows months of U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean. And there is no doubt that should it come to it, the U.S. boasts a far larger and more sophisticated military than Venezuela.

But as an expert on Latin American politics, I suspect that might not be enough to remove Maduro from power – or encourage opposition figures in Venezuela on Washington’s behalf. In fact, any direct attempt to do so might only lead to a slow process that risks entrenching Maduro’s position.

Powerful friends overseas

Alongside nationwide domestic mobilization, the Venezuelan leader still has some pretty powerful international friends. Maduro boasts some 5,000 Russian Igla-S, man-portable anti-aircraft missiles positioned at key air-defense points. While unverified, these reports are indicative of the short-range air defense and anti-ship capabilities being supplied by nations friendly to the Maduro regime.

On Oct. 28, a Russian Il-76 heavy cargo plane, operated by a sanctioned carrier tied to Russian military logistics, landed in Caracas after a multistop route through the Caucasus and West Africa. If not an outright sign of solidarity, this is a signal that Russia can airlift advisers, parts and munitions at will.

Iran’s long, quiet hand is visible in Venezuela’s drone program. It was reportedly seeded with Mohajer-2 kits and expanded over the years into armed and surveillance platforms assembled at state plants by Tehran-trained technicians.

Cuba, for its part, has for more than a decade embedded intelligence and internal security advisers across Venezuela’s military services, an underdiscussed force multiplier that helps the regime police dissent and maintain loyalty.

Although Russia, Cuba and Iran may help Maduro survive, they are unlikely to save him from any determined American campaign.

Cautious opposition

If Washington is hoping that its military squeeze may encourage Venezuelans to take matters into their own hands, the domestic scene is less favorable. The opposition to Maduro is fragmented and vulnerable after being deprived, fraudulently by most accounts, victory in a 2024 vote and a subsequent year of repression.

The Democratic Unitary Platform remains split between a pressure wing and a participation wing after the disputed vote. The jolt of morale handed to the opposition on Oct. 10, when the de facto 2024 opposition candidate María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize, has yet to move the needle.

There is a low probability, in my opinion, that the opposition can forcibly remove Maduro without a trigger, such as a major split within the security services, sustained mass mobilization with elite defections, or a massive U.S. intervention.

The regime’s domestic security architecture and control of courts, prosecutors and the electoral council make a sudden elite split unlikely. Electoral displacement is also unpromising given that the official opposition is split on tactics, faces daily repression, and Maduro has repeatedly signaled he will not accept a loss – even if he loses.

Street power, backed by sustained international leverage and U.S. military threats, are arguably the opposition’s best asset.

Diaspora politics are febrile. South Florida’s large Venezuelan exile community reads the naval buildup as a potential turning point and lobbies accordingly, even as U.S. immigration and travel policies cut against their interests. The opposition’s mainstream leaders still mouth the catechism that change should come by Venezuelan hands, but more are openly courting external pressure to tilt the balance.

What Washington might do next

The Trump administration has certainly shown willingness to mount pressure on Maduro and encourage his opponents. Since August, the Pentagon has surged forces, destroyers and amphibious ships into the U.S. Southern Command’s patch. Then, on Oct. 24, Washington redirected the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, attacks against suspected drug vessels will likely continue.

The campaign has already resulted in at least 13 strikes and 57 killed in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. And President Donald Trump has been consistent in linking the targeted cartels to Venezuela’s government and Maduro directly. Should the U.S. wish to escalate further, precision strikes on Venezuelan territory are not out of the question. With an aircraft carrier nearby and F-35s staged in Puerto Rico, the Pentagon has options.

Meanwhile, covert actions will accompany any overt military posturing. The White House has openly declared that the CIA has authority to operate inside Venezuela. A U.S. Homeland Security agent reportedly tried to recruit Maduro’s chief pilot to fly the president into U.S. custody, a plot that fizzled but hints at the psychological ops now in play. Venezuela, meanwhile, has condemned “military provocation” by the CIA and others.

It is worth recalling past attempts to unseat Maduro, including a 2018 drone attack at a Caracas parade and a failed freelance operation in 2020 that ended with deaths and dozens captured, including two former U.S. soldiers. The U.S. has denied any connection to both incidents.

