Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Yuanyuan (Gina) Cui, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Coastal Carolina University

Americans are skipping restaurant dinners, delaying car purchases and scouring for grocery deals. Amid tariff anxiety and broader stress over affordability, consumer confidence has dropped to levels not seen in over a decade, according to The Conference Board, a business think tank. At this point, it’s wealthier consumers who are powering the bulk of spending in the U.S. economy.

So what explains the success of Erewhon’s US$22 smoothie?

The Los Angeles grocery chain selling these fancy concoctions is doing so well, it opened three new stores in 2025 – its biggest expansion since 2011. The chain reportedly generates $1,800 to $2,500 in sales per square foot, up to five times what a typical U.S. supermarket earns.

These aren’t ordinary blended drinks; they include ingredients such as high-grade sea moss gel, adaptogenic mushrooms and collagen peptides. Often they come with a celebrity’s name attached.

It’s all part of the broader boom in the U.S. specialty food market, which has surpassed $219 billion – up nearly 150% in a decade, according to the Specialty Food Association. That far outpaces the roughly 47% growth seen in overall U.S. grocery sales over the same period.

Independent retail data from the market research firm Circana also confirms this growth: Even as inflation-weary consumers have traded down to store brands in many categories, premium and specialty products held up and even grew their dollar share of the market through 2025. On TikTok, creators who once filmed designer-bag hauls now post $12 tinned fish boards. Craft chocolate bars that cost $8–$12 are being marketed as, without irony, “self-care.”

So if consumers are this anxious, why are they still splurging? In fact, these aren’t contradictions – they’re two expressions of the same psychological reaction.

When people feel life is out of control, they reach for something small, expensive and signaling virtue. This is the real reason premium food is booming while some traditional luxury brands struggle, say consumer psychologists.

We are professors of consumer behavior and marketing who study how people make purchasing decisions amid economic uncertainty, and ask what explains the gap between how consumers feel and how they actually spend. Our work points to a consistent finding: When people feel they’ve lost control over the big things, they seek it in the small ones.

A quick detour through the makeup drawer

Economists have seen this before.

In 2001, Estée Lauder Chairman Leonard Lauder coined the term the “lipstick index” after he saw that lipstick sales rose 11% following the Sept. 11 attacks. When big luxuries feel out of reach, consumers find a small substitute. A $60 lipstick is extravagant for a cosmetic, but next to the Hermès handbag it psychologically replaces, it feels like a bargain.

Then, as now, people seek agency wherever they can find it. Consumer psychologists call this “compensatory consumption”: buying things to feel in control when life feels out of control.

While even beauty sales are softening, that impulse hasn’t disappeared. It has just found better hosts – such as food.

In many ways, food is an ideal product for this compensation. It’s experiential – something you taste, smell and savor. It’s also emotional – carrying associations with comfort, care and home. And it’s visible, because if you’re on social media, what you eat is now as public as what you wear. Premium food isn’t just eaten – it’s filmed, posted and performed.

Most importantly, it’s still relatively accessible. Twenty-two dollars may be an absurd price for a drink, but it’s cheap compared with a $400 wellness retreat.

Indulgence with a side of virtue

Here is what separates this moment from Lauder’s lipstick index. That example was purely about pleasure, as consumers sought indulgence as consolation. Today’s premium food purchases carry an additional layer: They are coded as virtuous.

An Erewhon smoothie isn’t just a treat. It’s organic, superfood-enriched and wellness-aligned. By the same logic, a $20 bottle of single-estate olive oil isn’t just cooking fat; it’s a commitment to craft and health. Premium tinned fish isn’t convenience food; it’s sustainably sourced protein caught in the wild with packaging beautiful enough to display.

This “virtue coding” does the most important psychological work in the sales transaction: It transforms indulgence into self-investment. You’re not splurging during a downturn; you’re doing something for your health. You’re not being frivolous; you’re supporting small producers. Research shows that people need reasons to justify pleasurable purchases, especially during financial anxiety – and premium food is powerful because the justification is built into the product. The organic label, the sustainability story, the wellness framing – they all dissolve guilt before it even kicks in.

Consumed in the kitchen and again on the feed

There’s a reason this trend is accelerating now. Many premium food purchases are consumed twice – once physically and once digitally. The Erewhon smoothie purchase isn’t really about the drink; it can be as much about the content as the drink. The tinned fish board is plated for Instagram before anyone takes a bite.

Social media doesn’t just amplify the trend; it completes it. When you post a photo or video of the smoothie, you’re broadcasting that you value wellness, quality and intentionality. In a cultural moment when flaunting a designer bag feels tone-deaf, food provides perfect cover. It’s the safest flex there is. It’s no surprise that one YouTube video of an Erewhon haul by food creator @KarissaEats has drawn over 14 million views.

All of this raises a fair question: Does the growing focus on the “K-shaped economy” explain this boom? As many economists see it, low- and middle-income shoppers are increasingly pulling back, as they face an affordability squeeze from health care to housing and education. But wealthier consumers are picking up the slack and then some, splurging on luxury and powering gross domestic product growth.

In this scenario, premium food thrives because it’s still affordable for the people who are doing fine, even as everyone else cuts back. That’s partly true. But this explanation doesn’t account for another shift – why affluent consumers are foregoing splurges on items like designer handbags in favor of premium groceries.

This is why the virtue framing matters so much. If the question was purely about having money to spend, traditional luxury would be booming as well. It isn’t. A case in point is LVMH, the conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton and Dior, which saw its fashion division’s profits decline 13% across all of 2025.

Even consumers who are flush with disposable income need psychological permission to spend during anxious times. The premium food phenomenon is about why food has become the thing they choose – not about who can afford to splurge.

And when a smoothie becomes a status symbol, it tells us something about economic security more broadly. Food prices have climbed nearly 30% since 2019, outpacing 23% for overall consumer prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For a family stretching a tight grocery budget, $22 isn’t a smoothie. It’s dinner.

The need for control, the desire for identity, the comfort of virtue permission — these are universal. A single mother working two jobs feels the same craving for agency as the influencer filming her grocery haul. It’s just that the purchases that satisfy those needs are increasingly constrained by price. The justification only works if you can afford your indulgence.

What’s really in the cart

The next time you’re in a grocery store and you reach for something a little more expensive than what you might need, you should pause – not to put it back, but to think about what you’re actually reaching for.

Chances are it isn’t really about the product. It’s about the feeling of choosing something when the world feels out of hand.

A $22 smoothie is never just a smoothie. It’s what people seek out when they need permission to feel OK.

