Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Susan H. Kamei, Adjunct Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty, USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

In the spring of 1942, 15-year-old Momo Nagano needed a way to fill her time.

She was imprisoned at the Manzanar Relocation Center along with approximately 10,000 other people of Japanese ancestry. When she’d arrived with her mother and two brothers, she’d been horrified.

The detention facility was located in the middle of the desert, about 225 miles northeast of Los Angeles. As I describe in my book “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,” barbed wire surrounded the perimeter and armed soldiers peered down from guard towers. The toilets and showers lacked partitions, and Nagano was forced to stand in long lines for hours in mess halls that served canned food. Her bed was a metal cot. She was directed to stuff straw into a bag for a makeshift mattress. She didn’t know whether she and her family would ever be able to return to their Los Angeles home.

One day, the teenager decided to pick up a glove and play softball. Her son, Dan Kwong, told me in an interview that Nagano ended up playing catcher for The Gremlins, one of the camp’s many women’s softball teams.

“In one game, a batter connected with the ball and then threw the bat, clocking my mom in the nose, breaking it,” he said. “But despite her injury, she still enjoyed playing, even though she didn’t think her team was very good.”

Eighty years later, the descendants of prisoners – such as Nagano’s son, Kwong – are playing baseball again in Manzanar. Thanks to an effort spearheaded by Kwong, a baseball field on the site has been restored as a way to both celebrate the resiliency of so many prisoners and memorialize this dark period in U.S. history.

A massive removal effort

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government wrongly assumed that Japanese-descended West Coast residents would be more loyal to Japan and presented an espionage risk.

So on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that gave the U.S. Army the authority to forcibly remove all first-generation immigrants from Japan and their American-born descendants from their West Coast homes.

In March 1942, U.S. soldiers began transporting the detainees to temporary detention sites under Army jurisdiction. The Manzanar site opened on March 21, 1942, and it eventually became one of 10 long-term detention centers, colloquially known as “the camps.”

According to Duncan Ryȗken Williams, the director of The Irei Project, which has compiled the most comprehensive list of those detained, nearly 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated between 1942 and 1947, when the last camp closed. Two-thirds of them were American citizens. Most were imprisoned for the duration of the war, and all were held without hearings or charges leveled against them.

A love of the game

Adjusting to their new grim reality, the detainees embraced the Japanese spirit of “gaman,” which means to endure hardship with dignity and resilience. They set up an education system and coordinated an array of activities. And they immediately organized baseball and softball games.

Many Japanese American families had already developed a passion for the two sports.

Horace Wilson, an educator from Maine, is credited with introducing baseball to Japan in the early 1870s. In 1872 the Yeddo Royal Japanese Troupe became the first Japanese people to play baseball on U.S. soil. When young Japanese men started immigrating to the U.S. in the late 19th century, they brought with them a love of America’s pastime.

Kerry Yo Nakagawa, the director of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, has written about the vanguards of Japanese American baseball. At a time when players of color were excluded from Major League Baseball, talented Japanese American ballplayers such as Kenichi Zenimura formed teams that barnstormed the country. They even played alongside Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in Fresno, Calif., on Oct. 29, 1927.

“Every pre-war Japanese American community had a baseball team and they brought their love of baseball with them to the assembly centers and their camps,” Nakagawa explained to me. Though Zenimura was forced to leave his Fresno home and go to a camp in Gila River, Arizona, he soon had a baseball diamond and a 32-team league up and running.

Patriotism on the diamond

At Manzanar, baseball was easily the most popular sport. According to Dave Goto, the Manzanar National Historic Site arborist, the camp had 10 baseball and softball diamonds on the grounds and more than 120 teams divided into 12 leagues. The camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press, provided detailed game recaps, and thousands turned out to watch the games at Manzanar’s “A” Field.

“Watching baseball played at a semi-pro level was entertainment and also gave them a sense of normalcy and community,” Nakagawa said.

But for those who felt their loyalty to the U.S. was unfairly questioned, baseball was also a powerful way to express their identity as Americans, especially for the U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants. Takeo Suo, who was incarcerated at Manazarer, recalled, “Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag.” Or, as Nakagawa put it,
“What could be more American than playing the all-American pastime?”

After the war was over and the camps closed, those who’d been imprisoned had to focus on rebuilding their lives. Many were unable to return to their prewar hometowns. For those who ended up back on the West Coast, baseball continued to play an important role.

As Japanese American journalist and sports historian Chris Komai explained in a program at the Japanese American National Museum, “Baseball was a way for them to reestablish their communities while they dealt with antagonism and discrimination. Through the games they stayed connected with their friends and relatives who were now scattered.”

Postwar community baseball gave rise to the Southern California Nisei Athletic Union Baseball Leagues and other leagues that still operate. Kwong began playing for the Nisei Athletic Union in 1971 and does so to this day.

Rebuilding a dusty field of dreams

Nagano instilled in her son a commitment not only to baseball but also to social justice. A performance artist, Kwong stages a one-man play, “Return of the Samurai Centerfielder,” to shed light on this episode in history through the lens of playing baseball at Manzanar. Two years ago, he set out to restore the main Manzanar ball field and to bring baseball back to the site as a tribute to his late mother and other Manzanar detainees.

Working with Goto, the site arborist, volunteer construction supervisor Chris Siddons, Manzanar archaeologist Jeff Burton and other Manzanar site staff, Kwong and his team have restored the field almost exactly as it was. They carefully scrutinized archival photos, some taken by famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams and others snapped by studio photographer Toyo Miyatake, who’d been imprisoned at Manzanar. Miyatake’s photos were provided by his grandson, Alan Miyatake.

From November 2023 to October 2024, volunteers cleared sagebrush, dug post holes and poured concrete, enduring intense heat, strong winds and relentless dust.

On Oct. 26, 2024, baseball returned to Manzanar after more than 80 years before an invitation-only audience. In the inaugural game, Kwong’s Li’l Tokio Giants beat the Lodi JACL Templars. In the game that followed, players donned custom 1940s-style uniforms and used vintage baseball equipment lent by History For Hire prop house. Many of the players were descendants of Japanese Americans who’d been incarcerated at Manzanar and other camps.

That day, Kwong was emotional as he said, “Mom would have gotten such a kick out of this.”

Kwong’s team has completed an announcer’s booth in time for this year’s grand opening, a doubleheader open to the public. The games were originally scheduled for Oct. 18, 2025, but have been postponed due to the U.S. government shutdown.

For Kwong, staging a historical reenactment of how detainees played ball behind barbed wire pays tribute to their resilience, connects camp survivors and descendants with their past, and allows them to share their story with the American public. He hopes the games can become an annual event, a recurring celebration.

His motto: “In this place of sadness, injustice, and pain, we will do something joyous, righteous, and healing. We will play baseball.”

Susan H. Kamei is a researcher with The Irei Project and is a member of the Japanese American National Museum.

