Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paolo Aversa, Professor of Strategy, King’s College London

The Winter Olympics just showcased alpine sport at its most spectacular and universal. But in the mountains themselves, access to winter sports is becoming increasingly unequal.

The cost of keeping slopes open in a warming climate is climbing – and so are prices for visitors. Investment will be concentrated in higher altitude resorts that are able to adapt, while smaller and lower areas fall behind. The key question for the future of skiing may not be whether it survives at all, but who it survives for.

Unlike the UK, where skiing is associated with expensive foreign holidays, in Alpine regions it has become a mainstream hobby without the same class connotations. Born as a means of transport, more affordable equipment made it increasingly accessible to people beyond the mountains. In Italy, for instance, it is not unusual for state schools to take their pupils into the mountains for a traditional “settimana bianca” – white week – skiing holiday.

Each winter, locals and tourists together support a sector that accounts for roughly €12 billion (about £10 billion) – that’s 0.5% of Italy’s national GDP, and a far higher percentage of the economy in mountain regions. Winter sports have become a major employer, as communities that once depended on seasonal farming and agriculture have progressively shifted to tourism.

Yet the climate conditions that made this possible are changing.

Peak prices

With snow falling less and melting faster, resorts invest heavily in artificial snowmaking to maintain reliable winter seasons. These investments have worked – most ski runs in the Alps are now lined by modern snowmaking machines – but they also reshape the economics of skiing.

That’s because the cost is being passed on to skiers themselves.

For instance in the Dolomiti Superski network, Italy’s largest, a high-season daily pass has surged from €67 (£59) in 2021 to around €86 (£75) this year, a rise of 28% in three years. The cost of skiing in Europe has risen by 34.8% above inflation since 2015, with Swiss, Austrian, and Italian resorts mostly responsible for the price increase.

In the US, prices are increasing even faster and American skiers are increasingly heading to relatively cheaper resorts in the Alps. Together with skiers from Russia and Eastern Europe who are wealthy enough to ignore the prices, they’ve helped keep Alpine tourism fully booked.

But skiing is less and less accessible for many less-affluent families, including many locals. Former Italian World Cup skier and TV commentator Paolo De Chiesa recently warned that skiing in Italy is becoming a sport for the elite.

As climate adaptation demands more and more investment, skiing will be increasingly concentrated in fewer higher altitude resorts. These resorts tend to be further into the mountains and already attract most of the wealthy tourists, which means they can also afford more snow-making.

Smaller and lower-altitude resorts with mostly local visitors are far more likely to struggle – many are already seeing their winter seasons shorten, and some have already closed entirely.

When adaptation reshapes communities

These changes are felt most strongly in mountain communities themselves. One of us (Paolo) grew up a short drive from where the recent Winter Olympics were held. During his childhood most of his friends knew how to ski, but today only a handful of them can afford to take their children.

This is one side of a growing divide within ski tourism between places that can afford to adapt and those that cannot. Artificial snowmaking increases dependence on capital investment, energy and water. This favours large resorts which, over time, pass costs on to deep-pocketed visitors and local communities.

Meanwhile, seasonal workers now often struggle to find accommodation as housing is prioritised for visitors. Narrow mountain roads are congested, parking is difficult, and public services are under pressure.

Beyond winter-only tourism

If climate change is concentrating skiing in fewer, higher-altitude resorts, the change needs to be gradual and managed rather than sudden and brutal. Much of the industry still profits from the status quo and won’t be keen to transition to other arrangements. That’s why policymakers have a responsibility to guide the transition, starting with lower-altitude resorts.

There, diversification into year-round tourism, gastronomy, wellness, or other nature experiences is one way to build a more resilient future. Protecting the local community and more fairly distributing the revenues of the tourism is becoming as important as maintaining visitor numbers.

Investment and opportunity – and even snow itself – is being further concentrated in fewer spots. Technology may save skiing, but the question is for whom. A global affluent elite may be able to handle the price rises, while local people are increasingly excluded from the system they helped to build.

Paolo Aversa receives funding from the Center for Sustainable Business at King’s College London, the Center for Sports and Business at the Stockholm School of Economics, and the Fondazione CARITRO.

Juliane Reinecke receives funding from the Center for Sports and Business at the Stockholm School of Economics.

– ref. Climate change may not end skiing. But it will make it more exclusive – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-may-not-end-skiing-but-it-will-make-it-more-exclusive-276703

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Emmanuel Junior Zuza, Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Science, The Open University

Wild garlic, oyster mushrooms and sea beet were once regularly gathered and eaten as part of meals across the UK. Today, some people have concerns about eating food growing in the woods or hedgerows, but are keen to discuss why – as our research shows.

Our small study looked at current public attitudes to eating wild foods in the English county of Dorset.

In previous centuries, knowledge about what to pick and eat and even how to cook was passed down through generations.

In 16th-century Britain, rural households ate pottage (a kind of soup made from oats) and foraged for other ingredients including sorrel and leeks. Coastal communities gathered samphire and sea beet, while hazelnuts were gathered from forests and hedgerows. Wild game, such as rabbit and deer, and freshwater eels were considered ordinary foods for those who could find them.

My team’s research into public attitudes to “wild food” was based in Dorset, a strongly agricultural county. Working with an experienced forager, we selected ten foods growing wild in the county and available around the UK. We then asked a mix of farmers and people in the food industry including chefs and experienced foragers about whether they would feel comfortable eating these items.

