Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kevin Maloney, PhD student, Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University

The first half of 2026 has been a chaotic time for U.S. foreign policy: new tariffs, threats to annex Greenland, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As a researcher focused on the values and rhetoric of American presidents, I study how presidents and their administrations communicate to the public about foreign policy. My primary aim is to understand the values systems and policy priorities that make up a president’s public persona.

I have found the second Trump administration exceptionally difficult to track and assess. Keeping up with Truth Social posts, press conferences and off-the-cuff Oval Office remarks from the president can feel like drinking from a fire hose.

Gone for now are the days when a U.S. president stepped to the lectern and delivered a speech direct from the teleprompter or released a carefully crafted statement that was understood to be official U.S. policy.

In its place is an unpredictable barrage of communication – ranging from traditionally worded executive orders in the mold of previous administrations to an expletive-laden Truth Social post on Easter morning in the midst of Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon name for the war in Iran.

The president’s rhetorical style, heard most recently on his mid-May trip to China, is explained by political allies as part of Trump’s strategic approach and criticized by his opponents as the dangerous musings of an unstable leader.

In either case – whether it’s Trump’s defenders or detractors – it is increasingly difficult to ascertain whether the language of the president signals actual policy positions from the White House.

If the words of the American president no longer function as reliable indicators of U.S. foreign policy, where can the public, U.S. allies and America’s adversaries look to better understand the administration’s geopolitical priorities?

One answer may be found by examining the words of key Cabinet members.

Vance redefines ‘Western’ values

Trump’s second term has introduced a political paradox: because he is president, his words carry enormous weight. And yet, because of his hyperbolic and often erratic communication style, each statement also carries significant political uncertainty.

Will the next social media post threatening to exit NATO hint at a real policy position? Or will it simply disappear into the digital information ecosystem as another “Trump being Trump” moment?

The rhetoric of Cabinet members increasingly serves as a bridge between Trump’s erratic communication style and actual policy.

Public statements delivered in 2025 by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered, I believe, critical insight into the administration’s foreign policy vision and helped lay the groundwork for major policy actions in 2026.

In February 2025, Vance stood at a lectern at the Munich Security Conference to address a gathering of prominent European political and military leaders. Many analysts expected an aggressive speech from Vance criticizing Europe’s spending on defense in the context of shared American-European security concerns, such as NATO and the war in Ukraine.

Instead, Vance argued that Europe’s political elites had failed to defend “Western” values. Speaking over audible gasps from attendees, Vance declared: “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

Using freedom of speech as a shared value, Vance argued that many left-leaning European governments – not authoritarian-led Russia or Hungary – posed the real threat to this cornerstone of Western society.

As the first major foreign policy speech delivered abroad by the second Trump administration, Vance’s remarks signaled a major shift in America’s approach to the trans-Atlantic alliance.

The speech suggested that, in the eyes of the administration, the “values-and-interests” framework that shaped the U.S.-European relationship post-World War II had weakened. In that phrase, “values” are understood as a country’s moral and cultural preferences and its “interests” as the factors that advance its security and prosperity.

Instead, Vance argued that liberal values alone would no longer guarantee cooperation, and the administration made clear it would not avoid public fights over ideological differences with European allies.

The speech also appeared to send a clear signal to right-leaning political leaders in Europe, including then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, that their brand of “Western” values had become increasingly attractive to Washington.

It is not difficult to connect Vance’s Munich speech to the administration’s subsequent embrace of right-leaning political leaders and its pullback from postwar liberal foreign policy priorities, such as a commitment to international aid.

Rubio: Trade over humanitarian aid

One of the most tumultuous domestic periods of Trump 2.0 came during the DOGE process of massive budget cutting, which eliminated programs across the government.

One DOGE flash point was the fate of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which since 1961 had been the American government’s primary organization delivering humanitarian aid globally.

On July 1, 2025, the administration officially announced that USAID would stop providing foreign assistance, which it had been doing in approximately 130 countries.

That same day, Rubio published an article on the State Department’s Substack account titled Make Foreign Aid Great Again, arguing for a new approach that prioritized “trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.”

Like Vance in Munich, Rubio adopted an overtly aggressive tone in criticizing both USAID and America’s broader humanitarian aid model. Rubio argued that the “charity-based model failed.” Rubio’s rhetoric built on and complemented themes from Vance’s speech.

First, it reinforced the administration’s broader free-ride-is-over argument that prioritized quid pro quo relationships over established liberal values-based commitments. While Vance applied this logic to European allies in the context of “Western” values and military support, Rubio applied it to humanitarian aid projects and America’s relationships across the Global South.

