The agreements reflected expanding cooperation between Vietnamese and Indian enterprises across trade promotion, aviation finance, airport infrastructure, tourism, logistics, manufacturing, digital transformation and green technology.
The Vietnamese leader highly valued the growing cooperation between Maharashtra and Ho Chi Minh City, affirming that despite global uncertainties, Vietnam and India have every reason to be proud of the strong and substantive development of the bilateral ties over the past decade under the comprehensive strategic partnership framework.
General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee and State President To Lam stressed that the time has come for bilateral cooperation to reach a higher level, not only in scale, but more importantly in quality, depth and strategic value.
NEW YORK, May 7 — SpaceX has adopted corporate governance policies that will erode typical shareholder protections in unprecedented ways, giving founder Elon Musk virtually unchecked executive authority when the rocket maker goes public later this year.
Excerpts of SpaceX’s IPO registration statement reviewed by Reuters show the company is combining supervoting shares, mandatory arbitration, stricter rules on shareholder proposals and Texas corporate law to give Musk and other insiders broad control. At the same time, it sharply limits investors’ ability to challenge management, sue in court and force votes on governance issues. And the only person who can fire Musk is Musk, who will retain majority control through supervoting shares.
“It closes the voting door, the courthouse door and the proposal door simultaneously. It’s unprecedented in terms of creating a total lack of accountability,” said Bruce Herbert, CEO of Seattle-based sustainability-focused wealth management firm Newground Social Investment, which challenged Musk at his electric-vehicle company, Tesla, with a shareholder proposal that won 49 per cent of the vote in November. For all of Musk’s controversies, many investors see him as a visionary able to achieve impossible things. At Tesla, the board recently awarded him a 10-year pay package worth close to US$1 trillion (RM3.9 trillion), saying the company would lose significant value “without Elon.” At SpaceX, much of his pay is tied to launching massive data centers in space and colonizing Mars.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Price of entry
The restrictions may not stop investors from piling in. Some investors see relinquishing some of their rights as the cost to buy in to what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history as SpaceX eyes up to US$75 billion in proceeds and a US$1.75 trillion valuation. Many investors fear missing out, especially if the billionaire entrepreneur can generate returns similar to those of Tesla. The EV maker’s shares have risen to about US$397.55 as of Wednesday afternoon compared with their 2010 debut at US$17. With stock splits, Tesla has given investors annualised returns of about 42 per cent, according to LSEG data.
“SpaceX is going to be such a huge part of the market that for most portfolio managers it’s very difficult not to buy, because it’s going to be driving the price of everything,” said Ann Lipton, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School. “And if SpaceX soars, and you don’t have a piece of it, then you’re going to look like you’re underperforming the market by comparison.”
Musk is structuring SpaceX to protect the company from the kind of shareholder criticism aimed at Tesla, according to corporate governance experts. The EV maker’s investors have challenged Musk on issues ranging from his pay package to the acquisition of his solar energy company, SolarCity.
There is a risk for investors, the experts added, that Musk sets a precedent for other high-profile, founder-led IPOs expected to come to market later this year or next, including artificial-intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI.
“They are all complicated, potentially controversial figures that are also creating history in real time,” Dishmi Capital co-founder Shang Chou said of Musk, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and other founders. “You focus less on valuation and more on the fact that you’ve been offered a seat on a rocket ship.”
Musk consolidates power
Musk will stay on as CEO, chief technology officer and chairman of SpaceX’s nine-member board of directors after the company’s stock starts trading later this year. He has a firm grip with 42.5 per cent of the company’s equity and 83.8 per cent of the voting control, according to a May 4 filing with federal regulators. SpaceX plans to use a dual-class equity structure that gives Class B shareholders 10 votes for every Class A share available to everyday investors, concentrating power with Musk and a handful of other insiders with supervoting shares. Musk’s Class B stock, which will not be available to the public, will allow him to retain more than 50 per cent of the voting power in the company after it goes public, handing him and other insiders the power to pick a majority of the board of directors.
That will also give Musk the power to “elect, remove or fill any vacancy” among those directors, the company said. It also hands to him the power to control other issues requiring shareholder approval, including M&A transactions, potentially making it easier to merge with Tesla later if he wants.