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When shown photographs of commonly available edible species including nettles, mushrooms (wood ear and oyster), blackberries, wild garlic, elder, cleavers (a native wildflower), hawthorn, hazelnut, and sea beet, many participants expressed surprise about how little they knew about the foods growing in their back gardens and nearby woods.

One farmer in the group said: “I grew up in the countryside, I was always curious about plants and what was growing outside. But I’m always surprised about how little I know and I’m someone who loves plants.” The people we spoke with were not confident about how to identify food sources on their doorsteps and add them into their cooking.

Two people out of the group of 11 correctly identified the two types of mushrooms, wood ear and oyster, that are common in Dorset and widely foraged globally. Several participants admitted they were a bit afraid of eating mushrooms. One farmer said that wild mushrooming “terrifies me a little bit”.

A foraging expert said: “A lot of people are scared because they’re told when they’re a kid, don’t touch the mushrooms, they might be poisonous.”

One grower said that consumers have become used to buying all their food from shops, but they are less comfortable with buying, or finding, foraged food. Participants said they would be comfortable buying oyster mushrooms in a supermarket, but they would feel less secure buying them at a market, for instance.

But we found some participants were enthusiastic about trying out new wild ingredients. One said: “If you can eat something that you’ve grown, picked or foraged, it kind of has a special feeling about it.”

Another said: “I’m going to have them. It’s free! I mean, why wouldn’t you?”

It should be noted that inexperienced foragers should seek guidance on which fungi are safe to eat as not all are edible, and some are poisonous.

Participants’ perspectives shifted after discussing foraging and consumption. One participant commented: “This shows the loss of knowledge and understanding of how to find and eat wild foods, even in rural communities.”

Wild foods, such as the ones in our study, were once part of a staple diet but are not widely available in supermarkets, although a few do crop up at farmers’ markets. Examples of these include wild garlic, wood ear mushrooms, elderflower, nettle, cleavers, hawthorn, sea beet, chickweed and sea purslane.

Rebuilding knowledge about local wild foods could help reconnect people with their food environment.

Emmanuel Junior Zuza works as a Senior Lecturer at The Royal Agricultural University and is a Visiting Fellow for the Open University.

– ref. Foraged mushrooms and sea beet featured in British meals in the 16th century. Why not today? – https://theconversation.com/foraged-mushrooms-and-sea-beet-featured-in-british-meals-in-the-16th-century-why-not-today-275743

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rosamund Oates, Senior Lecturer in History, Manchester Metropolitan University

In February, Leicester Cathedral hosted a British Sign Language (BSL) service celebrating a deaf marriage that took place in the church 450 years ago, in 1576.

The groom was a deaf blacksmith from Leicester named Thomas Tilsey, who made his wedding vows in sign. It was so unusual that the clerk who witnessed the marriage recorded it in full in the parish records. Although the BBC reported that this marriage was “one of the earliest recorded examples of inclusive worship”, by 1576 deaf people had been marrying using sign language for almost 400 years.

These signs were probably not the complex languages we know today as BSL or ASL, but rather what linguists describe as “homesign”: a semi-structured form of signing that develops in small groups of deaf people. However, it was still complicated enough for deaf men and women to rely on friends and family to act as interpreters and structured enough that the 17th century mathematician John Wallis described learning the “language” of deaf signers.

The medieval church’s acknowledgement that signs were equivalent to a spoken language was transformative for deaf people. Sign language recognition unlocked the world, letting deaf people inherit property, go to court and even challenge their hearing friends and family. It is not a straightforward story of inclusion, however, and it is a struggle for equality that continues today, with the British Deaf Association continuing to campaign for the equal access to BSL.

Sign and the law

In 1198, Pope Innocent III issued a decree that deaf people should be able to get married by making their vows in sign language. Since marriage has wide-reaching legal implications, this was a powerful recognition that deaf signers were as capable of consent as anyone else.

These decrees became part of the church law that stretched across Europe, and gradually the principle was applied in other areas too. After the papal ruling, deaf people used sign language to go to court. In England, a court case involving a deaf signer was recorded in 1344, and by the start of Henry VII’s reign it was being routinely taught to legal students that signs could replace vocal speech in property law.

In churches across Europe, including England, deaf people could attend Mass or make their confession using signs. These practices were carried into the new Protestant Church of England.

The significance of recognising sign languages as equivalent to a spoken language can not be overstated. It challenged a long legal tradition, first seen in ancient Rome, that decreed people who were deaf and did not speak were cognitively impaired and should be treated like infants in legal situations.

Since deaf people could neither hear to understand, nor express their consent, lawyers across Europe argued well into the early modern period that they could not make contracts or even be held responsible for crimes.

As late as the 17th century, the barrister Michael Dalton claimed in a legal handbook that “if a man born deaf and dumb killeth another that is no felony, for he cannot know whether he did evil or no”. This reflected a long tradition, often attributed to Aristotle, that speech was necessary for intelligent thought, and was evidence that humans were superior to animals.

Perhaps the greatest test of how far sign language was recognised came when deaf people challenged their hearing family. Another deaf marriage, this time in Jacobean Essex in 1618, involved just that. The groom was a young deaf man called Thomas Speller, who had moved to a nearby village to train as an apprentice, fallen in love with his master’s daughter – Sarah Earle – and wanted to marry her.

