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When its six-week abortion ban went into effect on May 1, 2024, Florida joined nearly two dozen other U.S. states that ban abortion or greatly restrict it.

These laws came into effect after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade ended nearly 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

Florida health officials in 2023 reported more than 84,000 abortions statewide, including nearly 7,800 from out-of-state residents.

The Tampa Bay Times recently reported that about 2 in 5 abortions in Florida over the past six years occurred in the first six weeks of pregnancy, meaning that roughly 60% of the procedures performed over that time frame would be illegal under the new restrictions.

The new laws in Florida and other states are sending some Americans across the border into Mexico to access an abortion, where the procedure was legalized in recent years.

Clinics in Mexico do not require proof of residency, so solid numbers about who they are treating are hard to come by. But providers in Mexico report they have been seeing more Americans.

In 2022, Luisa García, director of Profem, an abortion clinic in the border city of Tijuana, told NPR that the percentage of patients coming from the United States had jumped from 25% to 50% in just the two months following the Dobbs decision.

My research and teaching focuses on gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. I often ask students to think about the differences between the United States and Latin America — and the struggles the two regions share.

Different paths

In recent years, the U.S. and Mexico have each struggled over access to abortion care, with the two countries moving in opposite directions.

The year before the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled the criminalization of abortion by the northern state of Coahuila unconstitutional. This decision set a precedent that led to decriminalization at the federal level in 2023.

Change has since been slow. Only 13 of Mexico’s 31 states have modified their penal codes to reflect the court’s resolution, with Jalisco being the latest state to do so, in April 2024.

Unlike in the U.S., federal laws in Mexico do not automatically overrule local ones. But Mexican women living in states where abortions are illegal can still have one in a federally run hospital or clinic. And the federal statute protects the staff of those facilities from punishment.

Marea Verde movement

A crucial force behind the legalization of abortion care in Latin America is a movement called Green Tide, or Marea Verde, which emerged in Argentina and expanded across the region over the past two decades.

Although it began as a collective fight for abortion rights, Green Tide has grown to encompass issues such as the prevention of violence against women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as femicide – the violent death of women motivated by gender.

Expansion of abortion access in Mexico

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2022, Mexican organizations offering abortions have expanded locations to increase choices for Mexican and U.S. residents seeking care. For example, Fundación MSI opened its newest clinic in Cancún late last year.

It chose this location intentionally, MSI’s Latin America regional managing director told the health news website Stat. Cancún’s status as a popular tourist destination means that multiple U.S. airports offer direct flights for about US$400 round trip. In-person abortion services range from $250 to $350. MSI’s website caters to Americans by offering information in English and featuring links to search for flights.

In Mexico, an ‘acompanante’ often accompanies other women who want to terminate their pregnancy but don’t know where to turn or fear hostility at public clinics.
AP Photo/Maria Alferez

To assist those traveling to Mexico, Mexican and American abortion rights groups created the Red Transfronteriza, a transnational network that supports those crossing the border in search of care but whose primary mission has become the shipping of misoprostol and mifepristone, the pills generally used to induce abortions, into the United States.

One group that is part of the network on the Mexican side of the border is Guanajuato-based Las Libres, or The Free Ones. In September 2023, its founder estimated that her organization had sent abortion pills to approximately 20,000 women in the U.S. since the Dobbs decision.

Red Necesito Abortar, or I Need to Abort Network, was founded in 2017 by Sandra Cardona and Vanessa Jimenez in the northern city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, to help those seeking abortion services.

History of abortion, US-Mexico border

Although the Dobbs decision brought renewed attention to the issue, the relationship between the United States and Mexico and people from both countries seeking abortions has a long history.

Women’s studies professor Lina-María Murillo, who studies the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and teaches a course on global reproduction, explains that abortion in the United States was legal and performed by midwives before the Civil War. In the following decades, declining birth rates and gender inequality led to restrictions across the country and a nationwide ban in 1910.

As Murillo’s research has documented, criminalization led women seeking abortions to travel to Mexico more than a century ago.

These border crossings ultimately declined as Mexican abortion restrictions were enforced and clinics shut down by the late 1960s. At the same time, U.S. activists and doctors contributed to the narrative that portrayed Mexico as a dangerous place where “back alley” abortions were performed by “butcher” physicians. Murillo argues that these myths contributed to a loosening of abortion restrictions in several U.S. states like California and New Mexico, helping set the stage for Roe v. Wade.

As elections loom closer in the United States, abortion will likely take center stage once again – including in Florida, where a referendum to reverse the six-week ban will be on the November ballot. Läs mer…

As hundreds of New York police officers in riot gear were called in to clear away a student protest at Columbia University on Tuesday night, the university president Nemat Shafik was saying she had “no choice” but to take this action.

Earlier that day, after defying administrative orders to disband their two-week encampment, a group of Columbia students had broken into and occupied a major academic building on campus, causing considerable damage. The incident and other protests have not only brought tensions over the Gaza war protests erupting across American universities to a fever pitch, it has also made the political stakes much clearer.

In recent weeks, a palpable unease has gripped some Democrats, fearing that anger among young people displayed at campuses such as Columbia’s could spill over into November’s election. Headlines like “The campus is coming for Joe Biden” (The Economist) and “How protests against Israel and war in Gaza could hurt Biden in November” (PBS) underscore the gravity of concern among certain White House officials.