– ref. Baseball returns to a Japanese American detention camp after a historic ball field was restored to honor the resilience of those incarcerated – https://theconversation.com/baseball-returns-to-a-japanese-american-detention-camp-after-a-historic-ball-field-was-restored-to-honor-the-resilience-of-those-incarcerated-265954

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By C. Michael White, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut

Powder and ready-to-drink protein sales have exploded, reaching over US$32 billion globally from 2024 to 2025. Increasingly, consumers are using these protein sources daily.

A new study by Consumer Reports, published on Oct. 14, 2025, claims that some such protein products contain dangerously high levels of lead, as well as other heavy metals such as cadmium and arsenic. At high levels, these substances have serious, well-documented health risks.

I am a clinical pharmacologist who has evaluated the heavy metal content of baby food, calcium supplements and kratom products. Lead and other heavy metals occur naturally in soil and water, so achieving zero-level exposure would be impossible. Additionally, the level of lead exposure that Consumer Reports deems safe is significantly lower than those set by the Food and Drug Administration.

However, regardless of the safety cutoff, the study does show that a few products are delivering a concerningly high dose of heavy metals per serving.

How Consumer Reports did the study

The new study assessed 23 powder and ready-to-drink protein products from popular brands by sending three samples of each product to an independent commercial laboratory.

Consumer Reports considered anything over 0.5 micrograms per day from any single source to be above recommended maximum lead levels. That number comes from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which established recommended maximum levels for a variety of substances that could cause cancer or fetal harm.

It is significantly more conservative than the safety standard for lead exposure used by the FDA for drugs and supplements. The discrepancy is driven by Consumer Reports’ aspirational goals of very low exposure versus the more realistic but actionable requirements from the FDA.

According to the FDA, the limit for the amount of lead that a person should consume from any single dietary supplement product is 5 micrograms per day. That number is 10 times higher than the Consumer Report limit.

The FDA has another standard for the total daily amount of lead a person can safely consume from food, drugs and supplements combined. This number, called the Interim Reference Level, or IRL, for lead is based on concentrations of lead in the blood that are associated with negative health effects in different populations.

For people who could become pregnant, that level is 8.8 micrograms per day, and for children it’s 2.2 micrograms per day. For everyone else, it’s 12.5 micrograms per day. Every food, drug and dietary supplement that contains lead contributes to the total daily exposure, which should be less than this amount.

What the report found

The nonprofit advocacy group found that 16 of the 23 products it tested exceeded 0.5 micrograms, the level of lead in a standard serving that the organization deems safe.

Four of the 23 products exceeded 2.2 micrograms, the FDA’s cutoff for the total daily amount of lead children should consume. Two products contained 72% and 88%, respectively, of the total daily amount of lead that the FDA deems safe for pregnant women.

In addition, Consumer Reports found that two of the 23 products delivered more than what it considers a safe amount of cadmium per serving, and one had more arsenic than was recommended.

The organization’s safety cutoff for cadmium is 4.1 micrograms per day, and for arsenic it is 7 micrograms per day. These numbers align fairly closely with the FDA’s recommended exposure limit for cadmium and arsenic from a single product. For cadmium, the FDA’s limit is set at 5 micrograms per day for a given dietary supplement product and 15 micrograms per day for arsenic.

The study found that the source of protein was key: Plant-derived protein products had nine times the lead found in dairy proteins like whey, and twice as much as beef-based protein.

Where are these heavy metals coming from?

Lead and other heavy metals are present in high amounts in volcanic rock, which comes from molten rock called magma beneath the Earth’s surface. When volcanic rock is eroded, the heavy metals contaminate the local soil and water supply. What’s more, some crop plants are especially efficient at extracting heavy metals from the soil and placing them in the parts of the plants that consumers ingest.

Fossil fuels, which come from deep within the Earth, also billow heavy metals into the air when they are burned. These substances then settle out into the soil and water. Finally, some fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides also contain heavy metals that can further contaminate soil and local water.

High levels of heavy metals have been found in plant-based protein powder, spices like cinnamon, dark chocolate, root vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes, rice, legumes such as pea pods and many herbal supplements.

Should consumers be concerned? And what can they do?

Occasionally exceeding the daily recommended heavy metal doses is unlikely to result in serious health issues.

Repeated, heavy exposure to heavy metals can cause harm, however. When they accumulate in the blood, these substances can delay or impair mental functioning, damage nerves, soften bones and raise blood pressure – which in turn increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Heavy metals can also increase the risk of developing cancer.

It’s important to note that all the products Consumer Reports flagged have lead levels significantly lower than the maximum daily exposure levels established by the FDA.

Consumers can limit exposure by choosing dairy- or animal-based sources of protein products, since they generally seemed to have less heavy metal contamination than plant-based ones. However, some plant-based protein products in the study did not have high levels of heavy metals. Heavy metal levels vary widely in the environment, so the results from the Consumer Reports study show a snapshot in time. They might not be consistently accurate across batches if, for example, a manufacturer changes the source of its raw ingredients.

For protein products that do show an especially high heavy metal content, using them more sporadically, rather than daily, can reduce exposure. Studies suggest that organic plant-based products generally yield less heavy metal content than traditionally farmed ones.

Finally, the Consumer Reports study measured heavy metals in a single serving of protein products, so it’s helpful to understand what constitutes a serving for specific products and to avoid sharply increasing daily consumption.

Overall, the wide variation in lead levels across different protein powders and ready-made protein products highlights the need for manufacturers to tighten product testing and good manufacturing practices.

C. Michael White 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. Protein powders and shakes contain high amounts of lead, new report says – a pharmacologist explains the data – https://theconversation.com/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-amounts-of-lead-new-report-says-a-pharmacologist-explains-the-data-267591

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Nathaniel Johnson, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics, University of North Dakota

When it comes to describing what an antioxidant is, it’s all in the name: Antioxidants counter oxidants.

And that’s a good thing. Oxidants can damage the structure and function of the chemicals in your body critical to life – like the proteins and lipids within your cells, and your DNA, which stores genetic information. A special class of oxidants, free radicals, are even more reactive and dangerous.

As an assistant professor of nutrition, I’ve studied the long-standing research showing how the imbalances in antioxidants and oxidants lead to oxidative stress, which is linked to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, a primary cause of aging is the damage accumulated across of a lifetime of oxidative stress.

Simply put: To help prevent oxidative stress, people need to eat foods with antioxidants and limit their exposure to oxidants, particularly free radicals.

The research: Food, not supplements

There’s no way for any of us to avoid some oxidative stress. Just metabolism – the processes in your body that keep you alive, such as breathing, digestion and maintaining body temperature – are a source of oxidants and free radicals.
Inflammation, pollution and radiation are other sources.

As a result, everyone needs antioxidants. There are many different types: enzymes, minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals.

Two types of phytochemicals deserve special mention: carotenoids and flavonoids. Carotenoids are pigments, with the colors yellow, orange and red; they contain the antioxidants beta-carotene, lycopene and lutein. Some flavonoids, called anthocyanins, are pigments that give foods a blue, red or purple color.

Although your body produces some of these antioxidants, you can get them from the foods you eat, and they’re better for you than supplements.