Thomas’ mother, Winifred, objected – perhaps because the marriage would mean an end to a significant annuity. She did everything she could to stop the marriage. She complained that Sarah was a fortune hunter, that Thomas was being forced into the marriage against his will and that he was not capable of making informed consent.

The local bishop launched an investigation, but it was only when Thomas and Sarah travelled to London to see a representative of the bishop that the case was concluded. A secretary recorded that Thomas told the bishop’s lawyer that he wanted to marry Sarah, and he did so in sign language. His mother’s concerns were put aside, and a marriage license was issued for the pair to get married. They did so a few weeks later in London, with Thomas using signs to marry Sarah. And while it was unusual – the parish clerk noted “we had never seen the like before” – without Thomas’ mother in the picture, it went off without a hitch.

A couple of decades later, in Bedfordshire, another deaf man – George Blount – married against his parents’ will. This time the problem seems to have been that he married a former family servant, someone they held in low esteem, describing her as “one of our menial servants of unclear parentage”. When George’s father, Giles, believed that he would have to support any children from the marriage he wrote to his local magistrate, claiming that the marriage was invalid since George was not capable of consenting.

Again, there was an investigation, and the witnesses from the wedding and the vicar were interviewed: they all reported that though George couldn’t say the words of the wedding ceremony, he showed his “willingness” to marry and was declared “full of understanding”. The case was rejected, and George and his wife moved away from his parents, going on to have a long and apparently happy marriage.

Despite these success stories, prejudices about deafness and intellectual ability continued even as sign language allowed some men and women to assert themselves. Returning to the marriage of 1576 celebrated in Leicester Cathedral, we can see something of that. Before Thomas Tilsey was allowed to marry, he had to prove to the Mayor of Leicester, to the town council and to the bishop that he was intellectually capable of understanding what marriage was.

In addition, Tilsey’s friends and family had to vouch for him. When it came to the wedding ceremony itself, he had to use pre-approved signs which closely mimicked the service in the prayer book and could be understood by anyone. This was much closer to miming than the signs used by most deaf people.

Rosamund Oates receives funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. The deaf blacksmith who married in 1576 – and the history of sign as a legal language – https://theconversation.com/the-deaf-blacksmith-who-married-in-1576-and-the-history-of-sign-as-a-legal-language-276686

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nana Nwachukwu, PhD Researcher, Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology (Adapt), Trinity College Dublin

Between the middle of the 18th and 19th centuries, the English parliament passed more than 4,000 Enclosure Acts. These laws allowed the fencing of common lands where villagers had grazed livestock and planted for generations, transferring them largely into private ownership of the aristocracy or the church. Similar dramatic changes to the landscape and society occurred in Scotland and Wales around the same time.

According to the economic historian Karl Polanyi, this was a deliberate construction of a new kind of society. One where resources that had sustained communities through mutual access were converted to commodities, forcing people to depend on markets they did not control.

The commoners were not consulted in this decision process. The laws were drafted by landowners and passed by a parliament of property holders.

I have been thinking about Polanyi’s analysis as I research my PhD on AI governance and accountability. This is because I believe something similar is happening in the digital space, which my research into the Grok sexualised images controversy shed light on.

In July 2025, users discovered that Grok could generate sexualised images of women with a simple text prompt. Under a post, a user would write “put her in a bikini” and Grok obliged. Even requests for nudity were immediately visible to everyone with access to X.

I began documenting these requests, collecting and categorising more than 565 instances over the last quarter of 2025. To me, the Grok controversy represents the endpoint of a longer withdrawal from the responsibilities that once accompanied control of digital infrastructure.

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The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

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As a former Trusted Facebook Partner, I am familiar with how content moderation used to work. Platforms such as Meta (when it was Facebook) ran programs where activists and civil society organisations could flag harmful content directly to human reviewers for outright removal or labelling. While these arrangements were imperfect, they were a form of negotiated governance where communities retained input into what stayed and what was taken away.

A year ago, Meta announced it was ending its fact-checking program and moving to “community notes” modelled on X’s systems. Users now moderate each other. Meta framed this as a trade-off for free expression. I regard it as a withdrawal of responsibility while retaining control.

In this sense, it mirrors the way the enclosure system enabled landowners first to secure common space for private profit – and then, increasingly, to shirk the responsibilities that were meant to go with this transfer of resources.

Withdrawal of shared governance

Under the old commons system of England, enclosure meant more than fencing land. Lords had duties towards those who worked the land, and the commoners had recognised rights. Even though it was an unequal relationship, it was one negotiated over generations and enforced by local courts.

Enclosure eliminated the commoners’ rights while freeing landlords from their reciprocal duties. What was left was control without obligation or care.

But the English enclosure system did not succeed through legal force alone. It required ideological cover. Authors like Arthur Young and Jethro Tull framed enclosure as part of a broader scientific, rational and experimental innovation in agriculture. Newspapers and pamphlets amplified enclosure as a national economic project that would create employment and drive productivity. Today we are experiencing something similar.

AI is often framed as innovative and productivity enhancing – a catalyst for progress, efficiency and problem solving. This has helped big tech establish dominance. It also obscures the fact that controversies such as the Grok scandal are not a momentary failure of innovation, but a natural outcome for the way this technology has been rolled out.