Yet, despite the political pitfalls that campus protests pose for Biden on the left, dissatisfaction among young people over the Israel-Hamas war is unlikely to initiate a major swing in the 2024 presidential election. What it could do, however, is turn the broader electorate against Biden if he fails to take a stiff enough line against the most extreme agitators. Here’s why.

Protesters are unrepresentative

If there’s one point to glean from the recent spate of campus protests, it’s that participants are unrepresentative of young Americans as a whole. While protests have since rippled out to other institutions, demonstrations have mostly originated at America’s most prestigious (and expensive) universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Elite universities tend to foster progressive, activist student bodies that don’t look like the demography of American higher education generally, much less the US youth population overall.

Also, just a tiny fraction of students, even at elite institutions, are active in the Gaza demonstrations. At Columbia, for example, only about 200 students were arrested at a school that enrols more than 30,000.

Reports suggest that some protesters are non-students, and that outsiders have been responsible for orchestrating public displays. Some protesters don’t even have strong or well-formed views on Israel.

Zooming out, there’s no clear consensus among America’s youth on how the US should deal with Israel, or that it’s a top concern in the forthcoming election. According to the most recent Harvard Institute of Politics Survey of Young Americans, a slight majority, 51%, of young voters support a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. For 18- to 29-year-olds around 41% have no firm position on America’s alliance with Israel.

Among youth voters, ordinary domestic issues like the cost of living are almost certain to be more salient in driving ballot box decisions than violence in the Middle East. For instance, according to the same Harvard IOP poll, only 2% of young Americans cite the Israel-Palestine conflict as the issue that concerns them the most.

A campsite of supporters of Gaza popped up around Columbia University, New York.
Sipa/Alamy

Campus protests could trigger a backlash in favour of support for Israel — not against it. Some Americans are unhappy about the student protests, which will only be exacerbated by the recent violence at Columbia. And one poll suggests that overall 80% of Americans support Israel in the war against Hamas.

While there’s doubtlessly sympathy among Democrats (and Americans as a whole) for a Gaza ceasefire, much of the rhetoric employed on campuses — such as chants of “from the river to the sea”, calls for a “global intifada”, or exhortations for Israel to “go to hell” — threaten to undermine public support.

Other examples of student agitation will also earn enemies. The hoisting of the Palestinian flag over Harvard Yard, the central courtyard at Harvard University, in violation of school policy. A UCLA student wearing a Star of David necklace appeared to be denied access to a campus entrance by protesters. One masked protester yelling: “Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times.” And another demanding “humanitarian aid” be provided in the form of a meal plan from university officials after occupying an academic building. The list goes on.

Read more:
US election: two graphs show how young voters influence presidential results as Biden gets poll boost

In part, the campus protests over Gaza can be seen as an outgrowth of the protests that Biden has seen in the primary elections. In the Michigan primary, for example, the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to express their discontent with the administration’s policies.

Yet if Biden were to align himself more closely with these protests, he’d encounter resistance from Jewish and other voters who demand his full-throated support of Israel. That could open up a lane for Donald Trump, who’s already trying to frame campus protests as evidence of chaos under the current administration.

Even before the recent violence, Republican senator Tom Cotton had labelled the Columbia protests a “nascent pogrom” and encouraged enlisting the National Guard to quell student “mobs”.

Former Harvard president Larry Summers has observed that: “Academic leaders who fail to enforce regulations at many of our leading universities are giving a political gift to Donald Trump and his acolytes.”

Biden has said that he “condemn[ed] the antisemitic protests”, while also “condemn[ing] those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians”. Although the both-sideism statement has been criticised, it largely reflects Biden acknowledging the complexity of the issue.

Young voters will be critical to Biden winning in November. If Democrats can get that age group out to vote out, they may just nudge Biden over the line. However, this means appealing to far more young people than those who attend the country’s top universities. Läs mer…

Following the nearly three-hour oral argument about presidential immunity in the Supreme Court on April 25, 2024, many commentators were aghast. The general theme, among legal and political experts alike, was a hand-over-the-mouth, how-dare-they assessment of the mostly conservative justices’ questioning of the attorneys who appeared before them in the case known as Trump v. United States.

Rather than a laser-focused, deep dive into the details of Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, virtually all of the nine justices instead raised larger questions, peppered with hypotheticals – hello again, Seal Team Six! – about the reach of executive power, the intent of the nation’s founders and the best way to promote a stable democracy.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s “I’m not focused on the here and now of this case” and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s “We are writing a rule for the ages” drew particular fire.

The headline and subheadline on the New York Times analysis by Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak complained that the court had taken “Trump’s immunity arguments in unexpected direction” with “very little about the President’s conduct.” And the story itself fumed that the justices had responded to Trump’s claim that he should not face charges as a “weighty and difficult question.”

Slate’s Amicus podcast decried the court for failing to focus on the “narrow question” the case presented, instead going “off the rails” and “bouncing all over the map” with various legal arguments. A guest on NPR’s 1A program lamented that the court had “injected new questions” into the oral argument to “slow-walk” the case and prevent Trump from facing trial before the election.