In fact, researchers found that antioxidant supplements did not reduce deaths, and some supplements in excessive amounts contribute to oxidative stress, and may even increase the risk of dying.

It should be pointed out that in most of these studies, only one or two antioxidants were given, and often in amounts far greater than the recommended daily value. One study, for example, gave participants only vitamin A, and at an amount more than 60 times an adult’s recommended intake.

Foods rich in antioxidants

In contrast, increased antioxidant intake from whole foods is related to decreased risk of death. And although antioxidant supplementation didn’t reduce cancer rates in smokers, the antioxidants in whole foods did.

But measuring antioxidants in foods is complicated. Extensive laboratory testing is required, and too many foods exist to test them all anyway. Even individual food items that are the same exact variety of food – such as two Gala apples – can have different amounts of antioxidants. Where the food was grown and harvested, how it was processed and how it was stored during transportation and while in the supermarket are factors. The variety of the food also matters – the many different types of apples, for instance, can have different amounts of antioxidants.

Nonetheless, in 2018, researchers quantified the antioxidant content of more than 3,100 foods – the first antioxidant database. Each food’s antioxidant capacity was determined by the amount of oxidants neutralized by a given amount of food. The researchers measured this capacity in millimoles per 100 grams, or about 4 ounces.

For fruits easily found in the grocery store, the database shows blueberries have the most antioxidants – just over 9 millimoles per 4 ounces. The same serving of pomegranates and blackberries each have about 6.5 millimoles.

For common vegetables, cooked artichoke has 4.54 millimoles per 4 ounces; red kale, 4.09 millimoles; cooked red cabbage, 2.15; and orange bell pepper, 1.94.

Coffee has 2.5 millimoles per 4 ounces; green tea has 1.5; whole walnuts, just over 13; whole pecans, about 9.7; and sunflower seeds, just over 5. Herbs and spices have a lot: clove has 465 millimoles per 4 ounces; rosemary has 67; and thyme, about 64. But keep in mind that those enormous numbers are based on a quarter-pound. Still, just a normal sprinkle packs a powerful nutritional punch.

Other tips

Other ways to choose antioxidant-rich foods: Read the nutrition facts label and look for antioxidant vitamins and minerals – vitamins A, C, E, D, B2, B3 and B9, and the minerals selenium, zinc and manganese.

Just know the label has a drawback. Food producers and manufacturers are not required to list every nutrient of the food on the label. In fact, the only vitamins and minerals required by law are sodium, potassium, calcium, iron and vitamin D.

Also, focus on eating the rainbow. Colorful foods are often higher in antioxidants, like blue corn. Many darker foods are rich in antioxidants, too, like dark chocolate, black barley and dark leafy vegetables, such as kale and Swiss chard.

Although heat can degrade oxidants, that mostly occurs during the storage and transportation of the food. In some cases, cooking may increase the food’s antioxidant capacity, as with leafy green vegetables.

Keep in mind that while blueberries, red kale and pecans are great, their antioxidant profile will be different than that of other fruits, vegetables and nuts. That’s why diversity is the key: To increase the power of antioxidants, choose a variety of fresh, flavorful, colorful and, ideally, local foods.

Nathaniel Johnson 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. Antioxidants help stave off a host of health problems – but figuring out how much you’re getting can be tricky – https://theconversation.com/antioxidants-help-stave-off-a-host-of-health-problems-but-figuring-out-how-much-youre-getting-can-be-tricky-256974

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Patrick Aguilar, Managing Director of Health, Washington University in St. Louis

There are almost 1.1 million licensed physicians in the United States. That may sound like a lot, but the country has struggled for decades to train enough physicians to meet its needs – and, in particular, to provide care in rural and underserved communities.

Foreign-born physicians have long filled that gap, reducing the overall national shortage and signing up to practice in often overlooked regions and specialties. Today, 1 in 5 doctors licensed to practice in the U.S. were born and trained in another country.

But the ability of physicians from other countries to obtain work in the U.S. may be threatened by the Trump administration’s aims of limiting foreign workers. In September, Trump issued a proclamation requiring employers sponsoring foreign-born workers through a type of work visa called an H-1B to pay a fee of US$100,000 to the government. The White House has signaled doctors may be exempt but has not clarified its position.

As a physician and professor who studies the intersection of business and medicine, I believe increasing restrictions on H-1B visas for physicians may exacerbate the physician shortage. To grasp why that is, it’s important to understand how foreign-trained doctors became such an integral part of U.S. health care – and the role they play today.

The roots of today’s physician shortage

The Association of American Medical Colleges, a trade association representing U.S. medical schools, estimates there will be a deficit of about 86,000 physicians in the country by 2036.

The roots of this shortage stretch back more than a century. In 1910, a landmark study called the Flexner Report detailed significant inconsistencies in the quality of education at American medical schools. The report resulted in the closure of over half the country’s medical schools, winnowing their numbers down from 148 to 66 over two decades.

As a result, the number of doctors in the U.S. declined until new training programs emerged. Between 1960 and 1980, 40 new medical schools launched with the help of federal funding. In 1980, a congressionally mandated assessment deemed the problem solved, but by the early 2000s, a physician shortage emerged once more. In 2006, the American Association of Medical Colleges called for raising medical school enrollment by 30%.

Growth in medical school enrollment hit that target in the late 2010s, but even so, the U.S. still lacks enough medical graduates to fill yearslong training programs, called residencies, that early-career physicians must complete to become fully qualified to practice.

Especially lacking are primary care physicians – particularly in rural areas, where there are one-third as many physicians per capita as in urban areas.

Opportunities for foreign-born doctors

Even as the U.S. built up medical school enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s, the government joined other countries such as the U.K. and Canada in creating immigration policies that drew physicians from developing countries to practice in underserved areas. Between 1970 and 1980, their numbers grew sharply, from 57,000 to 97,000.

Foreign-born and -trained physicians have remained a key pillar of the U.S. medical system. In recent years, the majority of those physicians have come from India and Pakistan. Citizens of Canada and Middle Eastern countries have added significantly to that count, as well. Most arrive in the U.S. as trainees in residency programs through one of two main visa programs.

The majority come on J-1 visas, which allow physicians to enter the U.S. for training but require them to return to their home country for at least two years when their training is complete. Those who wish to remain in the U.S. to practice must transition to an H-1B visa.

A small percentage of physicians come to the U.S. on H-1Bs from the start.

H-1B visas are employer-sponsored temporary work permits that allow foreign-born, highly skilled workers to obtain U.S. employment. Employers directly petition the government on behalf of visa applicants, certifying that a foreign worker will be paid a similar wage to U.S. workers and will not adversely affect the working conditions of Americans.

Several programs sponsor H-1B visas for physicians, though the most common requires a three-year commitment to work in an underserved area after completing their training.

Foreign physicians fill a crucial need

In 2025, foreign-trained medical graduates filled 9,700 of the nearly 40,000 training positions. Of those, roughly one-third were actually U.S. citizens who attended medical schools in other countries, with the remainder being foreign citizens seeking more training in the U.S.