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

– ref. Why Americans are buying $22 smoothies despite feeling terrible about the economy – https://theconversation.com/why-americans-are-buying-22-smoothies-despite-feeling-terrible-about-the-economy-279425

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Renee Obringer, Assistant Professor in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State

When a drought turns into an urban water crisis, a city’s first step is often to limit lawn watering and launch a campaign to encourage everyone to conserve. It might raise water-use rates or offer incentives for installing low-flow devices.

While demand management techniques like these have had a lot of success in reducing water use, our new research suggests that they may not be effective enough in the face of climate change.

We looked at three cities in the Colorado River Basin – Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver – to understand what each could do to increase demand management amid water shortages and how far those methods could go as temperatures rise and the Colorado River’s flow weakens.

The results suggest the region needs to be thinking about bigger solutions.

Colorado River states’ immediate challenge

The Colorado River provides drinking water to nearly 40 million people and irrigation for over 5.5 million acres of cropland. But it has experienced a significant drop in water availability in recent decades due in part to rising demand for water and a long-running megadrought in the Southwest.

To ensure that water is shared across boundaries, the seven states within the basin agreed to the Colorado River Compact in 1922, setting limits on water withdrawals from the river. Since then, the region has adopted additional rules, agreements and policies, collectively termed the “Law of the River.” But despite this compact, which the states are renegotiating in 2026, the basin’s water supply is shrinking.

Research shows that the region is likely to experience more intense, frequent droughts that last longer due to climate change, putting the water supplies for farms, people and energy systems at risk.

As researchers who study the impact of climate change on water systems, we wanted to see if demand management techniques could help under these intensifying conditions.

Getting people involved can change attitudes

Many demand management policies are reactive and only go into effect when sources run low.

These reactive policies can be successful during the scarcity period, but there is often a rebound effect: Water consumption can actually increase afterward.

We integrated survey data with a computer model of water availability and demonstrated that there can be long-term benefits to the local water supply if communities encourage positive attitudes toward conservation.

The survey focused on how people think about water conservation and climate change, drawing on a large body of research that shows people who care about the environment often take eco-friendly actions. Building off these ideas, we segmented the population into groups that shared similar views on water conservation and found that a large proportion of residents supported water conservation but weren’t actively participating in conservation programs within their communities.

We then used the computer model to explore how changing attitudes, and subsequent conservation behavior, could affect water supplies under climate change.

When participatory demand management works

Our research shows that individual actions, when implemented by a lot of people, can measurably improve water supplies’ reliability.

A great example of the benefits of long-term behavioral changes is Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is in many ways viewed as a city of excess; however, since 2002, the city has reduced its per-capita water use by nearly 60%, even as the population grew by more than 50%. It reached these savings through efforts to reduce seasonal irrigation, replace water-intensive landscaping and require new developments to be sustainable, along with the treatment and reuse of wastewater. Today, Las Vegas recycles nearly all of the water used indoors and returns it to Lake Mead.

Phoenix, another desert city, also runs successful conservation programs. These programs focus on converting grass lawns to desert-friendly landscaping and encouraging owners to fix leaks and install smart meters and low-flow devices. These programs led to a 20% reduction in water use over 20 years, while the population grew by about 40%.

Demand management is not always enough

These cities have shown that demand management can work, but there are limits on how much these techniques can do as water supplies dry up.

When we added projections of future climate change to our model, we found that conditions could lead to so little water being available that these demand management methods won’t be able to keep up.

In other words, climate change may create situations where water supplies are still severely limited, even after people reduced their consumption by up to 25%.

For example, under a plausible, moderately high emissions scenario, Phoenix’s available surface water supply was forecast to drop below the historical average by 2060. Even when we simulated higher participation in conservation programs, there was no noticeable change in the water availability, suggesting that any savings from reducing demand were counteracted by losses from upstream flow reductions. Encouraging people to use less water is a start, but there is a limit to how much people can conserve.

We found similar results in Denver under a moderate emissions scenario and in Las Vegas under a moderately high emissions scenario, indicating that even moderate climate change could lead to extreme scarcity conditions that are not manageable through demand-side changes alone.

What else cities can do

In these cases, it may be necessary to find other creative water sources, such as water reuse, desalination or limiting consumption in other sectors, such as agriculture or energy, to maintain the municipal supply.

These solutions, however, take time and money to implement. Desalination is incredibly expensive. A recently built desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, cost US$1 billion – four times the initial estimate.

Other solutions, such as reducing agricultural water use, require significant buy-in from local farmers and could result in producing less food.

Reducing the water consumed for electricity generation would require significant investment in renewable energy technologies that have lower water requirements than fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

While large-scale solutions like water reuse systems and desalination can be expensive, these costs might be necessary to maintain adequate water supply in the region, because simply encouraging people to use less won’t be enough.

Renee Obringer received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Dave White received funding from the National Science Foundation.

– ref. Water conservation works, but climate change is outpacing it: Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas offer a glimpse of the future – https://theconversation.com/water-conservation-works-but-climate-change-is-outpacing-it-phoenix-denver-and-las-vegas-offer-a-glimpse-of-the-future-279837

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Daniel T. Blumstein, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles

The urban monkeys in New Delhi are so bold they’ll steal the lunch right off your plate. If you’ve spent time in New York, you’ve probably seen squirrels try to do the same. Sydney’s white ibises got the nickname “bin chickens” for stealing trash and sandwiches.

This brazen behavior isn’t normal for most species in the countryside, yet it shows up in urban wildlife, and not just in these cities.

Studies show that animals living in urban environments around the world exhibit common sets of behaviors. At the same time, these urban animals are losing traits they would need in the wild. This process of urban animals’ behavior becoming more similar is known as “behavioral homogenization,” and it accompanies the loss of species diversity with urbanization.

We study animals in urban settings to understand how humans can help wildlife thrive in an urbanizing world. In a new study, we explore the causes and the long-term consequences of these behavior changes for urban wildlife.

What makes animals in cities similar?

Cities, despite their local differences, share many of the same features worldwide: They are warmer than the surrounding countryside, noisy, polluted by light and, most importantly, dominated by people.

New York’s squirrels, New Delhi’s monkeys, gulls in coastal cities of the U.K. and other urban wildlife have learned that people are a source of food. And because people typically don’t harm the animals, city-dwelling animals learn not to fear people.

Cities drive evolution as well. Humans and the changes we’ve brought to cities have led to the survival of bolder animals, and those bolder animals pass on their traits to future generations. In genetics, scientists refer to this as the environment “selecting” for those traits.

It’s not just sandwich-stealing that is more common among city wildlife; urban birds also sound more alike.

Why? Cities are loud and filled with traffic noise, so those who can effectively communicate in that environment are more likely to survive and pass on those traits.

For example, urban birds may sing louder, start singing earlier in the morning or at higher frequencies to avoid getting drowned out by low-frequency traffic noise.