But here’s what the pundits seem to have forgotten: What happened that day in the court should have surprised no one, especially those constitutional scholars like me familiar with Supreme Court procedure.

Donald Trump’s attorneys told the Supreme Court that the actions of a president should be immune from criminal prosecution.
Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images

Five words ‘change everything’

Trump’s case stemmed from his prosecution by Special Counsel Jack Smith for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump claimed he, as president, was immune from prosecution, and he took his case to the Supreme Court.

When parties appeal their case to the court, they must tell the justices what specific legal question or questions they want the justices to answer. As a colleague and I have explored in a recent academic journal article, the court generally accepts what is called the “Questions Presented” as given, agreeing to hear a case without making any adjustments to its legal framing.

Sometimes, however, the court will alter the legal question in some way. Why it does this is an issue that scholars like myself are just beginning to explore. And because it is that question – not the one the litigant initially asked – that frames the legal analysis, the justices can exert real control over both the case itself and the development of the law.

Trump v. United States is a classic example. When attorneys for the former president filed their request with the court, the question presented by them was “Whether the doctrine of absolute presidential immunity includes immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s official acts.”

When it granted the petition in late February 2024, the court changed this language to “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

Five of those additional words – “if so to what extent” – changed everything. They sent a clear-as-day signal that the court would move well beyond the simple yes-or-no of whether Trump could be prosecuted.

The full Supreme Court, with nine justices, heard oral arguments in the immunity case.
Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

The court doing its job

With their reformulation of the question, the justices would instead be determining how, when and for what acts any president could ever be held criminally responsible.

That is a much larger inquiry, one that necessarily involves formulating a legal test to draw a line between what is constitutionally permissible and what is not. That the justices spent oral argument trying do exactly that is not a problem, much less an outrage: It’s just the court, the highest appellate court in the land, doing its job.

The scope of the argument, the expansiveness of the coming opinions and the time suck for the justices to write them and the possible vanishing of Trump’s prosecution are not at all shocking. The court signaled it would address the broader question months ago when it took the case; the time to fault the court for making the case about more than just Donald Trump was then, not now.

But perhaps commentators’ response to the oral argument can be a good lesson. Americans are told to take Trump at his word, expecting his second term to contain all the extremes he gleefully says it will.

When the Supreme Court indicates what legal question it will answer, the smart response is to do the same thing – pay attention and believe. This may not make the ultimate outcome any less distasteful to many, but at least it won’t be quite as disturbing. Läs mer…

Brain cancers remain among the most challenging tumors to treat. They often don’t respond to traditional treatments because many chemotherapies are unable to penetrate the protective barrier around the brain. Other treatments like radiation and surgery can leave patients with lifelong debilitating side effects.

As a result, brain cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in children. Brain tumors in children frequently do not respond to treatments developed for adults, likely due to the fact that pediatric brain cancers are not as well-studied as adult brain cancers. There is an urgent need to develop new treatments specific to children.

We developed a new messenger-RNA, or mRNA, cancer vaccine, described in newly published research, that can deliver treatments more effectively in children who have brain cancer and teach their immune systems to fight back.

Cancer treatments designed for adults may not necessarily work as well in children.
Virojt Changyencham/Moment via Getty Images

How do cancer vaccines work?

The immune system is a complex network of cells, tissues and organs whose primary function is to continuously surveil the body for threats posed by foreign invaders – pathogens that damage tissues and make you sick. It accomplishes this by recognizing antigens, or abnormal proteins or molecules, on pathogens. T cells that recognize these antigens seek out and destroy the pathogens.

Your immune system also protects you from domestic threats like cancer. Over time, your cells sustain DNA damage from either internal or external stressors, leading to mutations. The proteins and molecules produced from mutated DNA look quite different from the ones cells typically produce, so your immune system can recognize them as antigens. Cancer develops when cells accumulate mutations that enable them to continue to grow and divide while simultaneously going undetected by the immune system.

In 1991, scientists identified the first tumor antigen, helping lay the framework for modern-day immunotherapy. Since then, researchers have identified many new tumor antigens, facilitating the development of cancer vaccines. Broadly, cancer vaccines deliver tumor antigens into the body to teach the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells that display those antigens. Although all cancer vaccines conceptually work very similarly, they each significantly vary in the way they are developed and the number and combination of antigens they carry.

Cancer vaccines help the immune system differentiate between healthy cells and tumor cells.

One of the biggest differences among cancer vaccines is how they are created. Some vaccines use protein fragments, or peptides, of tumor antigens that are directly given to patients. Other vaccines use viruses reengineered to express cancer antigens. Even more complex are vaccines where a patient’s own immune cells are collected and trained to recognize cancer antigens in a laboratory before being delivered back to the patient.

Currently, there is a lot of excitement and focus among researchers on developing mRNA-based cancer vaccines. Whereas DNA is the blueprint of which proteins to make, mRNA is a copy of the blueprint that tells cells how to build these proteins. Thus, researchers can use mRNA to create blueprint copies of potential antigens.

mRNA cancer vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant attention to the potential of using mRNA-based vaccines to stimulate the immune system and provide protection against the antigens they encode for. But researchers have been investigating the use of mRNA vaccines for treating various cancers since before the pandemic.