The supervoting shares will be immediately converted to Class A shares if the stock is sold, further consolidating power among the remaining Class B holders. Although the company can issue more Class B shares, only Musk, his family and “certain entities” will be eligible to receive them, the filing shows.
‘Controlled company’
Musk’s voting power will make SpaceX a “controlled company” under securities rules, the filing shows. It is not uncommon for founder-led companies in media and tech to hand control to their charismatic CEOs, as happened with Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Platforms and at News Corp with former CEO Rupert Murdoch. That designation allows them to bypass certain corporate-governance requirements so they can make big, bold moves fast.
While most publicly traded companies are required to have independent directors make up a majority of their nominating and compensation committees, controlled companies do not have to and SpaceX said it does not plan to.
“You will not have the same protections afforded to shareholders of companies that are subject to all of the corporate governance requirements,” the company warned in a list of potential risk factors for investors.
Forced arbitration
The company significantly limits shareholders’ rights to sue. SpaceX’s bylaws will make it clear that anyone who owns shares “irrevocably and unconditionally” waives all rights to pursue a jury trial. Shareholders will also be prohibited from bringing class actions against the company, its directors, officers, controlling shareholders or bankers tied to the IPO, according to the filing. Instead, shareholders will be subject to mandatory arbitration, which had long been illegal in the US The Securities and Exchange Commission reversed its position in September, allowing companies to adopt mandatory arbitration policies, which are private proceedings overseen by arbitrators.
Texas versus Delaware
SpaceX is taking full advantage of its decision to move its incorporation in 2024 from Delaware to business-friendly Texas and the largely untested new governance laws there. The Lone Star State adopted a series of amendments to the Texas Business Organisations Code last year that significantly curtail investor protections. Musk abandoned Delaware after a judge there ruled to strip him of a 2018 Tesla pay package worth US$56 billion — a ruling that was recently reversed. The Texas incorporation gives the company extra protection from activist investors and hostile takeovers. The state’s securities laws also make it harder for challengers to make an unsolicited tender offer, run a proxy contest or remove officers, directors and management.
Shareholders will also have a harder time getting their proposals to a vote. They will need to own at least US$1 million in stock, or 3 per cent of the company, to force a vote under a new Texas rule.
“It’s definitely one of the most restrictive IPOs. He (Musk) is taking advantage of this ownership structure and the Texas provisions,” University of Pennsylvania law professor Jill Fisch said.
Joel Shulman, founder and chief investment officer of ERShares, which manages the US$993 million Private/Public Crossover ETF, said he has no issues with the restrictions as a SpaceX investor.
“I would rather have him making these decisions and be in control,” he said. “He may be controversial and polarizing and he does some crazy, bizarre things sometimes, but he’s a brilliant guy when it comes to building something completely new and building wealth” for himself and shareholders. — Reuters
GOMA (DR Congo), May 7 — In Tshopo, a north-eastern Congolese province blanketed in rainforest, rumours rippled through villages late last year claiming a mysterious illness had caused men’s genitals to atrophy.
Within days, testimonials proliferated on social media that amplified the imaginary threat, triggering a real-life panic that turned deadly before the government could react.
Angry mobs attacked and killed four health workers conducting vaccination research in an episode that took place in October, four officials and a survivor told Reuters — a deadly example of the rising danger posed by online health misinformation in Africa.
The violence has since spread to other parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In all, at least 17 killings related to the atrophy rumour have been reported, including the health workers, according to the WHO-led Africa Infodemic Response Alliance, which monitors fake health information. Reuters could not independently verify the other deaths.
In Congo, misinformation “really led to death and murder,” said the Nairobi-based alliance’s director Elodie Ho. “It started in communities. It spread into social media and local media. It was amplified by those actors.”
An examination of over a dozen video testimonials by the news agency, one of them viewed hundreds of thousands of times, found that churches helped spread the rumours in Tshopo. Overseas accounts and local news media also played a role.
In two of the videos, verified by the news agency, pastors and worshippers at two churches in provincial capital Kisangani stated prayer had cured alleged victims.