Second, Rubio’s remarks made clear that a quid pro quo foreign policy rooted in what he deemed to be U.S. national interests would increasingly shape State Department decision-making – regardless of the humanitarian consequences from cuts to international aid programs or multilateral institutions such as the United Nations.

Hegseth rewrites US rules of war

In September 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood in the Oval Office alongside Trump to discuss his department’s renaming to the “Department of War.” Hegseth asserted that the War Department would focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”

Viewed alongside the administration’s actions in late 2025 and into 2026 – from attacks on nonmilitary vessels around Venezuela to the extraction of Maduro, to the scale of destructive force deployed against Iran – the “maximum lethality” statement may prove to be one of the most consequential rhetorical moments from a Trump Cabinet official.

As Operation Epic Fury continues, Hegseth has defiantly reaffirmed the administration’s “maximum lethality” posture. At one point he declared that “we negotiate with bombs,” and at another briefing he called for “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” – a practice that violates international law.

These remarks and others underscore the administration’s rejection of international law and diplomacy in favor of military force as the preferred tool of American foreign policy.

Beyond the noise

In 2025, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth articulated new visions of America’s role in the world. In their own ways, they deployed rhetoric that sought to reshape U.S. foreign policy by redefining Western values, embracing quid pro quo relationships and prioritizing military force as guiding principles of the Trump administration’s agenda.

Despite the daily frenetic social posts and statements from Trump, members of his Cabinet will surely continue to project their own moral and political visions of America throughout 2026 and beyond.

Kevin Maloney is affiliated with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

– ref. Trump’s Cabinet dramatically changed American foreign policy while the president made noise – a scholar of presidential rhetoric explains – https://theconversation.com/trumps-cabinet-dramatically-changed-american-foreign-policy-while-the-president-made-noise-a-scholar-of-presidential-rhetoric-explains-281307

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Farah N. Jan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Pennsylvania

Days after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denied American forces the use of the Naval Station Rota and the Morón Air Base – installations that had hosted U.S. troops for more than 70 years.

“We are a sovereign country that does not wish to take part in illegal wars,” Sánchez said. U.S. President Donald Trump responded by threatening a full trade embargo against Spain.

Weeks later, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – Trump’s closest European ally and the only EU head of government invited to his second inauguration – broke publicly with Washington.

“When we don’t agree, we must say it,” she said. “And this time, we do not agree.” Rome then refused to let U.S. bombers refuel at a base in southern Italy.

These are not minor diplomatic frictions. As a scholar of alliance politics and nuclear security, I see something much larger than a tactical disagreement. The Iran war’s most consequential casualty may not be in Tehran. It may be American credibility as an ally, and with it, the trans-Atlantic alliance itself.

The Iraq comparison misleads

The initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran were launched with virtually no advance consultation with European allies. The Trump administration treated NATO partners not as participants in strategic decision-making but as logistical infrastructure to be commandeered or punished for refusing assistance.

European governments, even those most invested with the U.S., declined to join the campaign. The Trump administration has responded with the embargo threat against Spain and the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany.

“The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social on March 31, 2026.

The reflex in Washington has been to read this as a rerun of 2003, when France and Germany opposed the Iraq War. In January 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed France and Germany as “old Europe” while courting the postcommunist “new Europe,” including Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

On the surface, the parallel is tempting: a unilateral American war in the Middle East, European refusal to participate, trans-Atlantic recriminations.

But the comparison conceals more than it reveals. In 2003, the United States wanted Europe in its coalition. The George W. Bush administration sought United Nations authorization, courted allies and treated European refusal as a problem to be managed.

In 2026, the Trump administration explicitly does not want European input. It views allies as freeloaders and threatens them with economic coercion. It treats their hesitation as cause for retribution rather than negotiation.

The deeper difference is structural. In 2003, the trans-Atlantic alliance still rested on shared commitments to collective defense, open trade and an international, rules-based order.

Today, the Trump administration does not share the commitments that traditionally bound the United States to its European partners, whether on NATO, the Russia-Ukraine war, or the rules governing trade and migration.

The shared values that papered over the Iraq disagreement in 2003, and that allowed President Nicolas Sarkozy to reintegrate France into NATO’s command by 2009, are no longer there to do the work of repair.

The April 2026 collapse of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary left Trump without a serious political ally among major European governments.