Our team of scientists in the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program at University of Florida has spent the past 10 years developing and optimizing mRNA vaccines to treat brain cancer.

Cancer vaccines have faced significant challenges. One key hurdle is that these vaccines may not always trigger a strong enough immune response to eradicate the cancer completely. Moreover, tumors are not made up of one type of cancer cell, but rather a complex mix of cancer cells that each harbors its own unique cocktail of mutations.

Our cancer vaccine seeks to address these issues in a number of ways.

Lipid nanoparticles can carry therapeutic mRNA into the body.
Buschmann et al. 2021/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

First, we designed our vaccines by using the RNA of a patients’ own cancer cells as a template for the mRNA inside our nanoparticles. We also packaged our cancer vaccine inside of nanoparticles made up of specialized lipids, or fat molecules. We maximized the amount of mRNA packaged within each nanoparticle by sandwiching them between lipid layers like the layers of an onion. In this way, we increase the likelihood that the mRNA molecules in our nanoparticles produce enough tumor antigens from that patient’s cancer to activate an immune response.

Also, instead of injecting nanoparticles into the skin, muscle or directly into the tumor, as is commonly done for many therapeutic cancer vaccines, our mRNA nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream. From there, they travel to organs throughout the body involved in the immune response to teach the body to fight against the cancer. By doing so, we’ve found that the immune system launches a near immediate and powerful response. Within six hours of receiving the vaccine, there is a significant increase in the amount of blood markers connected to immune activation.

Looking to the future

Our mRNA-based vaccines are currently undergoing early-phase clinical trials to treat real patients with brain cancer.

We administered our mRNA-based vaccine to four adult patients with glioblastoma who had relapsed after previous treatment. All patients survived several months longer than the expected average survival at this advanced stage of illness. We expect to treat children with a type of brain tumor called pediatric high-grade glioma by the end of the year.

Importantly, mRNA vaccines can be developed to treat any kind of cancer, including childhood brain tumors. Our Pediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Initiative focuses on developing new immune-based therapies for children afflicted with cancer. After developing an mRNA vaccine for glioma in chidren, we will expand to treat other kinds of pediatric brain cancers like medulloblastoma and potentially treat other kinds of cancers like skin cancer and bone cancer.

We are hopeful that mRNA-based vaccines may lead to more children being cured of their brain tumors. Läs mer…

Tony Blair left Downing Street nearly 17 years ago, but in terms of his impact on the Labour party, it’s almost like he never left.

After Gordon Brown led Labour into the 2010 general election, and lost, the party entered what has turned out to be a lengthy spell in opposition. Labour changed a lot after that point, including some ways nobody could have predicted.

There was a common theme, though, which I describe in my book, Getting Over New Labour. Actions taken after 2010 were often motivated by a desire to be (and were presented as) in marked contrast to New Labour.

What is striking is that, regardless of people’s particular views on New Labour, we are still talking about it. When Blair speaks, he gets headlines. And the contemporary Labour party is still somewhat animated by a reaction to the politics of the 1990s.

The New Labour legacy

When David and Ed Miliband contested the 2010 Labour leadership election, along with Diane Abbott, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, they did so in the shadow of New Labour. The “rival” political identities of Blair and Brown loomed large. Ed Miliband had worked closely with Brown for many years, David Miliband more with Blair. When Ed Miliband triumphed, he did so, he later said, as “the ‘moving on from New Labour’ candidate”.

The list of New Labour achievements, certainly from a Labour party member’s perspective, is long. So too is the list of mistakes. Blair had left office in 2007 an unpopular figure, defined in large part by his continued belief that it was right for the UK to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003. The New Labour project itself had ended with the 2010 election, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which was followed by a Conservative-led government’s austerity programme.

Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, pictured in 2012.
Alamy/Dan Kitwood

Big questions about how New Labour had managed the UK economy, and specifically about continued high levels of economic inequality after the Conservative governments of the 1980s, took centre-stage within Labour. Miliband’s leadership, and Corbyn’s leadership after 2015, can be located in what the sociologist Mike Savage has called the “inequality paradigm” – a different set of propositions for understanding the world after the global financial crisis; ones that challenged New Labour’s acquiescence within an unfair economic model.

A different kind of party

While New Labour was electorally successful, some felt the project to have become too distant from both the party and the people – too technocratic and too “top-down”.

David and Ed Miliband both believed in the party resembling a “movement” once again, and this was important for much of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, too. It was another way of moving on from New Labour. Embracing a different kind of politics was also key. Labour wanted to become less obsessed with focus groups and unafraid of challenging conventional wisdom.

Just how successful was this? The post 2010 story is a paradoxical one. It was electorally unsuccessful, though at times defied political pessimism. There were new ideas coming from the Labour party, often based upon a convincing account of the problems the UK faced.

There were some big failures, too. Corbynism ultimately could not manage the politics of Brexit. On what became the defining political issue of the 2017-2019 period, Corbyn’s leadership seemed to lack both certainty and principle. And on organisational culture, the Corbyn project failed, most seriously when it came to tackling antisemitism within Labour.

New Labour today

New Labour factionalism has lessened over the past few years. New generations of Labour politicians and activists are beginning to treat the New Labour project like any other part of the party’s past.