In any event, such operations seldom topple strongmen – but they do seed paranoia and crackdowns as regimes chase ghosts.

Possible endgames

If Washington’s real objective is regime change, the plausible outcomes are sobering. To be sure, a quick collapse of Maduro’s government is unlikely. A short, sharp campaign that dismantles the regime’s coercive tools could trigger elite defection. Yet Cuba-hardened internal security, patronage over the generals and years of sanctions-induced siege mentality make a palace coup improbable on a timetable that suits Washington.

In my view, a slow squeeze is likelier.

A hybrid strategy involving maritime and air pressure, covert agitation and inducements, targeted strikes to degrade regime capacity, and political, legal and cyber warfare to isolate Caracas and split the officer corps is realistic. But that path risks entrenching the regime’s hard-liners and worsening a humanitarian crisis even as it degrades Maduro’s capacity.

Analysts warn that the regime change logic, once engaged, is hard to calibrate, especially if strikes kill civilians or hit national symbols.

A boomerang is always possible. Military action will very likely rally nationalist sentiment in Venezuela, fracture hemispheric consensus and drag the U.S. into a longer confrontation with messy spillovers, from uncontrolled migration to maritime security threats.

It is worth recalling that approximately 7.9 million migrants and refugees have already left Venezuela, with over 6.7 million residing in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Even the successful decapitation of Maduro’s regime would not guarantee a successor able to govern the country.

At least three signposts matter in determining what happens next.

The first is airlift cadence: More Russian cargo flights into Caracas point to accelerated military and technical aid. A second is the expansion of U.S. targets – a strike on a military installation or a presidential bunker would cross a political Rubicon, even if framed as a counter-narcotics operation. The third is opposition mobilization. If there are credible signs of Venezuelan demonstrations, protests and action, this will shape Washington’s appetite for escalation.

But even if the White House clings to its current counter-drugs and counterterrorism narrative, all evidence points to the trajectory as an incremental regime change push with less than certain outcomes.

Robert Muggah is the co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a think and do tank in Brazil and a principal and co-founder of SecDev, a geopolitical and digital advisory group. Dr. Muggah is an affiliated scholar at Princeton University, a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosh Academy, and received a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

– ref. US squeeze on Venezuela won’t bring about rapid collapse of Maduro – in fact, it might boomerang on Washington – https://theconversation.com/us-squeeze-on-venezuela-wont-bring-about-rapid-collapse-of-maduro-in-fact-it-might-boomerang-on-washington-268693

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Cindy McCreery, Associate Professor of History, University of Sydney

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, meaning he will no longer be called “prince” or “His Royal Highness”.

A statement from Buckingham Palace said:

His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor […] These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.

Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

The statement also noted Andrew will have to leave his current home, Royal Lodge, and move to alternative private accommodation.

These moves follows allegations, which Andrew continues to “vigorously deny”, surrounding his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But how can a prince – who is, after all, the son of a queen – be stripped of the title “prince”?

Here’s how it works – and what it might mean for succession.

How do you actually strip a prince of his titles?

This is within the remit of the monarch, Charles III. The monarch issues an official document called a letters patent.

They are typically used to grant a title or a right, but this is doing the opposite: withdrawing it from Andrew.

There are precedents for monarchs removing titles in this way. When Diana and Charles divorced, she lost the use of “Her Royal Highness”, as did Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Andrew. So a royal losing their title doesn’t always have to be scandalous or unusual.

But what’s not happened yet – because it’s not within the remit of the king – is the removal of Andrew’s position as eighth in line to the throne.

That requires parliamentary legislation to do – and not just the Westminster parliament, either.

To do that, the Westminster parliament would have to introduce a bill and pass it. However, the move would also require virtually identical legislation in all of the Commonwealth parliaments (such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on).

That’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

A bit over a decade ago, with what came to be known as the Perth agreements, the Commonwealth parliaments agreed to change the rules around succession and gender. No longer would older princesses be leapfrogged by younger brothers to get a spot on the throne.

It happened very smoothly, so it is certainly possible for all Commonwealth parliaments to agree to coordinate on something. However, the Westminster parliament cannot instruct other parliaments to pass such legislation.

So, could all the Commonwealth parliaments coordinate to remove Andrew from the line of succession? I have not seen any mention of this in media reports so far, but I would be highly surprised if this didn’t happen in future.