Cities select for smart individuals and species because that’s what it takes to survive.

Animals may behave similarly in cities because they learn from each other how to exploit novel human food sources. For instance, the cockatoos in Sydney have learned to open trash bins. In Toronto, the raccoons are in a race to outwit humans as urban wildlife managers try to design animal-proof trash bins.

The buildings and bridges in cities become home to bats, birds, and other urban dwellers, at the cost of learning to use more natural nesting sites. Roads and culverts modify how and where animals move.

While rural animals may forage at a variety of places and eat a variety of foods, urban animals may concentrate on garbage bins or rubbish dumps where they know they can find food, but they end up eating a potentially unhealthy diet.

Consequences of similar behaviors

The loss of behavioral diversity is happening everywhere that humans increase their footprint on nature. This is worrisome on several levels.

At the population level, behavioral variation may reflect genetic variation. Genetic variation gives species the ability to respond to future environmental change. For example, for animals that have evolved to breed at a specific time of the year, urban heat islands can select for earlier breeding.

Reducing genetic variation leaves populations less able to respond to future changes. In that sense, having genetic variation resembles a diversified investment portfolio: Spreading risk across a variety of stocks and bonds lowers the risk that a single shock will wipe out everything.

Moreover, as animals become tamer, new conflicts between animals and humans may emerge. For instance, there may be more car crashes, animal bites, property damage and zoonotic disease transmission. Such conflicts cost money and may harm both the animals and humans.

Losing behavioral diversity is also troubling for conservation.

When a species loses behavioral diversity, it loses resilience against future environmental change in the wild, making reintroducing urban animals to the wild harder.

Losing behavioral diversity also risks erasing socially learned, population-specific behaviors, such as local migration routes, foraging techniques, tool-use traditions or vocal dialects.

For example, Australia’s regent honeyeater populations have been shrinking and are critically endangered. The isolation of having fewer of their own species around has disrupted normal song-learning behavior, making it harder for male birds to sing attractive songs that help them find mates and breed successfully.

Ultimately, behavioral homogenization is making wildlife in cities such as Los Angeles, Lima, Lagos and Lahore behave in similar ways despite living in different environments and having different evolutionary histories.

Many of these behaviors influence survival and reproduction, so understanding this form of diversity loss is important for successful wildlife conservation, as well as future urban planning.

Daniel T. Blumstein is on the Board of Trustees of the nonprofit environmental organization The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

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

– ref. City animals act in the same brazen ways around the world – https://theconversation.com/city-animals-act-in-the-same-brazen-ways-around-the-world-279977

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Jessica A.J. Rich, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Marquette University

Public health institutions are under threat by populist governments across the globe.

From Budapest to Jakarta, Indonesia, public health agencies are being stripped of funding and independence. Meanwhile, disinformation has sown distrust in scientific experts. The results are already visible through the return of diseases once thought eliminated or controlled, like measles and whooping cough.

The United States is no exception to this trend. Since Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services in February 2025, he has fired over 10,000 staff, cut budgets and attempted to gut childhood vaccine recommendations. Though medical and public health groups have pushed back with some success, key government health institutions face a leadership vacuum, and national public health policy has fractured into “health alliances” formed by groups of states.

Doctors and scientists across the country worry about long-term damage to the country’s health system.

As a researcher studying the politics of health care, I believe it’s helpful to look to countries that have successfully managed similar threats. As my co-authors and I have argued, Brazil’s experience offers insights into how public health institutions can preserve power and authority in the face of assault.

Much like the U.S., Brazil has a fragmented and polarized Congress, it has powerful self-interested lobbies, and it has a federal system of government. And much like in the U.S., health outcomes suffer from stark race and income gaps.

But when a populist president attacked the Brazilian health care system during COVID-19, the public successfully rallied to its defense

A health system under attack

Brazil’s health system, established in its current form in 1990, provides free universal health care to all its citizens. Despite some significant flaws, including unequal access to care in poor and rural areas, its focus on preventive care is widely considered a model worldwide

Prior to the administration of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2022, Brazilians had trust in vaccines. They had what public health experts call a vaccine culture, thanks to the hard work of health workers who had spent years promoting them and making them easily accessible. Vaccines even had a beloved national mascot in Zé Gotinha (Joe Droplet), a cartoon vaccine droplet with a Pillsbury Doughboy-like visage.

When COVID-19 hit Brazil in March 2020, Bolsonaro – dubbed by many as the “Trump of the Tropics” – launched unprecedented attacks on Brazil’s vaccine program. Among other measures, he fired the senior leadership of the health ministry and appointed as minister an active-duty military officer with no health credentials.

Bolsonaro’s attacks on the vaccine program – a backbone of Brazil’s preventive health efforts – were especially strong. He pressured Brazil’s drug regulatory agency to ban pediatric vaccines. He blocked resources for vaccine procurement, and he spread misinformation, notoriously suggesting the vaccine could give people AIDS.

After Bolsonaro’s initial attacks on Brazil’s COVID-19 response efforts, the entire health system appeared on the verge of collapse. However, Brazil’s public health workers then marshaled broad support to defend their vaccine program.

Opposition governors offered important but limited help by producing their own vaccine guidance and procuring their own vaccines. But political support, on its own, couldn’t overcome Bolsonaro’s attacks.

That’s because Brazil’s vaccine program depended not just on independence, but also on resources to operate. And governments with an anti-science bent have many ways to deprive even well-established agencies of resources without broad congressional approval.

Brazil’s vaccine program ultimately survived because allies outside government stepped in to defend it not only with political advocacy, but by donating money and resources and with social activism.

Business leaders to the rescue

Businesses filled gaps in government resources with donations of private-sector funding. Two business coalitions gave a total of over 270 million real (US$54 million) to help two public laboratories, the Institute of Technology in Immunobiology, known as BioManguinhos, and the Butantan Institute.

One of the largest foundations in Brazil, the Lemann Foundation, paid for AstraZeneca’s clinical trials in Brazil. Ambev, one of the largest firms in South America, lent its logistics team to help BioManguinhos acquire supplies and equipment.

Women of Brazil, a nonpartisan network of female business leaders, even built a campaign called United for the Vaccine to help towns and cities acquire the vaccine distribution equipment they needed. They provided local health officials with cheap supplies, like coolers and refrigerators, as well as costlier investments, such as boats and even planes for carrying vaccines to the isolated communities of the Amazon.

As pulmonologist Margareth Dalcolmo, who consulted for United for the Vaccine, emphasized to me in an interview: “All their requests were met, without one cent of government money being used.”

From the ground up

Another hugely important component of defending Brazil’s vaccine program was support from trusted local grassroots groups.

When vaccines became available, community-based groups across the country jumped in to combat disinformation with their own locally produced information campaigns – especially in underserved communities.