And there is much for policymakers to learn from studying the recent past – just look at recent evidence about the difference made by New Labour’s flagship Sure Start programme, for example. It is less productive, I think, to continue debating New Labour’s personalities.

Current leader Keir Starmer is more comfortable sharing a stage with Blair than his predecessors.
Alamy

Since Keir Starmer has become leader, there has been something of a counter-reaction to how New Labour was interpreted and debated during the Corbyn and Miliband years. Starmer was initially elected leader with a narrative similar to that of his predecessors, including the theme of moving on from New Labour. He has since, however, sought a much stronger association with the New Labour record. That has included interacting with Blair and his high-profile, influential thinktank the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Starmer seems much keener than his predecessors to be associated with New Labour – particularly, unsurprisingly, its record of winning three general elections. That doesn’t, however, make the contemporary party a “continuity New Labour” project. On economic policy, for example, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has spoken extensively about how the politics of the 1990s and early 2000s – and the economics of New Labour – had significant weaknesses. Globalisation was a leitmotif for Blair’s take on the modern world. According to Reeves: “globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead”.

After 2010, the Labour Party couldn’t stop talking about New Labour. Starmer’s leadership marks a change on that front: less talking about “moving on”, but still actually moving on.

Yet, like everyone, politicians are still trying to understand an uncertain world. They will continue looking back at the near-past to explore the origins of certain problems, and to justify how they wish to change things. We haven’t, then, heard the last of New Labour. Läs mer…

The extraordinary sight of five horses galloping through London, sweating and covered in blood, caused the hashtag #Apocalypse to trend briefly on social media last week.

Colliding with vehicles and startling pedestrians, the military horses had been taking part in an exercise in the capital when they were spooked by noisy building works nearby. And while not exactly an omen for the end of days, the incident does give us cause to reflect on the role of working horses in our daily lives.

And it’s a role with a long history. For centuries, horses have transported people, goods and armies, and provided power on farms and in factories.

Then after the second world war, many were replaced by motorised vehicles and machinery. But that doesn’t mean they stopped working.

Today there are around 850,000 horses in the UK. As well as military units, there are 13 police forces with mounted branches. Horses are a familiar sight at football matches and demonstrations as well as ceremonial occasions. But most working horses are now employed in the sport, tourism and leisure industries.

And this is one of the reasons we may fail to recognise horses as “workers”. Our hard-wired anthropocentrism (believing humans are the most important beings) means we often fail to consider that, from a horse’s perspective, what is leisure to us is still work to them. This is compounded by the assumption that it is paid work which matters. We cannot pay horses, so how can we describe what they do as work?

Yet even to the untrained eye, it is hard to describe what many horses do in any other way. It is their physical effort which carries soldiers or police officers, delights punters at the racetrack, or hauls logs from sustainably managed forests.

And they engage in skilful emotional labour too, navigating crowded city streets or anticipating the next move of the rodeo rider.

Crowd control ahead of a football match in Newcastle, UK.
Islandstock/Alamy Stock Photo

When we properly consider horses as workers, it becomes clear that they deserve consideration, respect and safe working conditions, just like their human colleagues.

The unsettling scenes in London on April 24 showed what happens when those conditions are violated by a hostile outside world. And it was a reminder that we should bear in mind that while the people involved have largely chosen their line of work, the same cannot be said of the horses themselves.

The questions become tougher still if we take a global perspective. We are clearly a long way from a world in which decent work is a possibility for everyone, regardless of species. In many cases, not only horses, but the people working alongside them are often subject to extremely poor working conditions, or what one researcher calls “shared suffering”.

Stable relationships

In contrast, the working life of London’s cavalry horses is characterised by a high level of care, extensive training and a long retirement. This gives some insight into what is possible in a world where we treat animal workers with respect.

But for many working animals, the reality is very different. And our reluctance to recognise the animal workers among us is a symptom of a bigger problem. As a global society, we often seem unable to recognise our non-human neighbours as anything other than resources for our own benefit – with disastrous consequences.

If we are to find a way through environmental challenges like the climate crisis, we need to find new ways of thinking about the planet and all the species who share it with us. Recognising horses and other animals as workers is one small step along that road.

Recent research has found that working with horses has an influence on people’s understanding of what makes for a “good life”, which then inspires them to take better care of their environment.

This is an example of what one expert calls “interspecies solidarity” – the idea that someone does not need to be the same as us in order for us to care about their wellbeing.
And perhaps that’s a sense that our longstanding working relationship with horses could help to reignite. Läs mer…

James, the new novel by Percival Everett, is a stunning book which I relished long after finishing. It is the sort of book you need to tell all your friends about – and you know once they have read it, it will fundamentally change them. They can never unlearn what they discover once they’ve walked in James’s footsteps.

James is an incredible re-writing of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin that tells the story from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Just like the original book, it is set in the pre-Civil War plantation South. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and when the enslaved James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family, he goes on the run as “Jim”, with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn.

The same characters appear in both texts, including Tom Sawyer (Huck’s best friend), the town judge and the duke and the king – con artists who take control of Huck and Jim’s raft. While the mischievous Huck is the main focus of Twain’s novel, James is centre stage in this story.