The real precedent is Suez

A more illuminating precedent lies further back. In 1956, Britain and France went to war with Egypt over the Suez Canal, in coordination with Israel, deliberately concealing their plans from the Eisenhower administration. Washington responded by threatening to crash the British pound, forcing London and Paris into humiliating retreat.

The crisis is conventionally remembered as the moment Britain accepted that it was no longer an independent great power.

But its more important legacy was strategic. Suez exposed the depth of Europe’s dependence on the United States. That humiliation drove Charles de Gaulle’s pursuit of an independent French nuclear deterrent. It also accelerated European integration and planted the recognition that genuine strategic autonomy would be a generational project.

The Iran war inverts the conditions of that lesson. In 1956, Europeans learned that they could not act independently of Washington. In 2026, they are learning that they cannot rely on Washington’s consent being available, and that the U.S. will act without them, against their stated interests and at their economic expense.

The pattern is the same: Dependence on the U.S. is unsustainable, and autonomous capacity is no longer optional. What has changed is that Europe is now willing to use the financial, economic and military tools it has long possessed in ways it would not have considered before.

The EU’s €90 billion joint-debt loan to Ukraine signals an autonomous European strategic stance. So do discussions of activating the bloc’s anti-coercion trade instrument against U.S. tariffs, France’s nuclear arsenal expansion and offers to “Europeanize” deterrence.

The strategic postures were debated for decades. The Iran war is making them operational.

This is not yet European strategic independence. Europe remains militarily reliant on U.S. air defense, satellite capacity and intelligence.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, has forced an uncomfortable energy reckoning with American liquefied natural gas, Russian pipelines, Middle Eastern hydrocarbons and Chinese-dominated renewable supply chains. None of the available paths to energy security run through trusted partners.

France and Germany still disagree on nearly every detail of how integration should proceed. But the political condition for autonomy, a shared European belief that Washington can no longer be trusted to share strategic decision-making, has crystallized in a way that no previous crisis produced.

The post-1945 trans-Atlantic bargain traded U.S. security guarantees for European deference on global strategy. Iraq 2003 strained that bargain. Trump’s first term cracked it, and the Iran war has broken it.

What replaces it will not be a renewed partnership. It will be a parallel relationship between two powers with sometimes overlapping interests and, increasingly, separate strategic horizons.

In 1956, Europe learned how dependent it was on Washington. In 2026, it is learning that dependence is no longer sustainable.

Eleni Lomtatidze, a student in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania and at SciencesPo Paris, contributed to this story.

Farah N. Jan 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 Iran war is breaking the US-European strategic alliance – https://theconversation.com/why-the-iran-war-is-breaking-the-us-european-strategic-alliance-281975

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Suvrat Dhanorkar, Associate Professor of Operations Management, Georgia Institute of Technology

Across corporate earnings calls, investor presentations and marketing pitches, “artificial intelligence” has become the buzzword of choice. Yet a troubling pattern lies under the hype. Many claims vastly overstate actual AI sophistication, misleading people about true capabilities, future outcomes and potential harms.

A case in point is the recent 600% share price surge of Allbirds, after the once-trendy sustainable footwear business issued a vague announcement in April 2026 that it would pivot to AI. In the coming months, the company plans to rename itself NewBird AI and give up its status as a public benefit corporation.

As a scholar who studies corporate sustainability, I see parallels between this “AI washing” phenomenon – when companies oversell the benefits of AI while glossing over the risks – and the greenwashing trend in the recent past, when companies claimed to commit to sustainability but didn’t enact fundamental change. Widespread deception was rampant, with businesses spending far more on green marketing than on actual sustainability improvements. And those efforts often backfired on both the companies and the communities they served. Even more worrisome: AI washing’s rapid rise and widespread adoption will likely eclipse the greenwashing trends.

How we got here

AI washing is thriving because companies and policymakers ignore four important principles. These shortfalls, in the past, also characterized greenwashing.

First, AI guidelines lack standardization. By 2019, 84 sets of AI ethics principles and guidelines had already been published. By 2023, this number had exploded to more than 200 – a mess of voluntary frameworks from companies, research institutions and public organizations.

Making matters worse is that the U.S. currently relies on fragmented AI rules, with most being voluntary. The Trump administration has generally sided with Big Tech to push back efforts at state or federal regulation. At a global level, one of the few exceptions is the European Union AI Act, perhaps one of the most comprehensive frameworks, but its implementation won’t be fully phased in until 2027 or later.

In the early 2000s, corporate sustainability faced a similar credibility crisis. Every company measured sustainability differently, making comparisons impossible and greenwashing easy. The breakthrough came only when standardized, industry-specific metrics allowed meaningful benchmarking. Initiatives such as the Global Reporting Initiative and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board established common metrics for measuring environmental impact, social responsibility and quality of governance, known by the shorthand ESG.