One group I spoke to distributed 5,000 informational posters across their neighborhood. Another, Tamo Junto Rocinha, or We’re in it Together Rocinha, published a book with lessons for kids to do with their parents while school was canceled – all with vaccination information embedded. Voz das Comunidades, or Voice of the Communities, a neighborhood news service, even created a smartphone application to combat misinformation while also notifying community members of daily death tallies.

So many grassroots groups organized to counter Bolsonaro’s attacks on COVID-19 vaccines that researchers began to map the campaigns bubbling up across the country. By early 2021, one map had identified over 1,300 grassroots efforts and over 800 organized by universities.

By August 2022, despite Bolsonaro’s disinformation campaigns, 81% of Brazil’s adult population was fully vaccinated against COVID-19. These vaccination rates equaled those of New Zealand and the Netherlands and were well above that of the United States, where only 67% were fully vaccinated at the time.

This is not to say that Brazil was immune to disinformation campaigns. Vaccination rates for some diseases, such as measles, declined, as they have across the world.

But in many ways, the attacks on Brazil’s vaccine program paradoxically strengthened it. By the end of 2022, thanks to donor support, BioManguinhos had already built a new testing laboratory, and Butantan was constructing a new vaccine production facility. Brazil even had a new national health surveillance institute. By 2024, once Bolsonaro was voted out, overall spending on the health system had increased from the prior year by 27%.

Playing the long game with public health

In my view, these emergency countermeasures in Brazil worked effectively because the country had already spent years building a foundation of trust in – and ownership of – the shared goals of its public health system.

Decades ago, in the 1980s, Brazilians successfully demanded that their politicians make health care accessible to all – driving the genesis of the country’s universal public health system, known by the acronym SUS.

Brazil’s health ministry continues to invest heavily in making sure citizens take ownership of it. Cities and towns are postered with signs declaring “SUS is ours!” or “Health care is your right!”

As I found in my recent research in Brazil, this kind of advertising makes people feel their institutions are an earned right and reduces the power of partisan messaging.

Brazil also invests in integrating health workers into the communities they serve and cultivating public trust in their expertise. Government health care workers routinely set up shop in public plazas to advertise cancer screenings or give vaccinations. They regularly visit schools, where doctors or nurses talk to young people in accessible language about what the nation’s public health system offers its citizens. As one health care worker told me: “It’s like they are constantly saying, ‘Look, the doors are open. You can come. You’ll be seen and supported.’”

These long-term relationships between communities and the public health system helped lay the groundwork in Brazil for mounting a unified defense when political turbulence threatened public health agencies. Worldwide, a long-term view toward building or strengthening these relationships may help the public embrace the idea that public health institutions are worth defending.

Jessica A.J. Rich 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. From a vaccine mascot to business leadership, lessons for the US from Brazil’s public health system in building public trust and keeping it – https://theconversation.com/from-a-vaccine-mascot-to-business-leadership-lessons-for-the-us-from-brazils-public-health-system-in-building-public-trust-and-keeping-it-267611

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University

Bipartisan calls for President Donald Trump’s removal from office increased on April 7, 2026, after he issued threats to destroy “a whole civilization” if Iran refuses to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

These calls have come from across the political spectrum, from Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico to former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and right-wing pundit Alex Jones. Unlikely allies seem to agree that the president has gone too far and needs to be reined in.

Their concerns have emerged as Iran has walked away from talks to end the war and Trump’s language suggests that he plans to escalate it by destroying the country’s power plants and bridges.

Concerns over Trump’s fitness for office have grown in recent weeks as his commentary has become more erratic.

If lawmakers do attempt to remove Trump from office, here’s what would happen:

25th Amendment

The Constitution’s 25th Amendment provides a way for high-level officials to remove a president from office. It was ratified in 1967 in the wake of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy – who was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, who had already had one heart attack – as well as delayed disclosure of health problems experienced by Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower.

The 25th Amendment provides detailed procedures on what happens if a president resigns, dies in office, has a temporary disability or is no longer fit for office.

It has never been invoked against a president’s will, and has been used only to temporarily transfer power, such as when a president is undergoing a medical procedure requiring anesthesia.

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment authorizes high-level officials – either the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet or another body designated by Congress – to remove a president from office without his consent when he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Congress has yet to designate an alternative body, and scholars disagree over the role, if any, of acting Cabinet officials.

The high-level officials simply send a written declaration to the president pro tempore of the Senate – the longest-serving senator from the majority party – and the speaker of the House of Representatives, stating that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. The vice president immediately assumes the powers and duties of the president.

The president, however, can fight back. He or she can seek to resume their powers by informing congressional leadership in writing that they are fit for office and no disability exists. But the president doesn’t get the presidency back just by saying this.

The high-level officials originally questioning the president’s fitness then have four days to decide whether they disagree with the president. If they notify congressional leadership that they disagree, the vice president retains control and Congress has 48 hours to convene to discuss the issue. Congress has 21 days to debate and vote on whether the president is unfit or unable to resume his powers.

The vice president remains the acting president until Congress votes or the 21-day period lapses. A two-thirds majority vote by members of both houses of Congress is required to remove the president from office. If that vote fails or does not happen within the 21-day period, the president resumes his powers immediately.

The case for impeachment

Article II of the Constitution authorizes Congress to impeach and remove the president – and other federal officials – from office for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The founders included this provision as a tool to punish a president for misconduct and abuses of power. It’s one of the many ways that Congress could keep the president in check, if it chose to.

Impeachment proceedings begin in the House of Representatives. A member of the House files a resolution for impeachment. The resolution goes to the House Judiciary Committee, which usually holds a hearing to evaluate the resolution. If the House Judiciary Committee thinks impeachment is proper, its members draft and vote on articles of impeachment. Once the House Judiciary Committee approves articles of impeachment, they go to the full House for a vote.

If the House of Representatives impeaches a president or another official, the action then moves to the Senate. Under the Constitution’s Article I, the Senate has the responsibility for determining whether to remove the person from office. Normally, the Senate holds a trial, but it controls its procedures and can limit the process if it wants.

Ultimately, the Senate votes on whether to remove the president – which requires a two-thirds majority, or 67 senators. To date, the Senate has never voted to remove a president from office, although it almost did in 1868, when President Andrew Johnson escaped removal from office by one vote.

The Senate also has the power to disqualify a public official from holding public office in the future. If the person is convicted and removed from office, only then can senators vote on whether to permanently disqualify that person from ever again holding federal office. Members of Congress proposing the impeachment of Trump have promised to include a provision to do so. A simple majority vote is all that’s required then.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 9, 2021.