It seems incompatible that Andrew would lose his title and still be in line for succession.

But is the son of the queen not always a prince?

By custom, yes, the son of a queen is known as a prince. But as we have seen, that title can be removed.

The best example is in 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated so as to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson, and he lost the title of king.

He was thereafter no longer entitled to the title “His Royal Highness” and he got a new title: Duke of Windsor. He had some prestige, but was no longer entitled to use his royal title.

Edward VIII (who was also Andrew’s great uncle) did not have any children. But if he had, they wouldn’t have been entitled to inherit the throne.

And that was an actual reigning king, not just a prince.

Acting in a moment of crisis

Andrew has reportedly accepted the latest decision but it was made by his brother, the king.

This is a signal from Charles not just to the public but also to his heir, William, that he’s doing everything he can to smooth the path for William’s succession and to respond to public anger over the allegations against Andrew.

As an historian, this is a moment to reflect on how this is another example of the British monarch taking decisive action in a moment of crisis, to save the reputation of and public support for the monarchy.

Another example would be King George V, who acted decisively in the first world war not only to strip titles from family members who had supported Germany in the war, but to also change the name of his family.

They were known as Saxe-Coburg Gotha (a German name), but they became the house of Windsor.

Cindy McCreery has received funding from the ARC.

– ref. No longer ‘Prince Andrew’: an expert on how royals can be stripped of their titles – https://theconversation.com/no-longer-prince-andrew-an-expert-on-how-royals-can-be-stripped-of-their-titles-268766

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland

Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.

Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.

The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.

Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”

“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.

British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.

As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.

“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”

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Review: Nobody’s Girl: A memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice – Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Doubleday)

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Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.

Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.

Allegations of parental abuse

Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.

Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”

After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:

My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.

Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.

Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”

Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.

Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.

Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.

‘The younger, the better’

Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.

Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.

The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.

It is also a damning indictment of everyone who knew and looked away.

‘Please don’t stop reading’

Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)

Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages, Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.

Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.

In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”

Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”

One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.

According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.

Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.

Girls no one cared about

“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”

In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”

In 2019, Lang issued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”

In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.

On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.

“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”

Sex as birthright

In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”

Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.

In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.

In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.

In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.

The last word

Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.

However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:

It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.

As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.

“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”

Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.

While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.

Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.

By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.

In this way, she got the last word.

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If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

Kate Cantrell 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 stripped of all titles after Virginia Giuffre’s memoir. Her family declares ‘victory’ – https://theconversation.com/prince-andrew-stripped-of-all-titles-after-virginia-giuffres-memoir-her-family-declares-victory-267751

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lexi Eikelboom, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University

The documentary, 1,000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, has made Tia Billinger – stage name Bonnie Blue – a household name.

Famous for her sexual stunts, including one in which she has sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours, Bonnie Blue fascinates us because we do not understand her.

Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.

Some have offered personality-based explanations for Billinger’s choices, saying she may simply be an opportunistic sociopath.

But explanations like these relegate her to the status of a social oddity, or a monster. And this discounts the social conditions that produce someone like Billinger – the same social conditions all women face.

The contradiction Bonnie Blue embodies reveals just how fraught a woman’s relationship to power and influence is. Women who seek power often encounter a double bind that leads them to use their power in a way that also curtails it.

Power through subservience

Power requires two ingredients. It involves autonomy and self-determination. It also requires being embedded in society so as to exert influence within it.

These two aspects of power work in tandem for men, and especially white men. But for women, and people with other marginalised identities, they often pull in opposite directions.

US feminist writer Andrea Dworkin described this situation in her 1978 book Right-wing Women: for women, power comes through subservience to male values.

For a woman, to be embedded in society is, by definition, to have her autonomy and self-determination restricted. As a result she is forced to choose: do what you want or have influence.

The reward for protecting men’s access to women

Billinger’s business model is striking. She makes enormous amounts of money by offering sex for free. The fact the sex itself is free enables her to turn around and sell a desirable commodity through subscription-based platforms such as Fansly – namely, the fantasy of female availability.

After her 1,000 men stunt, Billinger told her documentary film makers

I loved […] seeing how many men had wedding rings on. I just loved knowing I was doing something their wives should’ve done.