After residency, these doctors frequently practice in precisely the geographic areas where the physician shortage is most severe. A nationwide survey of international medical graduates found that two-thirds practice in regions that the federal government has designated as lacking sufficient access to health care.

These doctors also occupy a disproportionate number of primary care positions. In a sample of 15,000 physicians who accepted new jobs in one year, foreign-born doctors were nine times more likely to enter primary care specialties. In 2025, 33.3% of internal medicine, 20.4% of pediatric and 17.6% of family medicine training positions were filled by physicians trained in other countries.

Who will pay?

Approximately 8,000 foreign-born physicians received H-1B visas in 2024. The new requirement of a $100,000 sponsorship fee would hit hardest for hospitals, health systems and clinics in areas of the country most significantly affected by the physician shortage.

These organizations are already under economic strain due to increasing labor costs and Medicare payments that have not kept pace with inflation. Dozens of these hospitals have closed in recent years, and many currently do not make enough money to support their operations.

On Sept. 25, 2025, 57 physician organizations cosigned a letter petitioning Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to waive the new application fee for physicians.

Already, however, the new rule may be having a chilling effect. Despite years of annual growth in the number of foreign-born applicants to U.S. physician training programs, 2025 has seen a nearly 10% drop. If the new H-1B fee is applied to physicians, the number is likely to keep falling.

Patrick Aguilar Washington University, an employer of physicians.

– ref. How new foreign worker visa fees might worsen doctor shortages in rural America – https://theconversation.com/how-new-foreign-worker-visa-fees-might-worsen-doctor-shortages-in-rural-america-266544

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amy Kristin Sanders, John and Ann Curley Professor of First Amendment Studies, Penn State

Throughout modern American history, reporters who cover the Pentagon have played an invaluable role shining a light on military actions when the government has not been forthright with the public.

For instance, reporters covering the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021 revealed the chaos that ensued and repudiated official statements claiming the pullout was smooth. That included reporting on a drone strike that killed 10 civilians, not ISIS militants, as the government initially claimed.

But free press advocates warn that recent changes in a Pentagon policy threaten journalists’ ability to cover the Department of Defense. That’s because it could curb their rights to report information not authorized by the government for release.

An initial policy change announced on Sept. 20, 2025 – and later revised – forbade journalists from publishing anything that hadn’t been approved by government officials. It gave journalists 10 days to sign and agree to the restrictions. A refusal to sign could have resulted in a cancellation of their press credentials to enter the Pentagon.

As a First Amendment expert, I believe the Pentagon policy change represents an unprecedented development in the Trump administration’s offensive against the press and a historic departure from previous administrations’ policies.

Attacks on journalism, said once-imprisoned journalist Peter Greste, “are a national security issue, and we have to protect press freedom.” Greste spoke in early October 2025 at the Global Free Speech Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, adding that “anything that undermines press freedom undermines national security.”

Greste was jailed for more than a year in Egypt while working for Al Jazeera in 2013. In Nashville, he drew a direct connection between the public’s access to information under a free press and the stability and freedom that democracies enjoy.

Even President Donald Trump seemed critical of the policy initially, telling a reporter in September 2025 he didn’t think the Pentagon should be in charge of deciding what reporters can cover.

An attempt to control critical coverage

Under the initial Pentagon policy change, journalists covering the Defense Department were required to sign a contract saying that department information must be “approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News on Oct. 5, “The Pentagon press corps can squeal all they want, we’re taking these things seriously. They can report, they just need to make sure they’re following rules.”

Media outlets decided they could not accept the policy change. They also mulled legal action.

The Pentagon revised its initial policy change on Oct. 6 and set an Oct. 14 deadline for journalists to comply. The revised policy says prior approval would not be required to report on the Defense Department, but it suggests that soliciting information from Pentagon sources “would not be considered protected activity under the 1st Amendment.” But journalists who don’t sign and follow the revised policy could be deemed “security risks” and lose their credentials to access the Pentagon.

As the Oct. 14 deadline approached, dozens of media outlets said they would not sign the revised policy. Fox, Newsmax and the Daily Caller – all conservative news organizations – have also rejected the policy. The following day, journalists from dozens of news outlets turned in their press passes rather than agree to the new policy.

The Pentagon Press Association, which represents journalists covering the Defense Department, says the revised policy is “asking us to affirm in writing our ‘understanding’ of policies that appear designed to stifle a free press and potentially expose us to prosecution for simply doing our jobs.”

Conservative commentators have also criticized the policy. Law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox News: “What they’re basically saying is if you publish anything that’s not in the press release, is not the official statement of the Pentagon, you could be held responsible under this policy. That is going to create a stranglehold on the free press, and the cost is too great.”

This isn’t the first time Hegseth has sought to limit media coverage of the Pentagon. In May 2025 he restricted journalists’ access to large portions of the Pentagon where they’d previously been allowed to go unescorted.

Freedom from government control

It is not unusual for the government to view the press as an adversary. But such direct attempts to control media outlets have been rare in the U.S.

The federal government has rarely been successful in its efforts to censor the media. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court set a high bar for the government to overcome if it wanted to stop the presses.

As Chief Justice Charles Hughes wrote in 1930 in Near v. Minnesota: “The fact that, for approximately one hundred and fifty years, there has been almost an entire absence of attempts to impose previous restraints upon publications relating to the malfeasance of public officers is significant of the deep-seated conviction that such restraints would violate constitutional right.”

In the years since, the high court has reiterated its belief that an adversarial press is essential to democracy. At the height of the Vietnam War, the court ruled the government could not prevent The New York Times from publishing leaked documents detailing U.S involvement in the conflict, despite the sensitive nature of the documents.

President Richard Nixon’s own nominee, Chief Justice Warren Burger, recognized the danger of allowing the government to restrict freedom of the press. “The thread running through all these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights. … The damage can be particularly great when the prior restraint falls upon the communication of news and commentary on current events,” Burger wrote.

Burger acknowledged the role the press plays as a watchdog against the government’s abuse of power in 1976 in Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart. “The press … guards against the miscarriage of justice by subjecting the (legal system) to extensive public scrutiny and criticism.”

Whether the Supreme Court’s commitment to these long-standing precedents remains steadfast is anyone’s guess.

Law scholars RonNell Andersen Jones and Sonja West have documented a marked decline in references by the high court to press freedom over the past two decades. They have also noted a dramatic change in the justices’ tone when discussing the press:

“(A)ny assumption that the Court is poised to be the branch to defend the press against disparagement is misplaced … When members of the press turn to the Court in their legal battles, they will no longer find an institution that consistently values their role in our democracy,” Andersen Jones and West write.

Yet even Burger was aware that muzzling the press posed serious consequences for a democratic society: “(I)t is nonetheless clear that the barriers to prior restraint remain high unless we are to abandon what the Court has said for nearly a quarter of our national existence and implied throughout all of it. The history of even wartime suspension of categorical guarantees, such as habeas corpus or the right to trial by civilian courts cautions against suspending explicit guarantees,” Burger wrote in his opinion in Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart in 1976.