Kirsten Matoy Carlson 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. When a president is unfit for office, here’s what the Constitution says can happen – https://theconversation.com/when-a-president-is-unfit-for-office-heres-what-the-constitution-says-can-happen-280120

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Scott L. Montgomery, Lecturer in International Studies, University of Washington

It has been said that Persian Gulf countries are both blessed and cursed by their vast oil and gas reserves. Geologic forces over millions of years have meant the region is an energy-rich global flash point, as it is now with a war underway that’s causing a global energy crisis.

As a petroleum geologist who has studied the region, I still find myself amazed at the size of its hydrocarbon endowment. For instance, there are more than 30 supergiant fields, each holding 5 billion barrels or more of oil, around the Persian Gulf. And wells in the region produce two to five times more oil each day than even the best wells in the North Sea and Russia.

Modern geoscience has identified several key factors of rocks that make a region particularly rich in petroleum, including their ability to generate and hold hydrocarbons. In the Persian Gulf region, all of these factors are at or near optimal levels.

For sheer abundance and ease of production, it simply doesn’t get any better than the Persian Gulf region.

A quick history

Humans knew about the presence of hydrocarbons in the area long before flooding created the Persian Gulf at the end of the last ice age, between 14,000 and 6,000 years ago. Natural seeps of oil and gas are common along rivers and valleys in many parts of the region. Thousands of years before the start of the Common Era people used bitumen, a form of heavy oil, for building mortar and to waterproof boats.

The first modern oil discovery came in 1908 at a known seepage site in western Iran. In the 1950s and ’60s, an era of rapid expansion in oil and gas exploration, it became clear that no other region on Earth was likely to have a similar abundance.

Other areas with huge volumes of oil and gas have been found, such as West Siberia in Russia and, more recently, the Permian Basin in the U.S., but none compare either with the scale of reserves or the high rates at which oil and gas can be produced in the Persian Gulf.

Geologic setting

The Persian Gulf region is located where two continental plates are colliding: the Arabian Plate to the southwest and the Eurasian Plate to the east and north. This collision has been happening for about 35 million years and has resulted in a dynamic setting where rock layers have been bent and broken and, at deeper levels, transformed by significant heat and pressure.

Geologic features differ a great deal between the two sides of the Gulf. On the Iranian side, the the Zagros Mountains stretch 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) from the Gulf of Oman to the Turkish border. Part of the great Alpine-Himalayan mountain system, the Zagros are made up of highly folded and broken rocks that formed over the past 60 million years from the collisions of Africa, Arabia and India with Eurasia.

On the Arabian side of the Gulf, that type of bending and fracturing didn’t occur. Instead, the compressive forces of collision warped a rigid platform of deep, hard rock known as “basement rock” into broad, dome-like structures of enormous size, extending for tens, even hundreds, of square miles.

Underlying the Persian Gulf itself is a basin filled with debris eroded from the rising of the Zagros Mountains. In its deeper portions, the basin was subjected to high temperatures and pressures necessary for the generation of oil and gas.

Overall, it is an excellent setting for generating and trapping hydrocarbons on a large scale.

Rocks that make oil

Oil and gas form from organic material such as marine zooplankton and phytoplankton, originally concentrated in shales, mud-rich limestones and other rocks exposed to elevated temperatures and pressures. When rocks are composed of at least 2% organic material, they are considered to be high quality for oil and gas generation.

The Gulf region has a particularly large number of layers of such source rocks, some of which are especially thick, widespread and organically rich. Examples are the Hanifa and Tuwaiq mountain formations on the Arabian side of the Gulf, which formed during the Jurassic period, about 200 million to 145 million years ago, and the Kazhdumi formation in Iran, which formed in the Cretaceous period, about 145 to 66 million years ago. These rocks have between 1% and 13% organic content, and even more in some places.

Oil and gas structures

The region’s bent and fractured rock layers, and its domes, are well suited for trapping hydrocarbons.

Folds of the Zagros, which are legendary for geologists due to their spectacular forms on satellite imagery, contain hundreds of billions of barrels of oil and cubic meters of natural gas. A glance at a map of oil and gas in the Persian Gulf region will show a northwest-southeast trend of long, sausage-shaped fields reflective of major fold structures. These features actually include hundreds of individual fields of varied size, reaching from southern Iran through northeastern Iraq.

On the Arabian Plate, the large dome structures have formed especially large oil and gas accumulations. These include Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, the largest in the world, which could produce over 70 billion barrels of crude oil. The South Pars-North Dome gas field, shared by Qatar and Iran, could produce at least 1,300 trillion cubic feet (46 billion cubic meters) of gas – equivalent in energy content to more than 200 billion barrels of oil.

The most important reservoir rocks are limestones in which portions have been partly dissolved, enhancing the ability for oil and gas to move through them. In Zagros reservoirs, fluid flows through fractures created by the folding and faulting related to plate collisions. And in places such as the Arab-D reservoir at the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia and the Asmari limestone in many Zagros fields, these high-quality oil-storage rocks cover huge areas – hundreds and even thousands of square kilometers.

Nothing on this scale exists anywhere else on the planet, onshore or offshore, testifying to the unique petroleum geology of the Persian Gulf region.

Future possibilities

The combined result of these factors is that roughly half of the world’s conventional oil reserves and 40% of its gas lie beneath just 3% of the Earth’s land surface.

U.S. Geological Survey assessments suggest that, even after more than a century of drilling and production, large amounts of oil and gas remain to be discovered in the Persian Gulf region. In a 2012 report covering the Arabian Peninsula and Zagros Mountains, the agency estimated there could be as much as 86 billion barrels of oil and 336 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the rocks, in addition to the amounts that have already been discovered.

More oil and gas could also be produced using the horizontal drilling and fracking techniques pioneered in the U.S. in the 2000s and 2010s. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now trying those methods in their petroleum fields. It’s too early to say how successful they may be, but research indicates they could allow even more production.

Scott L. Montgomery 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 the Persian Gulf has more oil and gas than anywhere else on Earth – https://theconversation.com/why-the-persian-gulf-has-more-oil-and-gas-than-anywhere-else-on-earth-279303

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor; Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair & GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology

In December, The Conversation hosted a webinar on AI’s revolutionary role in drug discovery and development.

Science and technology editor Eric Smalley interviewed Jeffrey Skolnick, eminent scholar in computational systems biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Benjamin P. Brown, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University.

Skolnick has developed AI-based approaches to predict protein structure and function that may help with drug discovery and finding off-label uses of existing drugs. Brown’s lab works on creating new computer models that make drug discovery faster and more reliable. Below is a condensed and edited version of the interview.

Let’s start with the big picture. How is AI changing biomedical research and drug discovery, and what is the potential we are talking about?