To escape his abusive father, Huck fakes his own death and goes on the run with James. James is a slave he thinks he knows well, a man subservient to him who he also considers his friend, but as Everett’s story unfolds, he realises he does not have the full measure of this remarkable person. Huck’s ingrained prejudices have led him to overlook James’s power and intellect, and James works very hard to conceal both.

Everett has reclaimed James from the peripheries and urges the reader to listen to his story. With James as our narrator, we hear about Huck and James’s adventures and near brushes with death and capture as they steer their makeshift raft down the great Mississippi River.

This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. Everett expertly weaves Black literary criticism and theory into his narrative, as well as making artful allusions to books that came before that have shaped American scholarly and literary traditions. This weaving, however, is done with a light touch.

Everett’s tale is gripping and deeply emotional. And his prose is as clear as a bell in this wonderful retelling of an American classic.

The shape-shifting trickster

Jim is, in many ways, a quintessential trickster figure. Tricksters like the spider Anansi and Brer Rabbit were the heroes of oral folktales brought from the African continent with enslaved populations.

Trickster tales focus on how the disempowered can turn the tables on the powerful using their brains rather than their muscle. The stories represent subversive strategies of survival and resistance enacted by the enslaved on plantations across the Americas.

Pan Macmillan

The most remarkable aspect of the book is following the journey of James’s developing intellectual and political consciousness through his reading, writing and trickery. While on the run, he is able to source a pencil, with horrendous repercussions, and start to write his story.

James sneaks into libraries and steals books. He reads Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke. This education enables him to debate the ethics of enslavement and he has an impressive intellectual mastery of the English language, which he hides carefully from whites and even Huck himself.

James is a master code switcher, able to change the way he speaks to ingratiate himself to whoever he is speaking to. Before his escape he runs classes in his cabin for his enslaved children to teach them how to speak “slave speak” – to speak slowly, with a reduced vocabulary and to feign stupidity. This enables them to fool the slave masters while keeping their real language (and intelligence) hidden – to “play fool to catch wise”, as the Jamaican proverb goes.

These lessons are indispensable because, as James stresses: “safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency”. “Papa, why do we have to learn this?” the children ask. James explains that whites need to feel superior, or they will make the children suffer.

James displays the gifts of linguistic dexterity found in so many Black cultural forms, which were highlighted by the American literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his book The Signifyin’ Monkey (1988). Everett alludes to this Black literary and linguistic theory knowingly in the text – a sort of scholarly Easter egg for academic readers like me.

James and Huck face a lot of danger as they make their way down river.
Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The book is being marketed as humorous, but I didn’t find it funny. There are slapstick moments, for example when their raft capsizes (which happens frequently), but these were mainly moments of fear and anxiety.

Instead, the tale elicits a deep empathy for Huck and James, through the complexity of their developing relationship and James’s self-emancipation. I was so completely invested in their story that nothing they faced on their gruelling journey seemed funny. I was simply immersed in rooting for them, and others will be too.

Read this book and listen carefully to James’s story. It will change you. You will start to question all the other classic novels you’ve read and wonder whose story is being suppressed and why. What if, you’ll ask yourself, they could be fleshed out and heard properly? It would, perhaps, be a much richer tale to tell. Läs mer…

James, the new novel by Percival Everett, is a stunning book which I relished long after finishing. It is the sort of book you need to tell all your friends about – and you know once they have read it, it will fundamentally change them. They can never unlearn what they discover once they’ve walked in James’s footsteps.

James is an incredible re-writing of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin that tells the story from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Just like the original book, it is set in the pre-Civil War plantation South. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and when the enslaved James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family, he goes on the run as “Jim”, with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn.

The same characters appear in both texts, including Tom Sawyer (Huck’s best friend), the town judge and the duke and the king – con artists who take control of Huck and Jim’s raft. While the mischievous Huck is the main focus of Twain’s novel, James is centre stage in this story.

To escape his abusive father, Huck fakes his own death and goes on the run with James. James is a slave he thinks he knows well, a man subservient to him who he also considers his friend, but as Everett’s story unfolds, he realises he does not have the full measure of this remarkable person. Huck’s ingrained prejudices have led him to overlook James’s power and intellect, and James works very hard to conceal both.

Everett has reclaimed James from the peripheries and urges the reader to listen to his story. With James as our narrator, we hear about Huck and James’s adventures and near brushes with death and capture as they steer their makeshift raft down the great Mississippi River.

This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. Everett expertly weaves Black literary criticism and theory into his narrative, as well as making artful allusions to books that came before that have shaped American scholarly and literary traditions. This weaving, however, is done with a light touch.

Everett’s tale is gripping and deeply emotional. And his prose is as clear as a bell in this wonderful retelling of an American classic.

The shape-shifting trickster

Jim is, in many ways, a quintessential trickster figure. Tricksters like the spider Anansi and Brer Rabbit were the heroes of oral folktales brought from the African continent with enslaved populations.

Trickster tales focus on how the disempowered can turn the tables on the powerful using their brains rather than their muscle. The stories represent subversive strategies of survival and resistance enacted by the enslaved on plantations across the Americas.

Pan Macmillan

The most remarkable aspect of the book is following the journey of James’s developing intellectual and political consciousness through his reading, writing and trickery. While on the run, he is able to source a pencil, with horrendous repercussions, and start to write his story.