When companies must report carbon emissions using the same methodology, for example, or disclose labor conditions using identical categories, investors can compare performance, identify laggards and allocate capital accordingly. This push made comparisons possible and deception harder, although it still wasn’t foolproof. For example, a 2023 United Nations Environment Programme report on the fast-fashion industry found that many companies continue to make “vague and inflated” sustainability claims.

Second, there are no comprehensive frameworks in the U.S. that require businesses to judge how AI affects them in a material way and publicly disclose those impacts. Examples of AI-driven material impacts include whether algorithmic bias shapes business outcomes, or whether decisions on how to use AI systems carry significance for shareholders and the public.

Instead, AI governance remains dominated by the narrow inner circle of companies that build the AI systems, while affected communities rarely have a say in determining which AI impacts are material enough to warrant public attention. For example, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and others adhere to their own AI governance guidelines, with relatively little public input.

The development of sustainability principles offers some examples of how to build these frameworks. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires over 50,000 companies to formally evaluate which sustainability topics are material to their stakeholders, and then disclose that information. These efforts try to ensure that accountability is clear across entire supply chains.

While nowhere nearly as comprehensive, U.S. regulations such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform and California’s law requiring reporting on statewide greenhouse gas emissions provide a similar blueprint that U.S. policymakers could build on if they chose.

A third problem is the general lack of third-party verification, making AI washing trivially easy. Effective disclosure means reporting all material impacts – not just cherry-picked successes.

In practice, AI audits can vary dramatically in rigor, scope and methodology. One auditor might conduct extensive testing across demographic groups, analyze decision-making and validate the quality of training data. Another might simply review documentation and accept company explanations at face value. Given the variety of AI auditing models out there, different auditors may use incompatible methodologies, making results impossible to compare. If companies adopted third-party accreditation systems to assess how they use AI, they would help ensure the accountability that self-reported claims cannot match.

By contrast, there was reasonable progress in this respect as companies adopted ESG principles. For example, institutions such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and Global Reporting Initiative have a network of partners that offer independent verification. These providers, certified under international standards, verify corporate sustainability data against rigorous criteria. That way, they provide the assurance that lets companies show the progress needed to unlock sustainable finance and mitigate legal risks. Third-party audits are far from perfect, but they offer a clear path for improvement.

The fourth principle is robust enforcement. Early ESG initiatives relied on reputational pressure and stakeholder goodwill – things that corporations routinely ignored when profits were at stake. When change came, it was because regulations established legal liability and financial penalties.

These consequences changed how corporations assess risk and continue to shape sustainability practices today. Volkswagen’s 2015 ‘Dieselgate’ scandal, for example, cost the company over US$30 billion in fines, settlements and criminal charges after U.S regulators found that the carmaker was cheating emissions tests. BP faced billions in penalties and liabilities for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the biggest oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling operations.

The current enforcement gap in AI creates a predictable dynamic. The expected value of AI washing – like potential investment gains, competitive advantage, and market valuation increases – far exceeds the expected cost in terms of penalties and risk of detection. Until enforcement imposes consequences that exceed benefits, AI washing will persist as a rational business strategy rather than a risk to a business’s reputation.

Fortunately, investors are beginning to step up. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, launched Operation AI Comply in 2024, targeting deceptive AI claims, although this effort has been partially scaled back by the current Trump administration.

New standards for a new era

Until businesses address these four principles, AI washing will continue. Without standards and audits, even well-intentioned companies can’t know if their work meets adequate rigor. Without assessments of material impact, some groups of consumers or shareholders will be hurt. And without liability, even thorough auditors won’t be able to identify whether a business’s claims about AI are truthful.

These principles, applied broadly, also help explain why greenwashing persists. For example, the lack of universal reporting standards continues to leave some gaps, with data-quality issues persisting even as reporting frameworks emerged. More fundamentally, political buy-in for ESG has diminished significantly, particularly in the U.S., where over 150 bills were introduced across multiple states by 2023 to disincentivize firms from adopting ESG. Major financial institutions – including JP Morgan, State Street, BlackRock and PIMCO – have retreated from their earlier climate commitments amid political pressure as well as antitrust concerns.

This trend shows that even well designed accountability measures require durable political support to succeed. After all, corporate sustainability took more than 25 years to develop from an initial framework to mandatory standards, and it still remains a work in progress. AI, by contrast, is advancing exponentially in terms of its reach and societal impact. There may not be 25 years to catch up – but at least there are lessons from the recent past.