The acceptable use policy of xAI, which owns Grok, states that “you are free to use the service as you like as long as you use it to be a good human”. These terms prohibit depicting a person’s likeness in a pornographic manner and violating people’s right to privacy or publicity, among other things.

These are the rules that users believe the algorithmic fences of AI content will enforce. However, these terms of service are not necessarily written into the system or model behaviour. Only after the major public outcry did xAI announce it had stopped Grok from technically being able to edit the images of real people in a sexualised way.

Big tech not only controls the technology, but the servers where the data we create is stored. Their invisible algorithms determine what surfaces and what disappears. Their terms of service define what speech is permitted. Today’s digital version of the enclosures is multidimensional.

In response, it’s easy to shrug and say: “Leave and move to a different platform.” Such a reply starts to sound like the advice given to people in abusive relationships.

Regulating the landlords

The path forward requires careful planning. Traditional regulatory approaches struggle when corporations are situated in jurisdictions that regard minimal regulation as a competitive advantage.

We need what I call an “authority awareness framework” for engaging with the landlords of these digital enclosures. This would clearly outline who controls which aspects of AI technology, and what can be done to renegotiate how the system is overseen and regulated.

Such a tool would, I believe, support the implementation of the UK’s proposed AI regulation bill, by giving the proposed auditing authorities a realistic map of power – not unlike the historical enclosure maps that helped to establish limits on what landlords could do to the English commoners centuries ago.

They didn’t get their common land back – but over time they began regulating the landlords. Now we need to do the same with today’s digital landlords, and break their stranglehold for good.

Nana Nwachukwu is on the Advisory Board of the Digital Democracy Initiative and the Tech Project Women’s Initiative (TechHerNG). Her PhD research is funded through the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin. Nana consults for Saidot Ltd.

– ref. We are in a digital version of the enclosures – like the landowners, big tech has power without responsibility – https://theconversation.com/we-are-in-a-digital-version-of-the-enclosures-like-the-landowners-big-tech-has-power-without-responsibility-276926

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Richard Buka, Haematology Registrar and Clinical Research Fellow, University of Birmingham

COVID vaccines saved millions of lives, but months into the rollout, a small number of people began developing dangerous blood clots in unusual parts of the body. These only happened after vaccines that used a modified adenovirus to deliver its payload – such as the AstraZeneca vaccine. Why these blood clots formed was a mystery – until now.

The condition was named vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis, or VITT. It happens when the immune system mistakenly attacks one of the body’s own proteins, called platelet factor 4.

Antibodies that recognise platelet factor 4 are actually part of normal immune responses, but in VITT the antibodies that develop are unusually sticky. They cling on to platelet factor 4, pulling together many molecules and forming large clusters of proteins called “immune complexes”, leading to dangerous blood clots.

Over the last few years, we have been working on the biology of VITT, primarily focusing on how these antibodies activate platelets. However, the way that vaccination triggers these antibodies to form was one of the main mysteries in this disease.

Now an international team of scientists in Australia, Canada and Germany has provided an answer. In an elegant set of experiments, they showed that virtually all patients with VITT share a distinctive pattern in their antibodies.

They studied 100 patients with VITT from around the world. By chance, two of these patients had donated blood in the past, meaning samples were taken before vaccination and stored in German blood service freezers. These samples turned out to be the key that unlocked the mystery.

The team were able to show that the antibodies involved in VITT begin as antibodies that recognise an adenoviral protein called protein VII. These antibodies probably came from the immune system’s memory of earlier adenovirus infections – which are common in childhood and cause mild cold-like symptoms.

During normal immune responses to infection and vaccination, tiny random genetic changes occur in cells that produce antibodies. This is normal and these changes help the immune system refine antibodies so they fight infections more effectively.

In all the patients with VITT, the researchers found the same change. By changing just one small part of the antibody, it suddenly gained the ability to bind platelet factor 4 very strongly.

Previous research by the same team had already shown that most patients with VITT carry a particular immune gene variant that shapes the structure of the antibodies they produce.

The new study helps explain why this matters. The mutation identified by the researchers only occurs in antibodies built on this genetic background, allowing them to grab onto platelet factor 4 extremely tightly.

This discovery helps explain why VITT is so rare. Two unlikely events must occur at the same time. First, a person must inherit the particular immune gene variant. Second, a rare mutation must occur in one of the antibody-producing cells responding to the adenovirus. Only when both events happen together does the immune system begin targeting platelet factor 4.

Why do we need to understand VITT?

You might wonder why this is still important. The pandemic is over and surely VITT is no longer seen?

But adenovirus-based vaccines remain an important tool. They are versatile, inexpensive and easy to deploy worldwide. When the next pandemic arrives, vaccines made using this approach could once again save millions of lives.

We also occasionally see patients with syndromes that look exactly like VITT but without any link to vaccination. These cases can sometimes be triggered by viral infections, including adenovirus and cytomegalovirus.

A similar process has also been implicated in people with recurring blood clots over many years, repeated miscarriages and stroke in a newborn baby caused by antibodies from the mother that target platelet factor 4.

Understanding exactly how VITT happens means scientists may now be able to modify future vaccines to avoid triggering this rare immune reaction.