James sneaks into libraries and steals books. He reads Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke. This education enables him to debate the ethics of enslavement and he has an impressive intellectual mastery of the English language, which he hides carefully from whites and even Huck himself.

James is a master code switcher, able to change the way he speaks to ingratiate himself to whoever he is speaking to. Before his escape he runs classes in his cabin for his enslaved children to teach them how to speak “slave speak” – to speak slowly, with a reduced vocabulary and to feign stupidity. This enables them to fool the slave masters while keeping their real language (and intelligence) hidden – to “play fool to catch wise”, as the Jamaican proverb goes.

These lessons are indispensable because, as James stresses: “safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency”. “Papa, why do we have to learn this?” the children ask. James explains that whites need to feel superior, or they will make the children suffer.

James displays the gifts of linguistic dexterity found in so many Black cultural forms, which were highlighted by the American literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his book The Signifyin’ Monkey (1988). Everett alludes to this Black literary and linguistic theory knowingly in the text – a sort of scholarly Easter egg for academic readers like me.

James and Huck face a lot of danger as they make their way down river.
Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

The book is being marketed as humorous, but I didn’t find it funny. There are slapstick moments, for example when their raft capsizes (which happens frequently), but these were mainly moments of fear and anxiety.

Instead, the tale elicits a deep empathy for Huck and James, through the complexity of their developing relationship and James’s self-emancipation. I was so completely invested in their story that nothing they faced on their gruelling journey seemed funny. I was simply immersed in rooting for them, and others will be too.

Read this book and listen carefully to James’s story. It will change you. You will start to question all the other classic novels you’ve read and wonder whose story is being suppressed and why. What if, you’ll ask yourself, they could be fleshed out and heard properly? It would, perhaps, be a much richer tale to tell. Läs mer…

New import checks on foods arriving from the EU could affect supplies at Britain’s local delis, high-street greengrocers or independent cafes. Worse, they could lead to shortages that affect the very viability of these businesses. So what are these new checks and what does it all mean for consumers in the UK?

Three years ago, the UK departed the EU single market. This meant that the border checks applied to goods coming into the UK from other nations would also apply to goods from members of the EU.

The UK government had previously delayed imposing EU import checks to ease the burden on UK businesses. This was largely due to financial pressures caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, spiralling energy costs and stricken supply chains resulting from the pandemic.

However, after several years of delays, the UK is finally bracing itself for physical border checks on EU imports. The start of the year has already seen tighter controls around certification on goods entering the UK from the EU.

The new border target operating model system assigns EU plant and animal products to high-, medium- or low-risk categories. Businesses importing them pay fees per product type up to a maximum of £145.

Products in the low-risk category will ultimately be charged at £10 per product line, whereas medium to high-risk categories incur charges of £29 per product line.

The next phase of this risk-based system has just launched, involving physically checking medium- and high-risk goods at the border. Recent reports suggest the checks will be phased in and will focus initially on the highest-risk products only.

But regardless, these checks are costly, requiring additional resource, time and paperwork. Ultimately, they mean that importing food from the EU is no longer a level playing field.

UK’s short-life products are highly reliant on the short straits route where products arrive via Dover and the Eurotunnel. Around 62% of fruit and vegetables, 43% of meats and 41% of dairy products arrive from the EU through this route. The new charges associated with these products threaten to cripple small and independent importers.

The checks have dealt a blow to the operations of smaller retailers who are under increasing pressure to maintain their inventory. A small consignment of goods, with only five different products in the medium-risk category, such as poultry, milk or some fish products for example, would cost small importers £145.

There are complexities associated with the administration of these changes. The maximum charge for one consignment will be limited to five product types. If a consignment is made up of different risk categories, the rate of the highest risk category applies to all the product lines. So if a consignment contains four low-risk product lines (totalling £40) plus one medium- or high-risk product line (£29), the importer will pay the maximum charge of £145.

The physical checks will take place on goods arriving into the port of Dover or Eurotunnel.
Ethan Wilkinson/Unsplash, CC BY

The infrastructure has also been called into question. There have been concerns about the capacity and design limitations of the £147 million Sevington facility, 22 miles from Dover, that has been chosen for the inspections. Ironically, while these checks are touted to enhance UK’s biosecurity, there remain concerns that moving the checks inland “creates an open door for disease and food fraud”.

Last August, the government forecast that additional checks would cost UK businesses an extra £330 million per year, but a recent report puts the cost closer to £2 billion. These additional costs are likely to be passed on to consumers, potentially leading to further grocery price inflation.

Supermarket rationing has become relatively commonplace in recent times and imports categorised as high-risk may again be in short supply over the coming months. The combined effects of physical checks, higher charges and increased paperwork have already deterred EU exporters.

This ultimately affects price, choice and availability for UK consumers. EU businesses are required to submit export health certificates to UK port and customs authorities 24 hours before goods arrive, adding further layers to the process. Vague rules at the border lead to delays and disruptions, affecting the availability of food on supermarket shelves.

Larger retailers, of course, are more resilient to disruptions due to their bargaining power and established supply chain networks. To compete, smaller importers may reduce the variety of their offerings by focusing on low-risk products. Or they could pass the costs on to the consumer.