Suvrat Dhanorkar 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. Companies are hyping AI the same way they talked up sustainability, but there are ways to fix that – https://theconversation.com/companies-are-hyping-ai-the-same-way-they-talked-up-sustainability-but-there-are-ways-to-fix-that-282013

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Claire Fontijn, Professor of Music, Wellesley College

The Paris Opera has staged iconic works like “Don Carlos” and “Les Troyens,” along with celebrated ballets such as “Les Indes Galantes” and “The Rite of Spring.”

But you’d be forgiven for not having heard of Antonia Bembo, whose 1707 opera “Ercole Amante” – “Hercules in Love” – will be staged at Paris’ Opéra Bastille for the first time on May 28, 2026. Born around 1640, Bembo and her opera remained obscure for centuries, due to the vagaries of her music manuscripts and the historical neglect of women composers.

I have been studying Bembo since 1990. At the time, scholars knew nothing about her life; she had merely been a name on the title pages to her music manuscripts. Once I confirmed that she was not born into, but had married into, the patrician Bembo family, I was able to not only identify her, but also tell her story in my 2006 biography, “Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo.”

Until recently, interest in Bembo and her music had been relatively modest, her name one among many historical women composers. A European premiere devoted to her work marks a major step forward.

Escape from Venice

Bembo’s obscurity was partly of her own making.

Trained as a musician in Venice, she fled from an abusive husband and settled in Paris in 1677. There, she sang before Louis XIV, who provided the means for her to live in a women’s residential community near the newly constructed Porte Saint-Denis, a triumphal arch along the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle.

She wrote music by hand and gifted it to the king to thank him for his generosity, producing numerous cantatas, arias, celebratory motets and dramatic works. Nevertheless, she must have lived in constant fear of being found in Paris by her husband: Only when he died in 1703 did she feel free to assemble her manuscripts into finished, presentable volumes.

By the time of her death around 1720, she’d bound eight volumes of works. Four have lain in France’s National Library for centuries, two have been lost, and the two containing “Ercole Amante” were acquired at auction by the Music Department at the National Library in 1937. That same year, musicologist Yvonne Rokseth published an article in The Musical Quarterly in which she wrote about the contents of the opera, as well as the compositions in Bembo’s other volumes.

I was a graduate student at Duke University in search of a dissertation topic in 1990 when I came across Rokseth’s article. It was the first time I had heard Bembo’s name. I obtained the microfilms of Bembo’s music, and my adviser gave me the go-ahead to pursue a study of her life and works.

For months I searched for documents mentioning the composer at the Paris National Archives and came up empty-handed. During a short trip to Venice in 1991, I found a book of names of women who married into noble families. From its contents, I posited that she had been born Antonia Padoani and had married into the Bembo family. The following year, I had a breakthrough: I found an envelope of documents at the State Archives of Venice that revealed she had left most of her belongings at the Convent of San Bernardo in Murano. She’d also left her 14-year-old daughter, Diana, at the convent in order to protect her from her father.

With these hints, I was able to find more information about Bembo’s life in documents located at the Patriarchal Archive, the Correr Museum and the Marciana Library in Venice.

Over time, I was able to flesh out enough details from Bembo’s life and works to write my biography.

A life comes into focus

The only child of medical doctor and amateur poet Giacomo Padoani and his wife, Diana Paresco, Antonia Padoani received an education in music and grammar in Venice.

Giacomo Padoani arranged to have Francesco Cavalli, the foremost Venetian composer of the day, teach his daughter.

Famously, Cavalli had been called to Paris in 1660 to write an opera for the wedding of Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta, María Teresa. That opera, “Ercole Amante,” was based on a libretto, or script, by Francesco Buti.

Giacomo Padoani’s Venetian contemporary, poet Giulio Strozzi, also hired Cavalli to teach his daughter, Barbara. But whereas Barbara would go on to publish a series of her compositions, Antonia took a different path that likely disappointed her father. Instead of pursuing a career as a musician or a poet, she married Lorenzo Bembo. He gave her noble status and three children, but it came with a great deal of trouble.

In 1672, Antonia Bembo – then living in the back part of a house known as Cà Bembo in the neighborhood of Santa Maria Nova – sued for divorce, citing Lorenzo’s infidelity along with mental and physical abuse. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, so five years later, she slipped out of town to start her new life in Paris, leaving her husband and children behind.