Richard Buka received funding from AstraZeneca to conduct research in an area of medicine unrelated to VITT. He has done consulting work for Pfizer. He is the Chair of HaemSTAR, a UK-wide network of haematology resident doctors interested in malignant haematology. He has previously been supported by the British Heart Foundation and his current post is funded by the UK National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Samantha Montague receives funding from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and was previously funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) (NIHR135073). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the BHF.

– ref. COVID vaccination: we now may know why some people developed blood clots – https://theconversation.com/covid-vaccination-we-now-may-know-why-some-people-developed-blood-clots-277702

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Saeed Bagheri, Assistant Professor of International Law, University of Reading

Israeli strikes targeted oil facilities near the Iranian capital of Tehran over the weekend. Two oil refineries, both of which had been attacked by Israel in 2025, and two oil storage facilities were hit. According to Iran’s deputy health minister, Ali Jafarian, at least four people were killed by the strikes.

The strikes raise two main questions. First is whether an oil refinery truly qualifies as a legitimate military target under international humanitarian law. And second is whether the rule of proportionality – that military actions are not excessive in relation to their intended aim – should have constrained an attack of this nature.

The principle of distinction forms the cornerstone of the laws governing the conduct of hostilities. It requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish at all times between civilian and military objects. The Geneva conventions, a set of treaties that establish rules for humane treatment during wars, also say that parties must limit their attacks to military objectives.

Article 52 of the conventions provides the authoritative definition of a military object. It says an object is a legitimate target if it makes an effective contribution to military action by its nature, location, purpose or use. It adds that the destruction of such an object must also offer a definite military advantage in the circumstances prevailing at the time.

Oil refineries showcase the complexity of applying these principles. They convert crude oil into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, all of which are essential both for civilian life and military operations. Armed forces may depend on these fuels to operate vehicles, aircraft and naval vessels, sustaining their combat and logistical capabilities.

Disrupting fuel production can therefore weaken the military capability of an adversary. This could make an oil refinery a legitimate target. However, there is no convincing evidence yet that the two targeted facilities near Tehran – the Tondgouyan and Shahran oil refineries – were important sources of fuel for the Iranian military.

Even if an oil refinery contributes to military actions, its importance to the civilian economy remains significant from a legal standpoint. Many states depend on continuous energy supplies for transportation, industry and public services.

Fuel shortages can disrupt public transportation, delay the delivery of food and medical supplies and impede electricity generation. In densely populated urban areas like Tehran, which is home to around 15 million people, such disruptions can have a serious impact on daily life and economic stability.

These considerations are reinforced by Article 54 of the Geneva conventions. This safeguards objects from attack that are considered indispensable for the survival of the civilian population.

The provision explicitly references foodstuffs, water installations and agricultural areas. But its underlying rationale emphasises the importance of protecting systems that are essential to fundamental living conditions, so probably includes energy infrastructure that underpins the operation of water treatment, sanitation and emergency services.

Principle of proportionality

The principle of proportionality provides a mechanism to balance military necessity and humanitarian protection. Article 51 of the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks that are expected to cause incidental civilian harm that is excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage.

In the case of oil refineries, proportionality analysis should account not only for immediate casualties and structural damage. It should also account for the expected downstream impact on civilian life. This includes the impact of service interruptions, economic disruption, fuel shortages and, perhaps most importantly, reduced air, water and soil quality.

Environmental contamination, particularly degraded water quality, has been documented following attacks on energy facilities in previous conflicts. The most notable instances have been in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf war, Syria in 2015 and Ukraine since 2022.

Under international humanitarian law, adversaries must take these considerations into account when assessing what is proportionate in the pursuit of military objectives. They must weigh the anticipated military advantage against the broader consequences for civilians who depend on the targeted facilities.

Tehran’s high energy demands mean that damage to refineries that supply fuel to millions could cause severe disruption. It could also cause air and water pollution. The Iranian authorities warned of toxic acid rain immediately after the attacks on Tehran’s oil facilities, and many residents have since reported headaches and difficulty breathing.

These consequences do not appear to have been considered in the Israeli military’s proportionality assessment. No feasible precautions or mitigation measures were reported prior to the attacks. There also does not appear to be evidence that attacking the refineries would yield a definite military advantage.

International humanitarian law does not categorically prohibit attacks on energy infrastructure. But it does require careful, context-specific assessments of the military relevance of an energy facility and the possible civilian harm caused by its destruction.

For now, assessing the legality of the Israeli strikes is difficult. More detail on the role of the refineries in Iran’s military operations and the anticipated military advantage achieved by targeting them will be required before a judgment can be made.

Saeed Bagheri 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. What international law says about the Israeli strikes on Iranian oil facilities – https://theconversation.com/what-international-law-says-about-the-israeli-strikes-on-iranian-oil-facilities-277875

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Emilie Rutledge, Senior Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

At the end of 2025, the Gulf states received high praise for their economic resilience. According to reports by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, the region was stable, modern and reliable.

Now the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – are watching on nervously. The economic damage done by what has become a regional conflict, bringing an abrupt loss of stability, could be huge.

Aside from Saddam Hussein’s foray into Kuwait in 1991, these six countries have successfully steered clear of conflict on their home turf over a long perriod. They avoided the revolutionary upheavals which affected Egypt (1952), Iraq, Syria and Iran (1979). They steered clear of any spillover from the long-running Israel-Palestine conflict.