Navigating a way forward

Governments should encourage farmers’ markets and local vendors to champion seasonal products. These would shorten food supply chains and reduce vulnerabilities including rising costs and carbon footprints. Governments could make training available to small businesses to help them navigate the new border processes.

As for independent, specialist and small importers, they should move away from competing only on price to provide more unique offerings. They could stay competitive by embracing ethical sourcing and using technology to streamline the bureaucracy associated with the new import checks.

Whether it’s Brexit, COVID, the Ukraine war or border controls, food shortages represent deeper cracks in how our food supply chains are operated. Business and government must fix them or we risk losing a vital part of our economy – those much-loved small businesses that make our high streets more interesting. Läs mer…

In 1992, two years before the end of apartheid, Nelson Mandela bemoaned the state of South Africa’s print media. He said the media’s domination by middle class males from the minority white population posed the biggest threat to freedom of expression in the country. The same year, the African National Congress under his leadership adopted a media charter calling for all citizens to be empowered with the necessary information and contesting views to make informed choices. “An ignorant society cannot be democratic,” it declared. We asked Prinola Govenden, a media and communications senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, what became of the vision for free, inclusive and vibrant South African media.

What’s there to celebrate about freedom of expression and the media?

The state of media freedom in South Africa is healthy. According to the latest Freedom of the World 2024 findings by Freedom House, the American advocacy and research group supporting democracy, freedom of expression is generally respected. South Africa scores an impressive three out of four for having “free and independent media”. Independent civic groups can expose government malpractice and efforts to encroach freedom of expression.

Freedom House says the country has a “vibrant and adversarial media landscape”. This is a far cry from the suppression of journalists during apartheid, when there were about 100 laws that censored the media. Journalists were harassed, tortured, jailed and beaten for telling the truth.

What should be particularly celebrated is the power of investigative journalism in the last 30 years. It has helped to expose government corruption and other societal misdemeanours. Key examples include:

What are the threats?

There have been worrying incidents, lawsuits and policy proposals designed to intimidate the media. They include:

done with the intent to intimidate and harass her and prevent her from performing her duties as a journalist.

Luckily these are isolated occurrences.

Media freedom is under unprecedented attack globally, but not in South Africa.

How transformed are the media?

Despite policies to increase the representation of the previously disadvantaged in the structures of the media, the legacies of apartheid persist in democratic South Africa. Much research, including my own, has revealed that “race” is still the distributing power in media content, audiences, ownership and management of media institutions.

In print media content, blackness is still associated with negative characteristics. This can be seen, for example, in the coverage of labour and service delivery protests. It was also evident in the coverage of the 2012 Marikana massacre. Similarly with coverage of black leadership, black labour, and the economically marginalised and people in rural areas.
Access and audiences reflect historical inequalities. Wealthier and urban audiences have a wide choice of media while rural and poor audiences have restricted access.
Media ownership, management and boards show white privileged access. The Mail and Guardian in 2019 found that the media were still run mostly by white people:

the boards of media houses comprise 41% white, 24% African, 17% coloured, 16% Indian and 2% of people from elsewhere.

The media today face challenges Mandela could never have anticipated. What are they?

Media theorist Michael Schudson argues that the outcome of news processes can be related to the

structure of the state and economy and to the economic foundation of the news organisation.

The country’s neoliberal capitalist economy is a threat to media freedom, which Mandela most likely did not anticipate.

The power of neoliberalism in South Africa – an economic ideology that favours the free market where private companies rule and government plays a secondary role – is evident in various ways. Topics, voices and economics news are driven by elite concerns. It’s also seen in class continuities, hyper-commercialism, sensationalism and sameness in content across newspapers.

Add to that “juniorisation” – young and inexperienced newsrooms – shrinking of budgets for investigative journalism, as well as a media market structure with only a few owners. These have dire implications for media freedom, diversity and the media’s watchdog and public interest roles.

Read more:
New threats to media freedom come from unexpected directions

For instance, cultural imperialism theorist Herbert Schiller states that among the greatest threats to freedom of expression is the monopolisation of the market by media moguls leading to the monopolisation of the marketplace of ideas.

The digital age and rise of such tech giants as Google have posed new challenges for media freedom, which can also be seen in South Africa. Google’s abuse of its dominant market position – not government – is seen as the biggest threat to press freedom through its

secretive and dominant control of online news distribution.

What can be done about the challenges, or are South Africa media doomed?

There is much to celebrate about the critical role the media have played in 30 years of democracy. There is a platform for robust debate, promoting accountability and a thriving reflection of South Africa’s diversities and cultures. This is especially so through the public broadcaster’s radio and television stations. Hundreds of community radio stations across the country also play a part.

Many of the challenges the media face require a critical assessment of what has worked or not in the last 30 years. Perhaps a concerted effort is needed to bring back the alternative media, like the anti-establishment Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad that were so successful during apartheid. That way, new players can diversify the current media monopoly.

Read more:
Surveillance and the state: South Africa’s proposed new spying law is open for comment – an expert points out its flaws

Transformation of the media to represent the diversity of people and their perspectives has not been achieved.

As the legal scholar Joel Modiri aptly states, in a racially stratified society such as South Africa, to transcend race one must openly confront racism. Policies supporting transformation should be race-conscious and open up possibilities for genuine transformation and racial justice. Läs mer…