In 1707, Bembo completed her composition of a new musical score for Buti’s opera libretto. Like Cavalli’s opera, it follows Hercules, who becomes obsessed with Iole, the daughter of a man he has killed. Iole happens to also be in a relationship with Hercules’ son, and Hercules’ pursuit ends up setting off a chain of rivalries among gods and mortals.

In some ways, Bembo improved upon Cavalli’s original opera. A story about an aging Hercules in the 1700s better coincided with Louis XIV’s life arc than when Cavalli had composed the opera for the 22-year-old king’s wedding. And whereas the French public had objected to the Italian language Cavalli used in his opera, Bembo’s union of Italian and French musical styles – reflecting what she had heard and learned in Venice and Paris – made it more accessible.

The time has come

So why is Bembo’s opera only reaching the stage in 2026?

First, her handwritten score was difficult to decipher. Unlike Barbara Strozzi’s scores, which were printed and published during her lifetime, Bembo’s manuscripts have presented challenges for performers. The Opéra de Paris created a performance score of “Ercole Amante” by employing an editorial team that corrected mistakes and rectified inconsistencies.

Second, women composers of early music operas – traditionally excluded from the operatic canon – have only recently started having their works staged. In 2023, for example, “Céphale et Procris,” an opera written by Bembo’s French contemporary Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, along with Francesca Caccini’s “Alcina,” were performed at the Boston Early Music Festival.

With a star-studded cast and a large Baroque orchestra under the baton of Leonardo García-Alarcón, the staging of Bembo’s manuscript, which has lain dormant for centuries, is an occasion to rejoice.

Now, Bembo’s operatic masterpiece can claim its place alongside the legacy of her teacher, Francesco Cavalli. It also places her alongside Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Michel-Richard de Lalande as one of Louis XIV’s “artisans of glory” – the group of artists, architects, composers and performers who helped construct the image of the “Sun King” as a divinely ordained monarch.

Claire Fontijn 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. Antonia Bembo fled Venice to escape her abusive husband – over three centuries later, her opera finally takes the stage – https://theconversation.com/antonia-bembo-fled-venice-to-escape-her-abusive-husband-over-three-centuries-later-her-opera-finally-takes-the-stage-281220

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Claire L. Ma, Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Public Health, University of Michigan

The resignation of Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, on May 12, 2026, brought to the forefront a heated controversy over fruit-flavored nicotine vapes.

Rumors had been circulating for weeks that President Donald Trump was planning to fire Makary, in large part due to Makary’s disagreement with Trump over the FDA’s recent approval of two fruit-flavored vapes. Makary reportedly disagreed in private with the FDA’s decision, which came soon after Trump pushed the FDA to move more quickly in approving fruit-flavored vapes.

Before that FDA approval, the agency had only approved menthol- and tobacco-flavored nicotine vapes. The clash between Trump and Makary over whether to allow fruit-flavored vapes is a high-profile example of the continued debate surrounding these products.

Beyond Washington, the public health community is also divided. Researchers are working to understand how flavored vapes affect public health, but the evidence is complicated.

We are a team of public health researchers who study scientific evidence, health policy and regulation as it relates to tobacco and nicotine products. Our team at the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations at the University of Michigan and University of Massachusetts Amherst is studying questions about flavors in these products.

The authorization of two fruit-flavored vapes marks a pivotal moment in U.S. e-cigarette regulation.

FDA’s role in regulating tobacco and nicotine

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law in 2009, gave the FDA the authority to regulate the manufacture, distribution and marketing of tobacco products. This includes nicotine alternatives such as e-cigarettes, vapes and oral nicotine pouches.

Tobacco and nicotine products, such as major cigarette brands, that were on the market before 2007 did not require FDA authorization, but new products, like vapes, do. To be authorized, new tobacco and nicotine products must meet the standard of being “appropriate for the protection of public health”. In other words, their benefits to the population as a whole must be judged to outweigh their risks.

The Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA is responsible for making these decisions and implementing regulations. Academic research centers, like ours, support the center in understanding how its policies might affect public health.

Vaping has a lower relative risk than smoking

Vaping nicotine is not risk-free, but research is clear that it is much less harmful than smoking. Vapes and e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco leaf like cigarettes do, nor do they have the same toxic chemicals that are found in cigarettes. Smoking involves burning organic material, which releases cancer-causing pollutants; vaping does not.

Vapes can contain potentially harmful chemicals, but these are usually in much lower amounts than those found in cigarettes. Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but it does not on its own cause cancer. The FDA’s regulation and oversight of vapes is important for public safety. As of May 2026, the FDA has approved 45 vaping products that can be lawfully sold in the U.S.