She tells men not to “feel guilty for doing something you deserved and you was, well, you was owed”. Despite appearances, then, Billinger is not autonomous at all. Her power is the result of subservience to male entitlement.

There have always been women who gain power by protecting men’s access to women. Consider, for example, US conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016). While Billinger is famous for her extreme sexual stunts, Schlafly could be considered the original tradwife.

Initially an expert in foreign policy, Schlafly was unable to gain political traction through her expertise, so she built a career opposing women’s liberation on behalf of housewives. She got the political power she wanted, but not in the field she really cared about.

Womanliness as a masquerade

Both Schlafly’s and Billinger’s personas map squarely onto one side or the other of what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, in which a misogynistic society categorises women according to the kind of service they offer men – either as a saintly mother figure or as a sexual object.

Each of these roles also deflects attention by attacking the opposite side of the dichotomy.

Billinger positions herself as a rival to men’s wives, claiming her critics simply want to turn her into a housewife. Schlafly positioned herself as a housewife opposing equal rights because she considered such rights to be bound up with sexual promiscuity.

In reality, each stance relies on the other. And we’re beginning to see this manifest in the emergence of tradwife Onlyfans content.

In 1929, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote about a tendency in her female patients she called “womanliness as a masquerade”.

Riviere notes how women who exhibited traits socially coded as “masculine”, or who occupied positions historically reserved for men, attempted to hide this masculinity through a performance of femininity. She wrote:

women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.

To undertake a “masculine” pursuit of power, both Schlafly and Billinger uphold a particular ideal of femininity. And both women’s careers are logical – if misguided – responses to the messages women receive about where their value lies.

A never-ending tradeoff

Our systems punish women for wanting things such as power, money, or visibility, requiring them to turn against other women, give up their expertise, or make themselves infinitely available to men.

If women were allowed to pursue power without these sacrifices, it might curtail the harms other women face as a result of the masked pursuit of power.

Women should not have to choose between power, money and visibility on one hand, and community and liberation on the other. They should not have to choose between Madonna and the whore.

Yet as political gains continue to shrink around the world, many women are starting to feel this double-bind more forcefully. There may be more Bonnie Blues and Phyllis Schlaflys on the horizon.

Lexi Eikelboom 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. Sex with 1,000 men in 12 hours: why Bonnie Blue is neither a feminist nor a monster – https://theconversation.com/sex-with-1-000-men-in-12-hours-why-bonnie-blue-is-neither-a-feminist-nor-a-monster-267982

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Lisa J. Hackett, Senior Lecturer, Sociology & Criminology, University of New England

Monopoly is the best-selling licensed board game of all time, popular since its 1935 release when “the new craze” swept the world.

It has remained a staple, with over 390,000 copies sold in Australia to date.

Its transformation from an economic critique to a capitalist icon highlights its historical evolution and adaptability.

A game with a message

Monopoly’s roots trace back to The Landlord’s Game (1903), created by Elizabeth Magie to critique monopolistic land ownership.

It featured two sets of rules – one emphasising wealth accumulation, the other wealth distribution. The aim was to demonstrate how different policy levers, taxing income versus taxing land, affect economic outcomes of players.

It was based on economist Henry George’s proposition for a “land value tax” or “single tax”. Under this regime, people would keep all they earned, with public funds raised from land ownership instead.

The two sets of rules in the Landlord’s Game demonstrate how wealth is either concentrated in the hands of landlords (taxing income) or is more fairly distributed across society (taxing land).

In 1935, a man named Charles Darrow removed the game’s socialist critique (the version that taxed land), renamed it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers. The game was now focused on the accumulation of real estate until one player remained, having bankrupted their fellows.

The game thrived during the Great Depression, offering an escapist fantasy of financial success.

In 1935, Parker Brothers paid Magie US$500 (US$11,800 today) for the rights to her game, ensuring their ownership of Monopoly was unchallenged. As part of the deal, they released her original game, but it failed to gain traction with players.

Not everyone welcomed its capitalist themes – Fidel Castro famously ordered all Monopoly sets in Cuba destroyed in 1959

Playability and house rules

Philip Orbanes, former vice president of research at Parker Brothers, argued a good board game must have clear rules, social interaction and an element of luck. Monopoly ticks all three boxes.