The group was mostly unaffected by the war between Iran and Iraq. And aside from a short-lived uprising in Bahrain in 2011, the GCC emerged largely unscathed from the regional turmoil of the Arab Spring in 2010 which spread from Tunisia and and Egypt and led to violent instability which continues to this day in Libya, Yemen and Syria.

The GCC’s comparative stability underpins its attractiveness as a global hub for money and modernity. Success in luxury tourism has filled places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi with five (and even a seven) star hotels. Only France has more Michelin-starred restaurants than the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is cutting-edge technology in Qatar’s energy sector, and a vast AI campus in the UAE.

It is these kinds of projects which led the World Bank and the World Economic Forum to publish glowing reports on the region recently. Both organisations agreed in late 2025 that oil wealth was being wisely invested for the future.

The general view was that the GCC was a place of economic stability and diversity. A director of the World Bank, Safaa El Kogali, said that the region’s embrace of a digital future had been nothing short of “remarkable”.

But US military bases in all GCC countries have come under attack. Drones have hit oil tankers. The Strait of Hormuz, vital for the transit of much of the world’s energy is effectively closed.

Missiles from Iran directly hit three Amazon web service facilities, one in Bahrain and two in the UAE, leading the company to recommend that GCC businesses back up their data and migrate it to data centres in the US.

Stock markets across the world have fallen sharply. Energy bills and petrol prices have soared as oil and gas refineries have been shut in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

Under fire

Despite efforts to diversify economies away from oil, for now the region is still clearly dependent on oil exports and food imports, hence the worries over Hormuz. There are fears for its numerous desalination plants, which provide drinking water (as well as filling infinity pools and keeping golf courses green).

And its status as a safe and sunny sanctuary for conference conveners, influencers, holiday makers and owners of second homes is now being questioned.

Even if the conflict were to end soon, reputational damage has been done. People are fleeing the area, as images of smoke filled skies fill screens.

This will inevitably dampen foreign direct investment in the immediate future. The course and duration of the conflict will determine the degree to which the region can bounce back and continue to attract holidaymakers and young professionals and those seeking a life with more sun and less tax.

From a geopolitical perspective, the region’s recent success – aside from its vast and easily extracted natural resources – has rested largely on the assumed political stability that was underwritten by hosting US military bases and buying US military hardware. Both of these could now prove to be an economic liability.

Emilie Rutledge 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 Middle East conflict has swiftly exposed economic vulnerability in the region – https://theconversation.com/the-middle-east-conflict-has-swiftly-exposed-economic-vulnerability-in-the-region-277666

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Iwan Williams, Senior Lecturer in Sports Communication and Public Relations, Swansea University

When Snoop Dogg swaggered into Swansea wearing a Swansea City hoodie and beanie, it felt surreal. The American rapper took his seat at the Swansea.com Stadium and, for a moment, Welsh football tilted slightly off its axis.

Far from being incidental, it was a calculated public relations strategy – and a smart one. His arrival offers a revealing lesson in sports branding, celebrity capital and the globalisation of lower-league football.

Snoop Dogg’s minority investment in Swansea City, announced in July 2025, triggered an immediate surge of interest in a Championship club that has struggled for visibility since relegation from the Premier League in 2018. Swansea have spent years trying to stabilise themselves financially and culturally outside the glare of the top flight.

The club’s chief executive, Tom Gorringe, has been candid about those constraints. Swansea needed fresh revenue streams and renewed attention. Snoop’s social media reach – more than 100 million followers across platforms, including more than 88.5 million on Instagram – offered exactly that.

That kind of reach acts as a multiplier. Every post, every appearance, exposes the club to audiences traditional marketing budgets could never reach. Nowhere is that more valuable than in the US, a market long targeted by British clubs but notoriously difficult for smaller sides to penetrate in any meaningful way.

The effect was almost immediate. Ticket demand spiked ahead of Swansea’s match against Preston on February 24, the first widely publicised fixture attended by Snoop. The club opened additional sections of the ground to accommodate a crowd of 20,233. This was an unprecedented move in recent years. What would normally have been a modest second-tier fixture sold out. It became one of the largest attendances in recent Swansea history.

Celebrity endorsements in sport are nothing new. Yet the pairing of a west coast rapper with a west Wales Championship club is less random than it first appears. Snoop’s public persona dovetails neatly with Swansea’s self-image. He has described the city as “proud” and “working class”, “an underdog that bites back, just like me”.

That underdog identity carries weight in Welsh sport. Whether in football or rugby, Wales often frames itself as resilient, defiant and collectively driven when competing against wealthier or more populous opponents. The emotional logic fits. And in modern sporting PR, emotional authenticity matters more than cynical brand alignment.

There is another advantage. Snoop’s presence humanises the club’s ownership structure. Since November 2024, following a takeover, Swansea’s central decision-makers have been two American businessmen. For many supporters, overseas ownership can feel distant and abstract. A globally recognised cultural figure who turns up at games, posts enthusiastically and participates in club promotions offers something more tangible.

No magic bullet

Still, this is no magic bullet. Snoop Dogg’s investment is relatively modest. Swansea remain bound by financial regulations and the economic realities of the Championship. Celebrity attention can amplify a brand, but it cannot increase recruitment budgets or guarantee promotion. If results falter, media interest will cool.