Skolnick: The upside, potentially, is very large. One of the frustrating things about drug discovery is that, in spite of the fact that the people doing it are extraordinarily intelligent and have done an extraordinarily good job, the success rate is very low. About 1 in 5 drugs will have negative health effects that outweigh its benefits. Of the ones that pass, roughly half don’t work.

In drug development, there are several key issues: Can you predict which target is driving a particular disease? Once this target is identified, how can you guarantee the drug is going to work and isn’t simultaneously going to kill you?

These are outstanding problems in drug discovery in which AI can play an important, though not 100% guaranteed, role. Unlike us, AI can look at basically all available knowledge. On a good day it makes strong and true connections called “insights,” and on a bad day it does what is called “hallucinating” and sees things that are weak and probably false.

At the end of the day, many diseases do not have a cure. Most diseases are maintained, such as high cholesterol or autoimmune conditions. A treatment for cancer might buy you five years, and now you’re in Stage 4 and you’ve exhausted all the standard care drugs. AI can play a role to suggest alternatives where there are none.

Let’s give some basic definitions here. When we use the word drug, we’re talking about a wide range of therapies. Can you explain the range – we’ve got small molecule drugs, biologics, gene therapies, cell therapies.

Brown: We have fairly large molecules in our bodies called proteins. They are like machines that carry out specific functions and interact with one another. Oftentimes, when we’re trying to treat disease, we’re trying to alter functions of specific proteins. Many drugs, like aspirin and Tylenol, are small molecules that can fit into a protein and change its function. Fundamentally, drugs don’t have to just interact with proteins, but this is a major way in which our current repertoire of medications work.

There are also proteins that act like drugs, such as antibodies. When you receive a vaccine for a virus, your body is basically given instructions on how to develop antibodies. These antibodies will target some part of that virus. Your body is creating these big molecules, much bigger than aspirin, to go and interact with foreign proteins in a different way. Gene therapy is a larger step beyond that.

So these modalities – molecule, protein, antibody or gene – are very different types of molecules. They have different scales and rules, so the way you approach designing and discovering them various widely.

Can you briefly explain artificial neural networks, and what the “deep” in deep learning means?

Skolnick: AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind, involved understanding how neural networks worked. They built a network with a lot of inputs, which are stimuli, and outputs with different weights, similar to how your brain actually works. These simple connections, or neurons, have reinforcement learning.

They also created sophisticated neural networks, such as transformers, which do specific things like a special-purpose tool that can learn, and they added a mechanism called “attention,” which amplifies critical details. Super neural networks with transformers is what we call deep learning. These now have literally billions, if not trillions, of parameters.

Essentially, these machines can learn higher order correlations between events, meaning the patterns of conditional interactions that depend on the properties of multiple things simultaneously. In these higher order correlations, AI has the potential to see previously unknown things that are embedded in petabytes (a unit of data equivalent to half of the contents of all U.S. academic research libraries of biological data.

AlphaFold, which predicts three-dimensional, bioactive forms of a protein, has millions of sequences and a couple of hundred thousand structures. It can tell you, based on a particular pattern, what small molecule to design that sticks to a protein to induce some kind of structural shift.

How is this technology being used in biomedical research to understand molecular dynamics or, essentially, the biological processes involved in health and disease?

Brown: In 2013, there was a Nobel Prize for molecular dynamics simulations, computational tools that help you understand the motions of molecules as they move according to physics. There’s a huge body of scientific research built around those ideas.

AI and deep learning are large right now, but it’s worth mentioning that for the last decade and a half, people have been using much smaller machine learning algorithms to help design drugs. A lot of the ideas, such as [using machine learning for virtual screening], are not new and have been in practice for a while.

With AlphaFold’s technologies to help people design proteins and predict their structure, we’ve changed how we think about a lot of these problems. We have this new repertoire of approaches to build ideas around and to start thinking about drug discovery.

From 20 years ago to now, what has today’s AI technology done in terms of scale of change in this process?

Skolnick: A lot of diseases, like cancers, are caused by a collection of malfunctioning proteins. AI now allows us to start to think conceptually about how these diseases are organized and related to each other.

Diseases tend to co-occur. For example, if you have hyperthyroidism, you’re very likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Kind of weird, right? We can look at pieces, but AI can look at all the information, integrate the collective behavior and then identify common drivers. This allows you to construct disease interrelationships which offer the possibility of broad spectrum treatments that could treat whole collections of diseases rather than narrow-spectrum treatments.

Relatedly, AI also can help us understand disease trajectories. Diseases that tend to co-occur often present themselves consecutively. You have disease 1, it gives you disease 2, then gives you disease 3. This suggests that if you go back to the root with disease 1, you may be able to stop a whole bunch of stuff. You can’t analyze millions of trajectories and millions of data without a tool, so you couldn’t do this before.

This holds a lot of promise, but one also must be careful not to overpromise. It will help, it will accelerate, but it is not a substitute yet for real experiments, real clinical validation and trials.

Jeffrey Skolnick receives funding from the National Institute of Health and the Ovarian Cancer Institute.

Benjamin P. Brown receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

– ref. AI is reengineering drug discovery by speeding up testing and scanning petabytes of data for connections between diseases – https://theconversation.com/ai-is-reengineering-drug-discovery-by-speeding-up-testing-and-scanning-petabytes-of-data-for-connections-between-diseases-274693

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

A California company has recalled more than 3.1 million bottles of lubricating eye drops because it had not properly tested – and thus could not prove – whether the products were sterile.

These products are sold under several names at major retailers across the country. The company, K.C. Pharmaceuticals, initiated the recall on March 3, 2026.

I am a clinical pharmacologist and pharmacist who has assessed risks of poor-quality manufacturing practices and lax oversight for prescription drugs, eye drops, dietary supplements and nutritional products in the United States for many years. This recall is very large, potentially affecting over a million people. Using nonsterile eye drops that harbor bacteria and fungus can cause eye infections, which can become severe because the immune system has a hard time accessing the eyeball and fighting the microbes.

This is not the first time that a major recall has occurred in the eye drop market – and it is the second time since 2023 that the Food and Drug Administration has become aware of sterility issues at K.C. Pharmaceuticals.

Multiple products affected

Eight products are being recalled: Dry Eye Relief Eye Drops, Artificial Tears Sterile Lubricant Eye Drops, Sterile Eye Drops Original Formula, Sterile Eye Drops Redness Lubricant, Eye Drops Advanced Relief, Ultra Lubricating Eye Drops, Sterile Eye Drops AC and Sterile Eye Drops Soothing Tears.

These products are sold under different company names, including Top Care, Best Choice, Good Sense, Rugby, Leader, Good Neighbor Pharmacy, Quality Choice, Valu Merchandisers, Geri Care, Walgreens, CVS and Kroger.