On the other hand, the U.S. is flooded with illegal vapes, including colorful devices manufactured in China. It can be difficult to know what is in illegal vapes.

Because vaping is not risk-free but has a lower relative risk than smoking, it presents an increased risk for people who do not otherwise use tobacco or smoke, but a decreased risk for people who smoke.

Flavored vapes attract new users, especially youth

Flavored vapes can include menthol and mint, fruit and sweet flavors and concept flavors with names like “jazz,” “solar,” “fusion” and “unicorn puke.” Other flavored vapes are often packaged in bright and appealing colors, even if they do not include explicit flavor description words.

The recent FDA decision to approve two fruit- and sweet-flavored nicotine vapes, which have the color-coded names of “Sapphire” and “Gold,” is a potentially significant expansion of the FDA’s approach to authorizing e-cigarettes.

Research shows that flavored vapes attract new users, including young people who do not have a history of smoking tobacco. It also shows that experimenting with flavors increases the appeal of vapes among adolescents. Young people often think fruit-flavored vapes are less harmful than tobacco-flavored vapes.

Flavored vapes might help people quit smoking

Flavored vapes can attract youth, but they can also appeal to people who smoke. For people who smoke, switching to nicotine vapes can diminish their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals and potentially lower their likelihood of tobacco-related disease.

Researchers regularly assess the scientific evidence on whether e-cigarettes can help people stop smoking. Regularly updated evidence across more than a hundred studies continues to show that nicotine vapes can help people who use cigarettes to quit smoking.

However, researchers don’t yet know whether or how adding flavors to vapes might affect smoking and vaping. While fruity and sweet flavors can be appealing to people who smoke, tobacco and menthol flavors are sometimes more popular among older people who have a history of smoking tobacco.

As the recent clash between Trump and Makary shows, the debate over flavored vapes continues. Whatever the outcome, it remains important that decisions made about vapes are based on scientific evidence, and that the reasons behind policy decisions are communicated effectively to the public.

Claire L. Ma is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations, where she leads research dissemination efforts for the Policy Analysis and Dissemination Core. Her research is funded by the FDA and NIH through a Federal grant to the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. Ma does not receive any funding from the tobacco or vaping industries.

Holly Jarman is the Co-Lead of the Policy and Dissemination Core for the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations (CAsToR) at the University of Michigan and receives funding from the NIH and FDA for that work. Jarman does not receive any funding from the tobacco or vaping industries.

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce receives funding from the NIH, FDA, Truth Initiative, Cancer Research UK and the Massachusetts Department of Health for research related to tobacco control. She does not receive any funding from tobacco or vaping industries.

– ref. Flavored vapes led to a major shake-up at the FDA – 3 health policy analysts explain the science behind the controversial products – https://theconversation.com/flavored-vapes-led-to-a-major-shake-up-at-the-fda-3-health-policy-analysts-explain-the-science-behind-the-controversial-products-283048

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Wendy Melillo, Associate Professor of Journalism, American University School of Communication

This article includes examples of antisemitic hate speech.

The men accused of carrying out high-profile antisemitic attacks in the United States in recent years shared an important characteristic: They posted hate speech on their social media accounts beforehand.

The FBI said the man who drove his truck into a synagogue outside Detroit in March 2026 posted on Facebook that “Israel is a cancerous/malignant growth” and “Israel is pure evil.” The online footprint of the gunman charged with shooting and killing two Israeli Embassy staffers at the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025 contained anti-Israel comments. The shooter sentenced to death for killing 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 frequently used antisemitic hate speech in his social media.

Hate speech uses feelings, emotions and attitudes that seek to dehumanize individuals or groups. At times, animosity is clear. But it can also take a more hidden form, using code words or terms understood only by like-minded people. Coded hate speech can evade online content censors and recruit people who might balk at more clearly discriminatory speech.

There are an estimated 5.7 billion social media accounts worldwide. Even when hate speech is explicit, content moderators struggle with the volume and deciding how much to monitor users’ speech. There are also alternative – some argue extremist – sites that limit content moderation, including 4chan, BitChute, Gab, GETTR, Parler, Rumble and Truth Social.

We are a group of interdisciplinary researchers at American University who study the rhetorical strategies behind overt and coded hate speech on social media. Our Unmasking Antisemitism project uses artificial intelligence, qualitative analysis and survey experiments to develop studies and tools to detect both types of terms. This article discusses examples of antisemitic hate speech that are disturbing but illustrate types of terms and how to counter this dangerous influence.