Within those limits, however, Swansea appear to be maximising what celebrity PR can offer. The club is not claiming that Snoop will transform its fortunes overnight. Instead, it is treating his global cultural capital as a strategic asset in an unequal league ecosystem where visibility itself has value.

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Read more:
Why America is buying up English football – and what it means for the future of ‘soccer’

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His involvement also reflects a broader shift in how football clubs operate. Increasingly, they exist at the intersection of sport, entertainment and global media. Ownership is no longer just about balance sheets. It shapes narrative, perception and the way fandom itself is constructed.

In that sense, Swansea are doing more than enjoying a surreal headline. They are experimenting with identity. They are attempting to reposition themselves within a crowded, rapidly evolving football mediascape.

It is also telling that the club’s other celebrity co-owners, American lifestyle personality Martha Stewart and Croatian footballer Luka Modrić, have not generated similar column inches. Clearly, not all celebrity is equal.

Swansea City, to their credit, seem to understand where the real leverage lies. By directing the PR spotlight squarely at Snoop Dogg, they have recognised that brand alignment works best when it feels culturally coherent. In football, as on the pitch, timing and positioning matter. Get them right, and even a Championship club can land a global headline.

Iwan Williams 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 Snoop Dogg became Swansea City’s most unlikely asset – https://theconversation.com/how-snoop-dogg-became-swansea-citys-most-unlikely-asset-276904

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Robert Frost, Early Career Fellow in History, University of Leicester

The concept of cultural appropriation, or “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own”, is a controversial topic guaranteed to provoke polarising debate.

Recently, the National Portrait Gallery added a trigger warning to its photographs and portraits of T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia. Visitors are now advised that these reflect “attitudes and viewpoints of the time”. Two Daily Telegraph columnists voiced contrary opinions, though both ultimately subsumed the issue into an attack on Free Palestine activists, impeding our understanding of the historical context.

If we restrict ourselves to looking at the images alone, they can indeed be classed as acts of cultural appropriation: there was, after all, no obligation for Lawrence to wear the costume when posing.

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Read more:
What is cultural appropriation, and how does it differ from cultural appreciation?

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But there is also Lawrence’s personal reality to consider. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence recounted being given the clothing by the Arabian Emir Feisal, the leader of the Arab revolt. The emir felt that British army khaki was uncomfortably close to that worn by the Turkish colonial soldiers, and that his followers would be more willing to accept someone dressed like themselves.

And Lawrence’s loyalty to the Arab cause did not end in 1918. In 1919, he lobbied the British government – unsuccessfully – to back them at Versailles. The most famous painting of Lawrence in Arab robes, from the same year, was a radical act of solidarity with another culture.

In this light, Lawrence was not simply engaging in frivolous cosplay. His choices should be distinguished from those of contemporaries such as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) also known as Mata Hari, the Dutch courtesan, dancer and convicted spy whose performances revolved around discarding the slendong veils worn by Javanese temple dancers. Yet beyond such surface-level engagement, I have come across documentation showing how and why many others donned indigenous dress in the countries they visited, as opposed to simply wearing it, in effect, for show.

Practical considerations

Wearing native dress for more practical purposes was part of a longer tradition extending back many centuries. For starters, it had practical benefits. Turkish dress was particularly popular; it was composed of layers which could be added or removed as needed. It was also looser than standard European clothing, so better suited to a warm climate. And it was no small advantage that it could actually be obtained locally. Those venturing to Egypt and Palestine frequently wore it.

In the 1810s, the British sailors Charles Irby and James Mangles, quickly realised that western dress tended to attract a little too much attention. They recalled how local people, intrigued by their appearance, “used to flock to gaze at us as if we had been wild beasts”.

Witnessing a play in Cairo in 1815, the Italian adventurer and Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni was surprised to see a character in western dress “who served as a sort of clown”. Under such conditions, it is unsurprising that Irby, Mangles and Belzoni all opted to change out of western clothing.

As I point out in my recent research, travellers were often advised by local people. Sadic Gibraltar, the son of an Egyptian admiral, told the British Egyptologist Gardner Wilkinson that Egypt was safe, “but costume of Turk is better”. Gibraltar sent Wilkinson to Osman Effendi, who led Wilkinson around the city to buy the recommended clothing. He also fitted out Edward William Lane in the same way; this dress allowed Lane to conduct a study of Islamic culture that would now be classed as participant observation.

A couple of decades later in 1839, the Scottish artist David Roberts was only permitted to enter mosques after he promised Cairo’s governor that he would wear local dress.

Two centuries later, it is difficult to assess whether any of these people were in any real danger. More likely, the dress simply made the wearer less conspicuous, so reduced unnecessary stress. William Rae Wilson probably also spoke for many when he wrote that his hosts “look upon it as a sort of compliment to imitate their dress”.

Resistance to wearing local dress came primarily from other Europeans, not indigenous people. Early 19th-century British embassy missions abroad always wore military uniform. Even Lord Byron – well-known for donning Greek national dress in the Greek war of independence – chose full-dress uniform for meeting Albania’s ruler, Ali Pasha. At an official level, there was an expectation that every Briton should behave similarly.

In one extreme episode, the British consul in Egypt, Henry Salt, sought to disavow Britons who continued to wear native dress. Charged by Britain’s growing power during the Napoleonic wars, Salt envisaged a future in which western clothing would mark his compatriots out for special treatment.