The new Pentagon policy, however, does just that by threatening reporters who write critical stories with the loss of their press credentials.

Amy Kristin Sanders has served as an expert witness for Fox News. She previously served on the Board of Directors for the Student Press Law Center and was a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

– ref. New Pentagon policy is an unprecedented attempt to undermine press freedom – https://theconversation.com/new-pentagon-policy-is-an-unprecedented-attempt-to-undermine-press-freedom-266129

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Valentina Dargam, Research Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University

When someone opens the door and enters a hospital room, wearing a stethoscope is a telltale sign that they’re a clinician. This medical device has been around for over 200 years and remains a staple in the clinic despite significant advances in medical diagnostics and technologies.

The stethoscope is a medical instrument used to listen to and amplify the internal sounds produced by the body. Physicians still use the sounds they hear through stethoscopes as initial indicators of heart or lung diseases. For example, a heart murmur or crackling lungs often signify an issue is present. Although there have been significant advances in imaging and monitoring technologies, the stethoscope remains a quick, accessible and cost-effective tool for assessing a patient’s health.

Though stethoscopes remain useful today, audible symptoms of disease often appear only at later stages of illness. At that point, treatments are less likely to work and outcomes are often poor. This is especially the case for heart disease, where changes in heart sounds are not always clearly defined and may be difficult to hear.

We are scientists and engineers who are exploring ways to use heart sounds to detect disease earlier and more accurately. Our research suggests that combining stethoscopes with artificial intelligence could help doctors be less reliant on the human ear to diagnose heart disease, leading to more timely and effective treatment.

History of the stethoscope

The invention of the stethoscope is widely credited to the 19th-century French physician René Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec. Before the stethoscope, physicians often placed their ear directly on a patient’s chest to listen for abnormalities in breathing and heart sounds.

In 1816, a young girl showing symptoms of heart disease sought consultation with Laënnec. Placing his ear on her chest, however, was considered socially inappropriate. Inspired by children transmitting sounds through a long wooden stick, he instead rolled a sheet of paper to listen to her heart. He was surprised by the sudden clarity of the heart sounds, and the first stethoscope was born.

Over the next couple of decades, researchers modified the shape of this early stethoscope to improve its comfort, portability and sound transmission. This includes the addition of a thin, flat membrane called a diaphragm that vibrates and amplifies sound.

The next major breakthrough occurred in the mid-1850s, when Irish physician Arthur Leared and American physician George Philip Cammann developed stethoscopes that could transmit sounds to both ears. These binaural stethoscopes use two flexible tubes connected to separate earpieces, allowing clearer and more balanced sound by reducing outside noise.

These early models are remarkably similar to the stethoscopes medical doctors use today, with only slight modifications mainly designed for user comfort.

Listening to the heart

Medical schools continue to teach the art of auscultation – the use of sound to assess the function of the heart, lungs and other organs. Digital models of stethoscopes, which have been commercially available since the early 2000s, offer new tools like sound amplification and recording – yet the basic principle that Laënnec introduced endures.

When listening to the heart, doctors pay close attention to the familiar “lub-dub” rhythm of each heartbeat. The first sound – the lub – happens when the valves between the upper and lower chambers of the heart close as it contracts and pushes blood out to the body. The second sound – the dub – occurs when the valves leading out of the heart close as the heart relaxes and refills with blood.

Along with these two normal sounds, doctors also listen for unusual noises – such as murmurs, extra beats or clicks – that can point to problems with how blood is flowing or whether the heart valves are working properly.

Heart sounds can vary greatly depending on the type of heart disease present. Sometimes, different diseases produce the same abnormal sound. For example, a systolic murmur – an extra sound between first and second heart sounds – may be heard with narrowing of either the aortic or pulmonary valve. Yet the very same murmur can also appear when the heart is structurally normal and healthy. This overlap makes it challenging to diagnose disease based solely on the presence of murmurs.

Teaching AI to hear what people can’t

AI technology can identify the hidden differences in the sounds of healthy and damaged hearts and use them to diagnose disease before traditional acoustic changes like murmurs even appear. Instead of relying on the presence of extra or abnormal sounds to diagnose disease, AI can detect differences in sound that are too faint or subtle for the human ear to detect.

To build these algorithms, researchers record heart sounds using digital stethoscopes. These stethoscopes convert sound into electronic signals that can be amplified, stored and analyzed using computers. Researchers can then label which sounds are normal or abnormal to train an algorithm to recognize patterns in the sounds it can then use to predict whether new sounds are normal or abnormal.

Researchers are developing algorithms that can analyze digitally recorded heart sounds in combination with digital stethoscopes as a low-cost, noninvasive and accessible tool to screen for heart disease. However, a lot of these algorithms are built on datasets of moderate-to-severe heart disease. Because it is difficult to find patients at early stages of disease, prior to when symptoms begin to show, the algorithms don’t have much information on what hearts in the earliest stages of disease sound like.

To bridge this gap, our team is using animal models to teach the algorithms to analyze heart sounds to find early signs of disease. After training the algorithms on these sounds, we assess its accuracy by comparing it with image scans of calcium buildup in the heart. Our research suggests that an AI-based algorithm can classify healthy heart sounds correctly over 95% of the time and can even differentiate between types of heart disease with nearly 85% accuracy. Most importantly, our algorithm is able to detect early stages of disease, before cardiac murmurs or structural changes appear.

We believe teaching AI to hear what humans can’t could transform how doctors diagnose and respond to heart disease.

Valentina Dargam receives funding from Florida Heart Research Foundation and National Institute of Health.

Joshua Hutcheson receives funding from the Florida Heart Research Foundation, the American Heart Association, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

– ref. Stethoscope, meet AI – helping doctors hear hidden sounds to better diagnose disease – https://theconversation.com/stethoscope-meet-ai-helping-doctors-hear-hidden-sounds-to-better-diagnose-disease-267373

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Shraddha Lall, Ph.D. Candidate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

As a Ph.D. student, I wanted to understand the evolution of individual differences in fruit fly behavior – the building blocks of personality. My experiments involved measuring how my tiny subjects acted in a maze.

So each day in the lab began with using a thin paintbrush to lift a single, anesthetized fruit fly and transfer it into a simple maze. After it woke up and had explored the maze, I’d place the fly – careful not to let it escape in transit – back into a tube where it could eat and hang out while I decided its fate.

My labmates and I repeated that process again and again, ultimately measuring the behavior of 900 individual flies daily.

I listened to countless podcasts and audiobooks over many days of moving lots of flies around by hand and keeping track of their individual identities, but this wasn’t how I’d originally planned this experiment. I had been excited to work with MAPLE, my lab’s robot, to automate the first and last steps of the process. MAPLE would grab individual flies, safely move them into their own tiny mazes, and back out after I’d measured their behaviors.

I’d been trying for months to modify MAPLE’s code. I finally got it running smoothly – and then on Day 1 of my 500-day experiment, MAPLE did not work.