Their expiration dates range from April 30, 2026, to Oct. 31, 2026. They were sold at stores including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Kroger, Harris Teeter, Dollar General, Circle K and Publix.

If you purchased an eye drop product since April 2025, check to see whether the name matches any of these. If it does, go to the FDA site, where you can see the exact lot numbers and expiration dates for those products.

How to tell whether your eye drops were recalled

You can determine whether your eye drop product is part of the recall by looking at two columns in the table. Column 2 of the table lists the names of the products, with one name per row. Column 5 provides the specific lot numbers of the affected products and their expiration dates. For example, recalled Sterile Eye Drops AC products – row 1, column 2 – have the lot number AC24E01 with an expiration date of May 31, 2026, listed in row 1, column 5.

If the product you purchased has the same name but a different lot number or expiration date than the ones listed on the FDA website, it is not subject to this recall and you can safely keep using it. If you find your product has been recalled, stop using it and bring it back to the store for a refund.

The FDA has not received reports of any infections as of early April. However, if after using one of these recalled products you experience redness in your eyes, eyelids stuck together, unusual eye discharge such as goo or pus, vision changes, eyelid swelling or eye pain itchiness or irritation, these symptoms could be due to an eye infection.

If you experience these symptoms, seek medical attention – and also, if possible, report your symptoms to the FDA.

A history of eye drop sterility issues

The FDA has many important public health roles: approving new drugs and medical devices; overseeing the manufacturing quality of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, dietary supplement and food products; and protecting the public from counterfeit medications.

With its limited personnel, the agency focuses its time on areas where the risks are greater. This means manufacturers of more dangerous products, or product types that were previously found to have issues, are inspected more frequently.

The FDA had inspected over-the-counter eye drop manufacturers only a few times before 2023, when cases of rare eye infections due to a drug-resistant Pseudomonas bacteria strain started occurring.

In total, 81 people from 18 states developed severe eye infections during the 2023 outbreak. Fourteen people experienced vision loss because of the product, an additional four people had their eyeballs removed and four people died.

The agency identified two products as the culprits: Global Pharma’s EzriCare Artificial Tears and Delsem Pharma’s Artificial Tears and Eye Ointment.

Later in 2023, the FDA issued recalls for Dr. Berne’s, LightEyez Limited, Pharmedica LLC and Kilitch Healthcare eye drop products for sterility issues. Kilitch Healthcare had serious quality lapses, in which the facility was filthy, employees were barefoot on the manufacturing floor and the company fraudulently passed products that failed sterility tests.

Repeated manufacturing problem

At the time, the FDA also inspected K.C. Pharmaceuticals and issued the company a warning letter. The FDA was concerned that the manufacturer failed to establish and follow appropriate written procedures designed to prevent microbiological contamination.

Although the agency did not request a recall, it did ask that the company immediately change its protocols and consult outside experts to prevent these issues from recurring.

The current massive recall of K.C. Pharmaceuticals’ eye drop products suggests lingering quality control issues in the manufacturer’s Pomona, California, plant that need to be urgently addressed. If the company had heeded the FDA’s recommendations, it would have detected the nonsterility issue before so many batches of the products were manufactured.

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. Massive eye drop recall reflects ongoing issues with manufacturing and FDA inspection – https://theconversation.com/massive-eye-drop-recall-reflects-ongoing-issues-with-manufacturing-and-fda-inspection-279971

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Anindya Kundu, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, Florida International University

Since March 2025, at least 15 Florida public universities and colleges, including the University of Florida and Florida State College at Jacksonville, have signed memorandums of agreement for their campus police departments to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These partnerships authorize ICE agents to expand the role of campus police officers so they can receive training and “perform certain functions of an immigration officer.”

The agreements give campus police officers the federal authority to question students who are believed to be immigrants about their legal right to be in the country. Campus police officers can arrest students if the officers have “reason to believe the alien to be arrested is in the United States in violation of law.” Campus police can also check federal immigration databases to see students’ immigration status.

The list of universities in the state that have signed on to these agreements includes leading research universities such as Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University in Miami, or FIU, where we work as professors of education. We are unaware of any school in the Florida state university system that has publicly said they will not sign an agreement.

In the past few decades, the U.S. government has classified universities as “sensitive” spaces that are protected from aggressive immigration enforcement. This means that schools, like churches and hospitals, have until recently been generally considered off-limits for immigration enforcement officers.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump revoked these long-standing Department of Homeland Security protections.

A shift on campus

As scholars, we study relationships between schools and democracy, from how students learn languages to how students and educators can become leaders.

As professors, we teach many students who are immigrants or are from foreign countries who come to the U.S. for their studies, as well as many who are children of immigrants.

As a result of these new initiatives, we are seeing and personally experiencing an intensifying climate of uncertainty and anxiety on our campus. These policies are worsening many of our students’ sense of belonging.

Understanding the changes

Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement is supported by the federal 287(g) program, a 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This amendment to the wide-ranging immigration law lets ICE delegate certain federal enforcement activities to local state police.

In February 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis directed state universities to enter into 287(g) partnerships with ICE and to “deputize” university police officers to enforce federal immigration laws on school campuses.

ICE does not have blanket access to student records, which remain protected under federal privacy law. But 287(g) agreements create new pathways for information to flow through campus police encounters, effectively lowering the barrier between university data and federal immigration enforcement.

There are no official reports of FIU or other Florida university campus police officers arresting students because of their immigration status. A few college students, though, have been detained off-campus by local police agencies and then turned over to ICE.

FIU’s communications team wrote in a statement to The Conversation: “Last year FIU Police signed a 287(g) memorandum of agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as have other state university, local and state law enforcement agencies in Florida. The 287(g) memorandum of agreement for Florida International University is readily available from ICE.gov.”

“Since signing the agreement, there have been no immigration-related enforcement actions on our campuses,” FIU’s statement continued.

Florida Atlantic University did not respond to a request for comment.

In January 2026, an immigration activist recorded FIU’s chief of police saying at a FIU meeting that if ICE requests campus police’s help, they would comply.

As FIU faculty members, we have not received any explicit guidance on what to do if an ICE agent comes to campus, or if a campus police officer tries to arrest someone for immigration reasons in our classrooms.

FIU President Jeanette Nuñez said in 2025 that there was “much confusion, much angst, and much misinformation” about the agreement.

Other universities have emphasized the need to comply with state directives.

Some Florida university officials have said that campus police will not target students or conduct raids as part of their routine cooperation with federal authorities.

Heightened stress and anxiety

As educators, our work has shifted over this past academic year from providing instruction to focusing more on mentoring our students as whole people. Our students are questioning how much their university supports them.