Despite this, Monopoly is notorious for causing arguments. Hasbro (who bought out Parker Brothers in 1991, acquiring Monopoly in the process) found that nearly half of Monopoly games end in disputes, often over rule interpretations. Monopoly is the game most likely to be banned, or see a particular player banned, on game nights.

Monopoly’s rules have been adjusted and manipulated as players have sought to overcome the inequities in the game. Another of Hasbro’s surveys found 68% of players admitting to not having read the rules in their entirety, and 49% said they had made up their own rules.

These “house rules” include things like cash bonuses on Free Parking or modifying auctions to make the game more engaging.

Identity and nostalgia

Monopoly’s use of real-world locations makes it adaptable to local markets.

The original version reflected Atlantic City’s socio-economic hierarchy. When Waddingtons released the English version in 1936 under license (the same version which would go on to be released in Australia in 1937), Atlantic City’s wealthy Boardwalk and working class Mediterranean Avenue became London’s Mayfair and Old Kent Road, respectively.

The game can also serve as a bridge to former geographies. The 1980s Yugoslav edition remains a link to the past for those who lived through that era, recording changing political geographies and cultural shifts.

Monopoly is a flagship brand for Hasbro, worth an estimated US$272m in 2018. Part of Monopoly’s success lies in its licensing strategy. The board layout is extremely flexible, allowing for localised adaptations to be made to suit different markets, without any substantial change to the game play.

There are believed to be over 3,400 different versions of Monopoly issued, from classic city street layouts to popular culture imaginings.

It is this aspect that attracts collectors; world record holder Neil Scanlon owns 4,379 sets of Monopoly (he is still searching for the Cronulla Sharks set).

Monopoly reflects the world’s economic systems, embodying both the dream of wealth and the realities of financial inequality.

It has been studied by economists and educators as a tool for understanding capitalism, wealth accumulation and market control.

The game originally meant to critique monopolistic practices became a celebration of them. Each player has the opportunity to accumulate vast wealth, reflecting the promise of capitalism: where anyone can enjoy riches as long as they work hard enough.

Magie’s message was leveraged by Federal MP Andrew Leigh in his 2023 critique of the growing concentration of business monopolies in Australia. Leigh noted how monopolies affected Australian families and how the Albanese government had “increased penalties for anti-competitive conduct, and banned unfair contract terms” with the aim of creating a fairer society.

Enduring popularity

In 2025, Hasbro introduced digital banking versions – though many players lament the feel of physical wads of cash.

The game continues to be a favourite, ranking as the top childhood game among Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials – and fourth for Gen Z. The sense of nostalgia was strong among all groups, not surprising as board games were found to be an integral part of family bonding.

Monopoly has evolved from an anti-capitalist critique into a commercial juggernaut. While it has faced criticism for erasing its socialist origins and its reliance on luck, its ability to reinvent itself has ensured its lasting appeal.

As both a cultural artefact and a competitive game, Monopoly remains firmly embedded in board game culture.

Lisa J. Hackett 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. 90 years of Monopoly: how the ‘new craze’ morphed from socialist critique to capitalist dream – https://theconversation.com/90-years-of-monopoly-how-the-new-craze-morphed-from-socialist-critique-to-capitalist-dream-252738

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Tilman Ruff, Honorary Principal Fellow, School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

US President Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing immediately, “on an equal basis” with other countries’ testing programs.

If Trump is referring to the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, this would be an extremely unfortunate, regrettable step by the United States.

It would almost inevitably be followed by tit-for-tat reciprocal announcements by other nuclear-armed states, particularly Russia and China, and cement an accelerating arms race that puts us all in great jeopardy.

It would also create profound risks of radioactive fallout globally. Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been signed by 187 states – it’s one of the most widely supported disarmament treaties in the world.

The US signed the treaty decades ago, but has yet to ratify it. Nonetheless, it is actually legally bound not to violate the spirit and purpose of the treaty while it’s a signatory.

What testing is used for, and why it stopped

In earlier years, the purpose of testing was to understand the effects of nuclear weapons – for example, the blast damage at different distances, which provides confidence around destroying a given military target.

Understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons helps militaries plan their use, and to some extent, protect their own military equipment and people from the possible use of nuclear weapons by adversaries.