After a little bit of panic, and a lot of deep breathing, I decided to power through without the robot’s help. MAPLE’s refusal to cooperate was the first of many obstacles I faced as I continued my experiment for the next year and a half. During this time, I learned a lot about the building blocks of personality – as well as the challenges of doing scientific research and how to work around them.

Animals have personalities

As an evolutionary biologist who studies animal behavior, I’m fascinated that no two individuals are completely alike. Think about the animal friends in your life — cats and dogs have unique personalities and idiosyncrasies, whether it’s a specific food they hate or a particular way they like to nap.

All animals – from the smallest worm to the biggest whale – have personalities: individual behavioral preferences that remain more or less stable throughout their lifetime. In Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit flies I worked with, individuality is evident in simple binary behaviors. Individual flies show a preference for turning left or right, choosing a hot or cool environment, preferring brightly lit areas or the shade, and many other idiosyncrasies.

Both nature and nurture influence animal personality. The environment during development can play a crucial role in some instances. In others, genes inherited from parents can drive preferences. In certain populations of fruit flies, for example, parents that like hot temperatures increase the chances that offspring prefer hot temperatures.

It is also possible for genes to influence how much individuals differ from each other. For instance, certain combinations of genes can lead individual fruit flies to have widely different temperature preferences, with some liking colder temperatures and others preferring it warm. These genes determine how wide the range of temperatures an individual’s preferences are drawn from.

Scientists have found genes that influence variation in traits in many animals and plants, so evolution seems to have kept them around for a reason. But what’s the benefit of a gene that makes individuals within a group different from each other?

The benefits of variation

An evolutionary theory called bet-hedging suggests that in an unpredictable environment, having options can be less risky. When conditions are fluctuating, there is no one behavior that is best suited for the environment. Variability-influencing genes can be adaptive in this situation.

Take temperature preference, for example.

Imagine that an organism can have either a low temperature-variability gene, which I will call low-var, or a high temperature-variability gene, high-var. Animals with the low-var gene have similar temperature preferences and can all survive and reproduce when the environment has stable, average temperatures. Comparatively, animals with high-var have very different temperature preferences from each other.

When the environment has average, stable temperatures, the preference of some animals with the high-var gene may be a good fit for conditions. They’ll be able to reproduce, but many other high-var individuals may not.

However, if temperatures fluctuate unpredictably, going below or above the average, all the low-var animals will be unfit and unable to pass on their genes. The low-var population would completely collapse.

In the high-var group, no matter how the environment fluctuates, there would be some individuals whose particular temperature preference makes them able to survive, reproduce and pass on the high-var gene.

The competition underlying evolution is a fight for which genes win out and are able to persist over time. In fluctuating environments, a gene that makes the individuals variable across a certain trait, such as temperature preference, has a better chance of persisting long term. Populations with these kinds of bet-hedging genes can therefore have a higher chance of surviving in unpredictable environments.

How can evolution shape this variation, and what kinds of genes are involved? To answer this question, I turned to artificial selection. This process is akin to how humans have domesticated plants and animals for millennia. An experimenter screens individuals from a population for a trait of interest, and only those that meet a certain threshold are allowed to reproduce to create the next generation. Instead of nature deciding who survives, the researcher chooses.

Variability in behavior responds to evolution

To evolve high variability, I picked a simple behavior: turn bias. When given a choice to turn left or right in a Y-shaped maze, some flies almost always choose left, others almost always choose right, and others choose left sometimes and right sometimes. These preferences remain stable over their lifetime, and their genetic background plays a role in determining it.

While the particular turn bias is not inherited – a left-turning mom and a left-turning dad don’t necessarily make left-turning fly babies – the variability in turn bias can be influenced by genes. This potential for variability can be considered the fly’s “personality” – whether that’s a strong preference for one direction or a more flexible approach.

For 21 generations, I used video and a type of AI called computer vision to track thousands of flies. I focused on siblings that shared a mother. If a sibling group made very similar turn choices, they likely had low-variability genes. If a group of siblings was mixed in terms of how biased they were for turning left or right, it was likely their lineage had a high-variability gene.

The next step was the artificial selection. I’d choose the families most likely to have the high-variability genes to mate and produce the next generation.

At the end of my experiment, I had evolved populations with very high levels of turn-bias variability. My results showed that variability in traits and increased individuality in behaviors can evolve in response to selection, definitely in the lab and potentially also in nature.

Now, I’m working on figuring out what happened to their genes as the flies evolved, and how their bodies and brains might have changed when I forced them onto this evolutionary path.

Creating a world where bet-hedging dominates

I now knew that increased behavioral individuality can evolve. That is, flies can evolve differing personalities driven by selection. Could I recreate in the lab the environmental conditions that would lead to this evolution in nature?

Fruit flies are ectotherms, meaning they need to get heat from external sources. Their temperature preference ensures that they find a suitable environment to live and lay eggs in. In a world with increasing unpredictability in temperatures, bet-hedging strategies may evolve as animals adapt.

Based on bet-hedging theory, I hypothesized that evolving in an unpredictable thermal environment in the lab, with temperatures fluctuating over generations, would lead to the evolution of higher variability in temperature preferences.

With this in mind, a labmate and I began creating houses for flies where we could control temperatures of different areas and change them over time. Unfortunately, time and logistics stopped this experiment, and it sits in storage now. I hope to continue this work someday.

My fly experiments taught me a lot about how animal behavior evolves, and also a lot about the process of doing research. There have been two constants – first, sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s OK. And second, regardless of the challenges – including broken robots, long hours and paused experiments – I want to keep exploring how evolution can shape personality as animals adapt to changing environments.

Shraddha Lall was affiliated with The Conversation U.S. as a AAAS Mass Media Science Fellow for summer 2025.

– ref. Why and how does personality emerge? Studying the evolution of individuality using thousands of fruit flies – https://theconversation.com/why-and-how-does-personality-emerge-studying-the-evolution-of-individuality-using-thousands-of-fruit-flies-261615

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Seda Saluk, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

Pregnant women crossing borders to get an abortion. People who miscarry facing jail time or dying from infection. Doctors who won’t perform lifesaving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.

For years, this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaragua or El Salvador. Now, it’s headline news in the United States.

As a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimes, I see the U.S. mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it doesn’t just cause more death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.

Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.

The American individualist perspective on abortion can make it harder for people in the U.S. to understand why banning abortion can serve as a back door for the erosion of civil liberties – and of democracy itself.

Autocrats target abortion first

Restricting reproductive rights is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

From Benito Mussolini’s Italy in 1926 and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1936 to Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1941 and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1966, the first move most 20th-century dictators made after seizing power was to criminalize abortion and contraception.

Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.

Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increase birth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.

In the past two decades, countries in Europe and the Americas have been following this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua and Poland have both banned abortion. Hungary, Turkey and Russia have all clamped down on access to it.

Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stoke lasting political divisions within society that help them consolidate their own power.

These leaders invoke a threat of moral and demographic decline, claiming that child-free women, queer people and immigrants pose a danger to national survival. In doing so, they portray themselves as defenders of their respective nations. It’s a way to regain and retain popular support even as their policies deepen poverty, erode civil liberties and increase corruption.