To establish the October events in Tshopo and the spread of misinformation elsewhere in Africa, Reuters examined medical studies and spoke to at least 20 people including local and regional officials, health workers and medical experts.
In response to questions from Reuters, Tshopo’s government spokesman said local officials took the rumour seriously, investigating claims by five alleged victims, and found no evidence the illness was real.
The government has moved to punish those responsible for fueling the panic. A local court sentenced a man who accused another of spreading the disease to 12 months in prison, and around a dozen people were arrested, the spokesman and another local official said.
Mistrust rooted in colonial past
Prevalent in many parts of the world including the United States, a lack of faith in established medicine in parts of Africa is partly rooted in both the colonial era and more recent Western clinical trials.
Such mistrust is turbocharged by cheap artificial intelligence and widespread social media use, according to the African Union’s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Uneven access to healthcare, weak rule of law and social media use play a part in the proliferation of rumours.
Dr. Jean Kaseya, Director General of the African Union’s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said false information was keeping people away from lifesaving treatments.
“When populations do not trust vaccines, health workers, or government policies, it means they don’t access services that can help them survive,” he said.
As well as in Congo, attacks on community leaders and health workers have been recorded in Mozambique and Malawi, linked to false cholera-related information.
A WHO-managed healthline aiming to combat health misinformation and provide authoritative advice has seen calls surge from 3,331 in the first quarter of 2025 to 31,636 in the fourth.
Another WHO project, tracking interactions with communities, recorded around 500 incidents since its launch last year related to rumours, conspiracy theories and other false information.
Churches and the cure
Dr. Bavon Tangunza, manager for the AIRA alliance in Congo, received a warning about the fake illness in Tshopo early in October, he said, when a colleague flagged the rumour spreading in the province.
Video testimonials by alleged victims soon appeared online.
One showed a taxi driver on stage at a Christian gathering in Tshopo recounting how megachurch pastor Jules Mulindwa of the Pentecostal Church Light of the World, located in Kisangani, had cured him with prayer.
The taxi driver presented no evidence, and Reuters was unable to identify him by name. The news agency could not establish who filmed the video, which bears the church’s logo. Posted on TikTok by a prominent church worker, it was widely watched — and shared.
On the Facebook page of Boyoma Revolution, an online news site listed with an address in Marseille, France, the video has been viewed more than 300,000 times.
A self-styled prophet whose TikTok channel shows him with large crowds of followers and has over 400,000 subscribers, Mulindwa has previously falsely claimed to cure coronavirus, according to CongoCheck, an online factchecking platform.
He received a 12-month prison term for defamation last year but has not served the sentence, a lawyer for the prosecution told Reuters. In response to questions from the news agency, a close relative who works for Mulindwa denied he had been convicted.
Mulindwa did not respond to requests for comment.
Another video, posted online by a local church called Assemblée Chretienne de Kisangani on October 3, showed pastor Christophore Kabamba at the church claiming to have a miracle cure. The church did not respond to requests for comment.
James Baka, a Kisangani university student who appears in the clip, told Reuters in a Facebook message that he saw others miraculously cured by the pastor.
In response to a request for comment, Boyoma Revolution acknowledged there was no evidence for the illness, but did not answer questions about why the video was still on its page.
TikTok and Facebook, which bans harmful health information but has wound down fact-checking programmes that helped it detect such content, did not immediately answer Reuters questions.
Tshopo Kwetu, a local news outlet, also shared posts about the fake illness. Director Gaston Mukendi told Reuters his outlet published information from a range of sources in line with its journalistic duties.
He pointed out an interview with a medical student debunking the rumour as an anxiety disorder.
Attacks expose vulnerability of health system
Violence erupted on October 6, when health workers reached villages in the Isangi area of Tshopo to carry out vaccination surveys.
In Ilambi village, young men accused the health workers of secretly spreading the fake disease when they saw outsiders wearing high-visibility vests and carrying tablet computers, according to local officials and Jean-Claude Kengefuku Mbatu, a member of the health worker team who escaped.
Two others in the team, Placide Mbungi and John Tangakeya, both medical doctors, tried to explain their vaccine research, which was unrelated to the health scare.