Two types of hate speech

To understand the difference between direct and coded hate speech, consider shooter Robert Bowers’ language before the Tree of Life massacre. On Gab, he used older, virulently antisemitic slurs such as “kike,” a “highly offensive term used to insult and denigrate people of Jewish faith or ethnicity that is widely considered to be a form of hate speech,” according to the American Jewish Committee.

Other extremist terms are just as offensive but less obvious, such as “oven dodger,” which Bowers also used on Gab: a reference to how German Nazis systematically exterminated Jews during the Holocaust. Like overt phrases, coded terms often draw on older, well-researched antisemitic tropes, such as “Jews have too much power,” repacking them in new words and phrases.

They can also have double meanings, which makes hate speech harder to moderate. The original definition of “globalist” refers to a person who believes that policies should be planned with the whole world’s interest in mind rather than just one country. But globalist also has an antisemitic connotation.

As the American Jewish Committee “Translate Hate” glossary puts it, antisemites often use “globalist” to disparage Jews, promoting a conspiracy theory that “Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order – like a global economy or international political system – that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments and media.” This repackages long-standing Nazi and Soviet propaganda about Jews based on historical antisemitic tropes.

How terms develop

In the early days of social media, companies responded to criticism of the more hateful content on their platforms by using a combination of AI and human analysis to moderate content. The automated tools use natural language processing to analyze context, detect slurs and flag content. Human workers analyze more complex language, such as irony and slang.

But keeping up with the volume of posts is challenging, especially for more subtle hate speech. Our team’s goals are to identify coded antisemitic terms, understand how they develop, and create technology to track them.

The key is to understand that hate terms have a life cycle. Some take a path toward more public use, while others disappear.

New terms tend to emerge from a small set of people considered leaders or influencers in antisemitic circles online. In some cases, their communities adopt the term and normalize it; other times, it’s dropped from use.

The term “cultural Marxism,” which has its origins in the antisemitic belief that Jewish intellectuals seek to subvert Western culture, was adopted into wider use. “Jew jab,” on the other hand – a white supremacist conspiracy theory claiming that COVID-19 vaccines were a Jewish plot to harm people – soon disappeared.

Tracking hate

In our initial pilot project we started with 46 antisemitic terms, both overt and coded, from the American Jewish Committee’s glossary. We entered the terms in Pyrra, now called Alert Media – a private software company that allows users to scrape posts from a collection of social media sites.

Researchers trained in definitions of antisemitism, historical antisemitic tropes and hate speech detection identified 24 additional terms. White supremacists use the symbol “1488,” for example, to identify each other. The first part, “14,” references the “14-word” slogan of white supremacist leader David Lane. The “88” stands for “Heil Hitler,” based on “h” being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Other coded terms are less well known, such as “DOTR” or “Day of the Rope,” a reference to the 1978 book “The Turner Diaries,” which was written under a pseudonym by neo-Nazi William Pierce.

To track which coded terms have spread to the general public, we scrutinized mainstream media content and ran survey experiments to see whether people recognized them. We also developed an AI software tool designed to automatically track how coded language evolves. The app is trained on data from Pyrra and learns to identify new antisemitic terms based on the context in which they appear.

First, the app identifies distinctive terms based on how frequently they appear in each post, versus how rare they are on the platform in general. To find out whether these terms have an antisemitic connotation, we encode their context, such as other words in the post, and calculate whether it is close to the context of already known antisemitic terminology. Some of the terms our app has identified are explicit, while others are coded.

This approach can also be applied to hate speech targeted at other groups, such as Latinos, LGBTQ+ people and women. We aim to create a tool kit that can be distributed to nonprofit groups, think tanks and policymakers considering legislative efforts to curb hate speech.

Humans and machines

Given the massive number of posts on social media every day, our work illustrates how detecting new hate speech requires an interdisciplinary group of researchers working with machines.

One academic discipline working independently is too siloed, and humans alone can’t handle the scale. But machines alone can’t understand sophisticated human language, slang or context.

History shows that at every moment of profound technological change in our communication systems, incidents targeting Jews or other minority groups go up dramatically. This era’s technical innovation is unprecedented – but unfortunately, hate speech now travels around the globe almost instantly. Technology may be part of the problem, but its immense power can be harnessed to create a solution.

We received internal funding for this project from American University as part of its Signature Research Initiative.

– ref. Uncovering coded antisemitism online takes both human expertise and AI automation – https://theconversation.com/uncovering-coded-antisemitism-online-takes-both-human-expertise-and-ai-automation-272150