An objection by the Britons themselves meant the order was rescinded, though eventually a trend developed toward tropical kit being used as a marker of difference in the late 19th century.

It has become almost a stock-in-trade to suggest that Britons, from the Arctic to the Sahara, failed to copy local customs more appropriate to their situation. Paintings from the past are complicated artefacts, but it is perhaps time to reclassify them as examples showing that some Britons actually did adapt.

Robert Frost receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. Cultural appropriation? How westerners have worn indigenous clothing for a variety of reasons throughout history – https://theconversation.com/cultural-appropriation-how-westerners-have-worn-indigenous-clothing-for-a-variety-of-reasons-throughout-history-275110

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vivek Soundararajan, Professor of Work and Equality, University of Bath

Every week brings fresh claims about AI transforming the workplace. A CEO declares a revolution. A think piece predicts millions of jobs vanishing overnight. The noise is relentless.

But strip away the hype and there is a simpler question. In developed economies, what has AI actually changed about work so far? The answer turns out to be more interesting, and more uneven, than either side suggests.

What’s real

Let’s start with what the evidence supports. AI is delivering genuine productivity gains in specific kinds of knowledge-based and service work. An experimental study found that professionals using ChatGPT for writing tasks took 40% less time to complete them, with an 18% improvement in quality (as evaluated by their colleagues in blind testing).

And another study of more than 5,000 customer service agents found a 15% increase in issues resolved per hour. An industry experiment involving realistic, complex tasks done with management consultants found they completed the work 25% faster and produced results that were deemed to be 40% higher in quality (again, judged by experts in blind tests). Randomised trials involving nearly 5,000 software developers documented a 26% increase in completed tasks.

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These are not small numbers. And adoption is moving fast. A US survey found that nearly four in ten workers were using generative AI at work by mid-2025. This pace of adoption outstrips the early years of both the personal computer and the internet. Across countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), firms report that AI integration into business functions is accelerating.

So the productivity story is real, particularly in text-heavy, codifiable tasks across legal, finance, marketing and customer service. That much is not hype.

What’s overstated

But the apocalyptic predictions have not yet materialised. Employment across OECD countries remains historically robust. A review of the research-based evidence produced in the US in early 2026 found that despite rapid adoption, AI has so far caused little in the way of widespread job losses or pay cuts. And a study (as yet unpublished) that tracked AI chatbot use in Danish workplaces found essentially zero effects on earnings or recorded hours, even among heavy users and early adopters.

Why? Because many jobs still require tacit knowledge, physical presence, sound judgement and the kind of contextual awareness that AI cannot yet replicate. And adoption is far more uneven than the headline numbers suggest. While AI use among firms in the US soared between 2023 and 2025, a report found fewer firms had actually embedded it into their operations. The information sector, for example, adopted it at roughly ten times the rate of hospitality.

One economic modelling exercise estimates that AI might add somewhere between 1% and 1.6% to US GDP over the next decade. This is significant, but it is far short of the transformative claims.

The gap between productivity gains in controlled studies and real transformation inside organisations remains enormous. The revolution, for most workplaces, has not yet arrived.

What’s under-reported

Here is where the story gets more consequential and where the commentary falls short. The distributional effects of AI within developed economies deserve far more attention. Not everyone is experiencing this transformation the same way.

The evidence on who benefits is strikingly consistent. Less experienced workers see the biggest gains from AI tools. A study found that AI narrowed the gap between the most and least productive staff, with the largest improvements among lower-ability workers.

In customer service, novice agents benefited most. The most experienced staff experienced little improvement and, in some cases, slight quality declines. The industry experiment mentioned above found below-average performers improved by 43%, while top performers gained 17%. So the biggest gains go to the least experienced workers, narrowing the gap between top and bottom performers within firms.

That sounds like good news. But there’s a catch.

While AI may compress skills inside firms, the broader labour market is telling a different story. Entry-level roles are shrinking in AI-exposed occupations. The routine tasks that once justified hiring juniors – jobs which provided learning opportunities for those on the bottom rung – are the first to be automated.

Economic theory has long warned that automation displaces workers from tasks, and the creation of new tasks to counterbalance this is neither automatic nor guaranteed. An estimated 60% of jobs in advanced economies face some AI exposure.

In most realistic scenarios, inequality worsens without deliberate intervention – partly because higher-income workers hold more capital assets and stand to gain from rising returns on AI-related investments.

The pattern that is emerging is this: AI helps those already inside the door while quietly narrowing the door for those trying to get in.

Paying attention to the right question

Sector matters. Firm size matters. Job type matters. The AI transition is not one story. It is many – unfolding at different speeds, with different consequences, depending on where you sit in the economy.

The debate has been stuck between breathless optimism and existential dread. Neither is useful. The evidence points somewhere more uncomfortable: a transformation that is real but partial, fast in some corners and stalled in others – and distributing its costs and benefits in ways that are shaped by existing inequalities.

If the productivity gains are genuine, the question is: who captures them? If entry-level work is disappearing, what replaces it? And if the gap between firms that adopt and those that cannot is widening, the focus should be on what we are building in response. Just talking about it won’t be enough.

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

– ref. AI and work: an expert assesses how far this revolution still has to run – https://theconversation.com/ai-and-work-an-expert-assesses-how-far-this-revolution-still-has-to-run-277650