They were killed on the spot, the officials and Mbatu said.
“They burned him alive, without even leaving me a trace of him,” Tangakeya’s widow Justine Tangakeya Basekauke told Reuters.
In nearby Yafira village, their colleagues Mathieu Mosisi and Kevin Ilunga sought help from a nearby policeman, but an angry crowd killed them as well, Tshopo health official Marie Jeanne Lebe told Reuters after a review of the incident was completed.
Reuters could not independently verify all of the events surrounding the deaths.
False and dangerous
The day after the killings, on October 7, the governor’s office put out a statement printed and posted online declaring the rumours were false and dangerous.
Over the next month, AIRA’s Tangunza helped craft messages to be broadcast in local languages over the radio, online and through community workers, and held workshops to prepare responses to any future misinformation crises.
But the rumours continue to resurface, months later.
In an incident in March, a woman in Congo’s Lualaba province was accused of spreading the disease and lynched, while a second person survived the attack, AIRA said, citing local media reports. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
Further complicating efforts to tackle false information, US and other nations’ foreign aid cuts over the past year have left AIRA low on funds, director Ho told Reuters in an interview.
One of AIRA’s funders, The Gates Foundation, said a grant to AIRA was active through December. It did not say whether further grants were under consideration.
AIRA now has personnel in just three countries, including Tangunza in Congo, down from five.
An AI platform built to track online conversations to monitor for fake information is out of action because there is no money for the monthly subscriptions with providers, Ho said.
The WHO regional office said talks were underway to secure funding to sustain and scale up AIRA’s work. — Reuters
SANTA MARTA (Colombia), May 7 — Yerson Granados used to fish off Colombia’s Caribbean coast for a living, but when he discovered the havoc he was wreaking on coral reefs, he changed his ways.
The 56-year-old from the city of Santa Marta now earns his keep saving coral, which is vital for marine biodiversity.
“We used to destroy them,” Granados told AFP, his body half-submerged in the sea and diving goggles concealing his face.
“We didn’t know it was a living being. They looked like rocks to us.”
Forty-four per cent of the world’s coral species face extinction, mainly due to climate change, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated in 2024.
When he discovered the pressing need to preserve coral, Granados swapped his dynamite, nets and anchors for a diving suit, which he uses to plunge to the depths of the sea to attach coral fragments to an artificial reef in a bid to repopulate the area.
He was the first fisherman to retrain as an environmental defender under a pioneering project to replenish the Caribbean coral ecosystem.
CIM Caribbean Foundation estimates that it has planted 1.5 hectares worth of 20 different coral species thanks to the team of former fishermen.
The NGO is hoping to plant 36 hectares of coral by 2030, which scientific director Diana Tarazona calls reviving “underwater cities.”
“Working with them (the former fishermen) means gaining insight into what lies beyond the literature, which is that innate knowledge they have” about the sea, she said.
A typical workday for Granados entails diving 10 metres below the surface with an oxygen tank to monitor the precious gardens.
The corals spend months growing in an incubator before transplantation.
Once underwater, they become “houses for the fish,” he said.
Kevin Monsalvo, 26, has followed in the footsteps of Granados and said things are different for him since he learned more about the organism threatened with extinction.
“Life has changed quite a lot for me, because we didn’t know what a coral was,” he said.
“For me, a coral is life now.” — AFP
ABIDJAN, May 7 — By miming children juggling ammunition found on the ground or driven mad by fear, the four acrobats hope to express what is too painful for words: how their native Burkina Faso’s jihadist conflict has ruined countless childhoods.
Baptised “Souffle” (Breath), the Dafra Circus’s latest performance “is about life... and when we talk about life we talk about hope, and hope means the children”, the troupe’s choreographer, Jean Adolphe Sanou, told AFP after a performance in neighbouring Ivory Coast.
For more than a decade, Burkina Faso has been at war with jihadists who have killed, kidnapped, raped or recruited thousands of the west African country’s children, according to the United Nations.
Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch also accuse the Burkinabe army and its allied civilian volunteer fighters of abuses, including towards minors.