But since the end of the second world war, states have mostly used testing as part of the development of new weapons designs. There have been a very large number of tests, more than 2,000, mostly seeking to understand how these new weapons work.

The huge environmental and health problems caused by nuclear testing prompted nations to agree a moratorium on atmospheric testing for a couple of years in the early 1960s. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in all environments except underground.

Since then, nuclear-armed states have stopped explosively testing at different times. The US stopped in 1992, while France stopped in 1996. China and Russia also aren’t known to have conducted any tests since the 1990s. North Korea is the only state to have openly tested a nuclear weapon this century, most recently in 2017.

These stoppages came in the 1990s for a reason: by that time, it became possible to test new nuclear weapon designs reliably through technical and computer developments, without having to actually explode them.

So, essentially, the nuclear states, particularly the more advanced ones, stopped when they no longer needed to explosively test new weapon designs to keep modernising their stocks, as they’re still doing.

Worrying levels of nuclear proliferation

There is some good news on the nuclear weapons front. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed by half the world’s nations. This is a historic treaty that, for the first time, bans nuclear weapons and provides the only internationally agreed framework for their eventual elimination.

With the exception of this significant development, however, everything else has been going badly.

All nine nuclear-armed states (the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) are investing unprecedented sums in developing more accurate, stealthier, longer-range, faster, more concealable nuclear weapons.

This potentially lowers the threshold for their use. And it certainly gives no indication these powers are serious about fulfilling their legally binding obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Moreover, multiple nuclear-armed states have been involved in recent conflicts in which nuclear threats have been made, most notably Russia and Israel.

Worryingly, we have also seen the numbers of nuclear weapons “available for use” actually start to climb again.

This includes those in military stockpiles, those that have been deployed (linked to delivery systems such as missiles), and those on high alert, which are the ones most prone to accidental use because they can be launched within minutes of a decision to do so. All of these categories are on the increase.

Russia, in particular, has weapons we haven’t seen before, such as a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile that President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday his country has successfully tested. China, too, is embarking on a rapid build-up of nuclear weapons.

And the US has just completed assembling a new nuclear gravity bomb.

A new START treaty also not moving forward

Nearly all of the hard-won treaties that constrained nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War have been abrogated.

There’s now just one remaining treaty constraining 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, which are in the hands of the US and Russia. This is the New START Treaty, which is set to expire in February next year.

Putin offered to extend that treaty informally for another year, and Trump has said this is a good idea. But its official end is just four months away, and no actual negotiations on a successor treaty have begun.

The US has also said China needs to be involved in the successor treaty, which would make it enormously more complicated. China has not expressed a willingness to be part of the process.

Whether anything will be negotiated to maintain these restraints beyond February is unclear. None of the nuclear-armed states are negotiating any other new treaties, either.

All of this means the Doomsday Clock – one of the most authoritative and best-known assessments of the existential threats facing the world – has moved forward this year further than it has ever done before.

It’s really an extraordinarily dangerous time in history.

Tilman Ruff is affiliated with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Medical Association for Prevention of War.

– ref. If the US resumes nuclear weapons testing, this would be extremely dangerous for humanity – https://theconversation.com/if-the-us-resumes-nuclear-weapons-testing-this-would-be-extremely-dangerous-for-humanity-268661

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Peter Rutland, Professor of Government, Wesleyan University

A new, old specter is haunting the world: the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons.

Well, that is what the Kremlin wants the world to believe.

Take the new Russian state-backed film “Tolerance.” Released in September 2025 to a less than enthusiastic public response, the dystopian tale of moral decay in the West opens with a warning of an “omnipresent Anglo-Saxon liberalism” that will “cause the ultimate degradation and extinction of once-prosperous countries and peoples.”

Scary stuff. But the film isn’t the first time that Anglo-Saxons have been cited as a threat to the Russian way of life.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian officials and their colleagues in the Kremlin-controlled media have taken to referring to their Western adversaries as “Anglo-Saxons.” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even stated that the “Anglo-Saxons” in question are bent on defeating Russia “with the hands of the Kyiv regime.”