These politicians have also taken power away from a significant portion of the population by reinstating earlier, fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, strong reproductive rights are central to functioning democracies.

Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often necessitate other kinds of restrictions to enforce and maintain them. These might include free speech limits that prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive options. Criminalizing political dissent enables the arrest of people who protest restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten prison time for individuals who help young people get abortion care out of state.

When these civil liberties weaken, it becomes harder to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, dissent or move freely, people cannot engage in conversations, organize or voice collective grievances.

Putting the US in a global context

In 2022, the U.S. joined the likes of Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion protections.

President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority was shaped during his first term.

Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have enacted their own regulations or bans on abortion. This has created a divided country where in some states abortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.

Yet, there’s a key difference.

In the U.S., abortion is viewed by the law and the public as a matter of individual rights. The debate often boils down to whether a person should be allowed to terminate their pregnancy.

In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits all society – or, conversely, harms all society when revoked.

This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. It’s how, for example, women’s and feminist groups in places such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.

Since 2018, the movement known as Latin America’s Green Wave, or “Marea Verde” for their green protest bandannas, has deliberately and strategically reframed abortion as a human right and used that assertion to expand reproductive rights.

The Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and worsens both individual and collective rights.

In a region where many citizens remember life under military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism may be particularly galvanizing.

Limits of framing abortion as an individual right

Roe v. Wade in 1973 recognized abortion as a private medical decision between “the woman and her responsible physician” up to the point of fetal viability − roughly around 24 to 26 weeks − and that framing has stuck.

This was basically what the mainstream pro-choice movement advocated for at the time. White feminists saw abortion rights as a personal liberty. This framing has real limitations.

As Black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long pointed out, Roe never served women of color or poor people particularly well because of underlying unequal access to health care. Their work has, for decades, illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic and reproductive justice, yet abortion is still largely regarded as solely an individual issue.

When debates about reproductive freedoms are framed as fights over individual rights, it can engender a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge – the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent – and are pitted against the pregnant person.

Recently, for instance, a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. As her mother told the press, her family had no say in the matter.

Narrowly focusing on abortion as an individual right can also obscure why banning it has societal impacts.

Research worldwide shows that restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated “back alley” procedures. Maternal and infant mortality rates rise, especially in marginalized communities.

Simply stated: More women and babies die when abortion and contraception laws become more restrictive.

Other kinds of suffering increase, too. Women and their families tend to become poorer when contraception and abortion are hard to get.

Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory practices in health care beyond reproductive health services, such as oncology, neurology and cardiology. Physicians who fear criminalization are forced to withhold or alter gold-standard treatments for pregnant patients, for example, or they may prescribe less effective drugs out of concern about legal consequences should patients later become pregnant.

Lifesaving procedures in the emergency room must await a negative pregnancy test.

As a result, abortion bans decrease the quality and effectiveness of medical care for many patients, not just those who are pregnant.

Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies

These findings demonstrate why reproductive rights are really a collective good. When viewed this way, it illuminates why they are an essential element of democracy.

Already, the rollback of reproductive freedoms in the U.S. has been followed by efforts to limit other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to travel.

Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for noncitizens are intertwined rights – not isolated issues.

When the government starts stripping away any of these rights, I believe it signals serious trouble for democracy.

This story is published in collaboration with Rewire News Group, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive and sexual health.

Seda Saluk 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. Banning abortion is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes – https://theconversation.com/banning-abortion-is-a-hallmark-of-authoritarian-regimes-265459

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Susan D. Daggett, Professor of the Practice of Law, University of Denver

Removing parking requirements for new buildings could help thousands of Coloradans who struggle to afford housing.

There is a shortage of over 106,000 homes across Colorado, according to a recent study by the Colorado State Demography Office.

Nearly 90% of the lowest-income households in the state spend over one-third of their pretax income on rent or mortgage payments. That means they pay more on housing, as a percentage of their income, than is considered affordable.

The cost of providing parking – borne by developers and passed on to residents – helps push prices up. Parking minimums may be mandated by city ordinances or demanded by lenders. Some renters prefer apartments that come with dedicated parking.

Structured parking can cost as much as US$50,000 per parking space, according to Denver’s Community Planning and Development office. Off-street surface parking, though cheaper to construct, requires dedicating valuable urban land to parking lots.

We are a law professor and urban planning scholar who worked with data scientists at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation to model how parking requirements affect the development of multifamily residential housing in the city and county of Denver.

Cutting parking boosts construction

We found that cutting minimum-parking requirements would likely boost housing construction in Denver by about 12.5%, translating into roughly 460 more homes per year.

This is a surprisingly high-impact result for a single, relatively simple policy change. We published our findings as a white paper with the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute in July 2025.

In August 2025, the Denver City Council eliminated parking minimums for new buildings.

Denver followed the lead of other cities such as Boulder, Longmont, Austin and Minneapolis that have all recently abolished parking minimums.

In 2024, the Colorado legislature also removed parking minimums near transit hubs statewide in order to increase housing supply. However, that effort has been challenged in court on the grounds that the state mandates infringe on local government prerogatives. This legal tug-of-war underscores the importance of Denver’s decision.

Parking can be expensive

Before the policy change, market-rate apartments in Denver were required by law to provide as many as one parking space per unit. In a 200-unit building, parking could add millions of dollars to the developer’s costs.

Parking requirements are often determined by a formula. Based in part on an outdated view that modern cities should be car-oriented, cities around the country, including Denver, passed zoning codes in the 1950s and 1960s that created legal requirements for the number of parking spaces that new housing projects must include.

Land is expensive in high-demand cities like Denver. Dedicating part of a building’s footprint to parking imposes both a direct cost – because developers must pay to build the parking – and an indirect cost, because it leaves less space for housing. These development costs are passed along to renters and owners, decreasing affordability.

Reducing parking requirements lets developers build only the parking spaces that residents want or need.

Eliminating parking minimums

We built a simulator that estimates the total number of apartments expected to be built in multifamily, market-rate rental developments in Denver in one year. It then allows for a comparison of possible outcomes based on changing policy assumptions.

Our predictions factor in:

• Building size and allowable unit counts for parcels.
• The type of development and corresponding number of units that are likely to be financially feasible.
• The probability that parcels might actually be developed in the future based on a statistical analysis of historical Denver development data.

Following guidelines developed by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, we modeled 75 scenarios. They included five potential parking policies tested across five economic environments and three sets of assumptions for developer-driven parking inclusion.

Changes would bring hundreds of housing units

Our prediction that eliminating parking mandates in Denver could result in approximately 460 additional multifamily units per year is based on three assumptions:

1. Somewhat unfavorable economic conditions, including high interest rates and relatively low margins for developers.
2. Elimination of all regulatory parking mandates.
3. Voluntary construction of 0.5 spaces per unit near light rail and 1.0 spaces per unit away from light rail.

We find that eliminating parking minimums creates more options for developers and renters. Developers will still build parking where needed or demanded by city residents.