Daily, we observe how Trump’s immigration policies, including travel bans the U.S. has placed on certain countries, heighten stress for all of our students, regardless of their immigration status. Our international and immigrant students have told us they are fearful of the government’s increased surveillance.

One graduate student shared that he was hesitant to leave his dorm room and participate in any campus activities for fear of possible arrest because of his immigration status.

Another student said he would not leave the U.S. to visit his mother who was sick with cancer for fear he would not be let back into the country. His mother has since passed without his presence.

Many students, including one international doctoral student and father to young children, are unable to return to their homeland and visit their relatives or conduct research due to current travel bans placed upon 75 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

These new policies have also prompted student and faculty protests at our university and other public universities across Florida.

Some Florida Atlantic University students in Boca Raton staged a walkout on Feb. 25, 2026, to protest the school’s agreement with ICE.

Florida State University students called on administrators in February 2026 to set up a “sanctuary campus,” which would limit FSU partnerships with ICE.

We are trying to create more opportunities for open dialogue and for sharing students’ emotions and experiences related to these policies. We are also helping students find resources, including legal aid, that could help them or their peers if they have a negative encounter with ICE or campus police.

Refuge or risk

Universities, especially in conservative states such as Florida, may continue to market themselves as places of inclusion, mobility and global belonging. This is true even as schools cut diversity, equity and inclusion programs and as some students experience heightened surveillance, visa cancellations, detention or deportation.

One of our FIU graduate students recently explained how these policies are affecting their day-to-day life.

“I just want to finish my studies as soon as possible and go back to my country. I feel unwelcome and unsafe on campus. I don’t want to join campus activities anymore because students can be targeted there,” the student said. “I no longer trust campus police officers and won’t ask them for help, even if I need it. I am afraid I will be profiled even though I am here legally.”

When campus police are folded into federal immigration work, we believe that universities cannot claim they offer more refuge than risk.

Ryan W. Pontier receives funding from the U.S. Department of Education. He is affiliated with P.S. 305 in Miami.

Anindya Kundu 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. We teach at a Florida university that agreed to cooperate with ICE – and we worry that it is making our students feel less safe – https://theconversation.com/we-teach-at-a-florida-university-that-agreed-to-cooperate-with-ice-and-we-worry-that-it-is-making-our-students-feel-less-safe-277911

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Tim Derdenger, Associate Professor of Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University

When the NFL draft arrives in Pittsburgh in April 2026, city officials are sure to tout projected economic impact figures. They will likely point to the US$73 million generated by Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the surrounding area in 2025, the $213 million generated by Detroit in 2024, or the $164 million by Kansas City the year prior.

I’m a sports marketing researcher who studies the economics of celebrity endorsements, and I view these short-term, direct economic impact numbers with skepticism.

The reality is that local residents often stay home to avoid the chaos of mega-events. Economists have long understood the “displacement effect” that happens when an influx of fans crowd out regular tourism and local spending, essentially replacing existing economic activity rather than adding to it.

If Pittsburgh measures NFL draft success strictly by hotel bookings and weekend beer sales, it has missed the point. Because the draft moves from city to city each year, the true return on investment isn’t found in a temporary spike in local revenues. It is found in brand equity – the long-term increase in a city’s “market value” and reputation.

The impact of endorsements

For three days, the NFL will act as a massive celebrity endorser for Pittsburgh. Because attention is a scarce and valuable commodity, that institutional endorsement holds a value that can far exceed any immediate cash injection.

In marketing, researchers frequently analyze the signaling power of endorsements. “Signaling” in this context is the shift from Pittsburgh saying, “Trust us, we’re great” to a massive global brand, the NFL, saying, “We trust them, and you should too.”

For example, my research into the golf industry quantified the immense impact Tiger Woods’ endorsement had on the sale of Nike golf balls. When Woods switched from Titleist, Nike sold an additional 119 million golf balls over a 10-year period, adding $105 million to its bottom line.

Woods’ endorsement served as a market-wide signal of quality and legitimacy, elevating the brand’s premium status. This led to an increase in price of 2.5%. The increase in price also sends a signal of product quality.

The NFL draft functions in a similar way for host cities.

By selecting Pittsburgh, the NFL broadcasts a signal that the city is a premier destination capable of managing a global stage. This presents a critical rebranding opportunity. Despite its decades-long transformation into a thriving hub for robotics, health care and higher education, Pittsburgh continually battles to shake off its 20th-century Rust Belt reputation in the national consciousness.

Detroit leveraged the draft in 2024 not just to host a massive party, but to also aggressively counter persistent narratives of urban decay and to highlight investments made in the city.

The broadcast shots of a vibrant, packed downtown did far more to modernize Detroit’s image than any taxpayer-funded ad campaign ever could.

The same thing happened in Kansas City after it hosted the 2023 draft. The city added almost 25,000 residents in the year after the draft – more than in any of the previous four years.

NFL draft could shape local recruiting

Hosting the NFL draft could also prove beneficial to recruitment efforts at Pittsburgh-area colleges.

In recent years, I have analyzed how name, image and likeness policies, commonly referred to as NIL, reshape talent acquisition in college football.

In the NIL era, universities aren’t just selling an education; they are selling a direct pathway to professional success.

I believe hosting the NFL draft will likely generate a “halo effect” for regional football programs like the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University and West Virginia University. A halo effect occurs when the prestige and glamour of a major endorsement spills over to elevate the perception of other brands that have some association.

For highly touted high school recruits who are watching the NFL draft broadcast, seeing the pathway to the pros physically located in Pittsburgh anchors the idea that this region is a center of the football universe – at least for three days.

Fans will see this play out in real time. When ESPN broadcasts from the North Shore, it won’t just talk about Penn State quarterback Drew Allar’s arm strength; it will show highlights of him developing just two hours east.

The impact on the University of Pittsburgh could be even more direct. The rise of linebacker Kyle Louis and running back Desmond Reid offers continued evidence of a Pitt-to-pro pipeline.

In a hypercompetitive recruiting market where every major college football program offers money, nonmonetary differentiation is key. Being in one of the NFL’s chosen cities signals that you are already in the league’s orbit.

Of course, hosting a mega-event comes with inherent risks. If logistics fail, traffic becomes unmanageable or the fan experience is poor, this high-profile endorsement backfires. The brand signal rapidly flips from “premier destination” to “not ready for prime time.”

In landing the NFL draft, Pittsburgh essentially scored a three-day commercial that will be viewed by tens of millions of Americans across the country. Now, it just has to make sure the set looks good.

Tim Derdenger 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. Hosting the NFL draft is less about weekend beer sales and more about long-term brand value – https://theconversation.com/hosting-the-nfl-draft-is-less-about-weekend-beer-sales-and-more-about-long-term-brand-value-277465