Indeed, analysis one of us conducted with Adrian Rogstad at the University of Groningen looking at statements posted on the Russian foreign ministry website found a marked increase in “Anglo-Saxon” references after the invasion of Ukraine – 86 of them in the course of 2022, compared to just 27 in the previous 20 years. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s March 2022 comment that the “Anglo-Saxon world will never stop … It’s like an insatiable monster,” is typical of the way “Anglo-Saxon” is used. The term even made it into the official Russian foreign policy concept published a year later, where in the section titled “The U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon states,” the United States is referred to as “the main inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West”.

The term is a particular favorite of Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. In February 2024, Peskov explained that Putin agreed to be interviewed by the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson because he “stands in clear contrast to the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”

This creeping use of “Anglo-Saxon” as a slur hasn’t gone unnoticed in the West. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy said in 2023 that the use of the term was “very strange” given the multiethnic character of American society.

Reports suggest that with the election of a more Russia-friendly president in Donald Trump, the word from the Kremlin was not to use the term for Americans, specifically. But it appears not everyone got the memo – pro-Putin State Duma Deputy Viktor Vodolatsky recently warned against “Anglo-Saxons” creating a “point of tension” in the South Caucasus through the U.S.-led peace efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

As experts in Russian discourse and post-Soviet nations, we see the increased use of “Anglo-Saxons” as reflecting deeper trends that tap into Putin’s use of history to justify the invasion of Ukraine and smear his perceived enemies, while exploiting political divisions in Europe and America.

Who were the Anglo-Saxons?

The original Anglo-Saxons comprised the waves of conquerors from Germanic tribes in Europe that flooded into England – Jutes as well as Angles and Saxons – in the fifth and sixth centuries. Alfred the Great united the warring fiefdoms of southern England in the ninth century and declared himself king of the Anglo-Saxon realm.

But the term did not enter wider usage until long after the “Anglo-Saxon period” ended with the invasion of England by French-speaking Normans in 1066.

In fact, it wasn’t until the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century that scholars started to refer to the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, in a bid to differentiate the country from Catholic Europe – another use of history for political aims.

But the term really took off in the 19th century, when it was folded into pseudoscientific racist justification for the British Empire. That came to an end in World War I, when Britain and America found themselves fighting against Germany – the location of Saxony. In 1917, the British royal family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Even U.S. President Woodrow Wilson – an acknowledged racist – insisted that Americans were not Anglo-Saxons.

There things stood until 1964, when American professor E. Digby Baltzell published “The Protestant Establishment,” which popularized the term “White Anglo Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, to refer to middle-class Americans of European descent.

By the 2000s, it was mostly white supremacists who were using the term Anglo-Saxon as a synonym for a modern-day demographic. Academic journals and groups dedicated to studying the Middle Ages dropped references to “Anglo-Saxons” due to the racist connotations.

Make Moscow medieval again!

It is against this background of Anglo-Saxon as a term appropriated by white supremacists that modern Russian usage should be seen.

Russian propaganda has long sought to talk up the far right in Europe and America, with whom Putin’s “national conservatism” has a close affinity. It does so to sow division in Western democracies and fracture the liberal international order. The aim is to portray the U.S. and U.K. as warmongering Anglo-Saxon nations, thereby encouraging the French, Germans and other Europeans to avoid following their lead.

More broadly, the references to Anglo-Saxons reflects Russia’s view that global politics is driven by a “clash of civilizations,” in which Russia represents the values of traditional Europe, and it taps into a centuries-old fear of perfidious Western encroachment on the Russian state.

It also fits a pattern of Putin referencing Russia’s medieval past to explain the country’s current policies, even if he needs the invasion of Turkic tribes in the 11th century to justify COVID-19 measures.

Putin has tried to justify the invasion of Ukraine by claiming that modern Russia is the direct descendant of ninth-century Kyivan Rus, and that Ukrainians are therefore really Russians.

The Russian government has invested heavily in trying to persuade its citizens that they can trace their identity all the way back to a distant past in medieval times – at a time when Anglo-Saxons ruled England.

But in leaning on outdated terminology popular with white supremacist groups in a bid to sow division and antagonism in the West, Putin seems to be retreating into an imaginary world of the medieval past.

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

– ref. Beware the Anglo-Saxons! Why Russia likes to invoke a medieval tribe when talking about the West – https://theconversation.com/beware-the-anglo-saxons-why-russia-likes-to-invoke-a-medieval-tribe-when-talking-about-the-west-264822