Eliminating mandatory parking requirements offers several additional benefits.

The city will save labor costs associated with enforcing parking requirements, reducing housing costs.

The policy change frees up land for more economically productive uses and for desired civic infrastructure such as sidewalks or green space. Developers freed from building parking are also more likely to invest in beautifying their building for residents and pedestrians.

Removing parking minimums can increase the flexibility to use small undeveloped or underdeveloped parcels for “missing middle” forms of housing, such as duplexes or triplexes. These forms of housing provide “gentle density,” meaning they do not significantly alter neighborhoods but still make them more affordable for lower- and middle-income people and increase the city’s overall housing supply. It can also allow for the adaptive reuse of historic buildings that may have been built before the city required on-site parking.

And finally, eliminating a requirement for surplus parking spaces allows more compact, efficient forms of development, which results in more walkable cities and more connected neighborhoods.

Susan D Daggett has received a teaching stipend from the University of Denver’s Executive Certificate in Affordable Housing Program, which is partially funded by a donation from the Colorado Housing Finance Authority and the Simpson Family. She serves on the Board of Smart Growth America and Transportation Solutions. She is married to Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.

Stefan Chavez-Norgaard previously worked as an in-residence scholar at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, an organization mentioned in the article.

– ref. Denver study shows removing parking requirements results in more affordable housing being built – https://theconversation.com/denver-study-shows-removing-parking-requirements-results-in-more-affordable-housing-being-built-263889

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kate Hua-Ke Chi, Doctoral Fellow, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Fossil fuels still power much of the world, even though renewable energy has become cheaper in most places and avoids both pollution and the climate damage caused by burning coal, oil and natural gas.

To understand this paradox, it helps to look at how countries – particularly major greenhouse gas emitters, including the U.S., China and European nations – are balancing the pressures of rising electricity demand with the global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

US embraces fossil fuels

The United States makes no secret of its fossil fuel ambitions. It has a wealth of fossil fuel reserves and a politically powerful oil and gas industry.

Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, his administration has been promoting oil and gas drilling and coal production, pointing to rising electricity demand to justify its moves, particularly to power artificial intelligence data centers.

Reviving the “drill, baby, drill” mantra, the Trump administration has now embraced a “mine, baby, mine” agenda to try to revive U.S. coal production, which fell dramatically over the past two decades as cheaper natural gas and renewable energy rose.

The Department of Interior on Sept. 29 rolled out a plan to “unleash American coal power” by opening 13 million acres of federal land to mining. The Department of Energy also pledged US$625 million to try to make coal competitive. It includes lowering the royalty rates mining companies pay and extending the operating lifespans of coal-fired power plants.

However, these initiatives further lock communities with coal plants into a carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Coal’s resurgence would also have public health costs. Its pollution is linked to respiratory illness, heart disease and thousands of premature deaths each year from 1999 to 2020 in the United States.

The Trump administration is also ceding the clean energy technology race to China. The administration is ending many renewable energy tax credits and pulling federal support for energy research projects.

I work in the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School of Tufts University, where we maintain a suite of databases for analyzing countries’ energy research budgets. The Trump administration’s 2026 U.S. budget request would slash funding for energy research, development and demonstration to $2.9 billion — just over half the budget allocated in 2025. These energy research investments would fall to levels not seen since the mid-1980s or early 2000s, even when accounting for inflation.

China’s clean energy push – and coal expansion

While the United States is cutting renewable energy funding, China is doubling down on clean energy technologies. Its large government subsidies and manufacturing capacity have helped China dominate global solar panel production and supply chains for wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles.

Cheaper Chinese-manufactured clean energy technologies have enabled many emerging economies, such as Brazil and South Africa, to reduce fossil fuel use in their power grids. Brazil surged into the global top five for solar generation in 2024, producing 75 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity and surpassing Germany’s 71 TWh.

The International Energy Agency now expects global renewable energy capacity to double by 2030, even with a sharp drop expected in U.S. renewable energy growth.

However, while China expands clean energy access around the world, its production and emissions from coal continue to rise: In the first half of 2025, China commissioned 21 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power plants, with projections of over 80 GW for the full year. This would be the largest surge in new coal power capacity in a decade for China. Although China pledged to phase down its coal use between 2026 to 2030, rising energy demand may make the plan difficult to realize.

China’s paradox — leading in clean energy innovations while expanding coal — reflects the tension between ensuring energy security and reducing emissions and climate impact.

Europe’s scramble for reliable energy sources

The European Union is pursuing strategies to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels amid the ongoing geopolitical tensions with Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed many countries to supply disruptions and geopolitical turmoil, and it triggered a global energy crisis as countries once reliant on Russian oil and gas scrambled to find alternatives.

In June 2025, the European Commission proposed a regulation to phase out Russian fossil fuel imports by the end of 2027, aiming to enhance energy security and stabilize prices. This initiative is part of the broader REPowerEU plan. The plan focuses on increasing clean energy production, improving energy efficiency and diversifying oil and gas supplies away from Russia.

Renewables are now the leading source of electric power in the EU, though natural gas and oil still account for more than half of Europe’s total energy supply.

The EU’s fossil energy phaseout plan also faces challenges. Slovakia and Hungary have expressed resistance to the proposed phaseout, citing concerns over energy affordability and the need for alternative supply sources. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán said Hungary would continue importing Russian oil and gas. Cutting off these supplies, he asserted, would be an economic “disaster” and immediately reduce Hungary’s economic output by 4%.

The path to reducing Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels thus involves navigating internal disagreements and incentivizing long-run sustainable development. Europe does appear to be gaining in one way from the U.S. pullback from clean energy. Global investment in renewable energy, which hit a record high in the first half of 2025, increased in the EU as it fell in the U.S., according to BloombergNEF’s analysis.

Brazil: Torn on fossil fuels as it hosts climate talks

In November 2025, representatives from countries around the world will gather in Brazil for the annual United Nations climate conference, COP30. The meeting marks three decades of international climate negotiations and a decade since nations signed the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise.

The conference’s setting in Belém, a city in the Amazon rainforest, reflects both the stakes and contradictions of climate commitments: a vital ecosystem at risk of collapse as the planet warms, in a nation that pledges climate leadership while expanding oil and gas production and exploring for oil in the Foz do Amazonas region, the mouth of the Amazon River.

Thirty years into global climate talks, the disconnect between promises and practices has never been so clear. The world is not on track to meet the Paris temperature goals, and the persistence of fossil fuels is a major reason why.

Negotiators are expected to debate measures to curb methane emissions and support the transition from fossil fuels. But whether the discussions can eventually translate into a concrete global phaseout plan remains to be seen. Without credible plans to actually reduce fossil fuel dependence, the annual climate talks risk becoming another point of geopolitical tension.

Kate Hua-Ke Chi 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. Why countries struggle to quit fossil fuels, despite higher costs and 30 years of climate talks and treaties – https://theconversation.com/why-countries-struggle-to-quit-fossil-fuels-despite-higher-costs-and-30-years-of-climate-talks-and-treaties-266993