Dafra Circus does not touch on that part of the issue – the army has cracked down on criticism since taking power through two military coups in 2022.
But for nearly an hour at a concert hall in Ivory Coast’s economic capital Abidjan, the troupe’s performing quartet translated the despair, innocence and resistance of children facing the unspeakable for several hundred spectators.
Slipping into the skin of a traumatised child, one of the men executed a series of pirouettes, swaying steps and somersaults to mimic the onset of insanity.
For the troupe’s artistic director Moustapha Konate, circus is an art that “makes it possible to bring together as many people as possible” because it “draws them in through feats, beauty, fluidity of movement”.
In the 30-year-old’s eyes, dance is “perhaps the easiest way for us artists” to “deal with a topic”.
Whole troupe ‘affected’
Konate’s position is clear: Dafra Circus “takes a stand against the involvement of children in wars”.
According to a UN report from last year, children suffered more than any other part of the population from Burkina Faso’s spiral of violence, with more than 2,200 enduring grave abuses between 2022 and 2024.
Mostly attributed to jihadist groups, the most frequent abuses involve murder, mutilation, abductions, recruitment as child soldiers, exploitation and sexual violence.
“Souffle” takes inspiration from the lives of the artists, who travelled from their base in Burkina Faso’s second city Bobo-Dioulasso to perform at a festival in Abidjan in mid-April.
Within the circus, “everyone has been affected” by the violence, Konate affirmed.
Despite its dark subject matter, the show received a rapturous reception in both the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou and the troupe’s Bobo-Dioulasso hometown.
“Many people aren’t familiar with the circus,” Konate said. “Seeing circus mixed with dance... theatre, juggling and storytelling was something new for them.”
Once the lights had dimmed and the spectators emptied out of the Abidjan events hall, Yeli Gnougoh Coulibaly departed, moved by the performance.
“It’s important for artists to put on shows about the terrorist violence in Burkina,” the 21-year-old said. “I’d say it’s a bit more subtle” and “less shocking than the news, because on TV... it’s scary.” — AFP
Historically, the United States hasn’t always been easy to deal with, but it was consistent. Even countries that disagreed with American policies knew there was a logic underlying its actions, and this predictability gave the country some credibility.
But now, under U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, American foreign policy has become haphazard and contradictory, driven by a leader who believes his ability to exercise power around the world is constrained only by his own morality.
This is new and, for observers around the world, perplexing. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently said: “Washington has changed. There is almost nothing normal now in the United States.”
Some, like U.S. Vice President JD Vance, are labouring to erect a retroactive, pseudo-intellectual scaffolding around this chaotic mess, seeking to frame it as a coherent doctrine. But it’s become increasingly clear there’s no grand plan, just a Trumpian maelstrom of impulsive reactions, extractive transactions and personal grudges that shift with the news cycle.
To understand this political dysfunction, a German thinker from more than 100 years ago, Max Weber, offers a helpful guide.
Most famous today for his theory of “the Protestant work ethic,” Weber’s writing also explored the concept of “patrimonialism.”
This is a system of governance in which a ruler treats the state as personal property, governs by whim and uses the state’s resources to reward cronies and enrich family. Drawing largely on his understanding of the Ottoman Empire, Weber called the most extreme form of this system “sultanism.”
Reading Weber today, it seems the best description of how the U.S. engages the wider world could be termed “sultanism with American characteristics.”
Consider Iran. Following the start of Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration cycled through so many conflicting war aims that CNN was able to assemble a montage of the contradictions.
Senior administration officials worked feverishly to build a strategy around the operation, but it soon became clear that this “war of choice” was started based on little more than the president’s whim.
Read more: Vietnam ruined Lyndon B. Johnson’s political career. Will Donald Trump face the same fate over Iran?
Weber’s framework extends to the people around Trump. In sultanistic systems, staff are selected based on loyalty, not merit, and serve the ruler, not the state.
As Weber wrote, this leads to “an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master.”
We see this pattern vividly illustrated by the Trump administration’s approach to staffing senior roles, including those leading high-stakes diplomatic negotiations.
Look at Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime Trump friend with no foreign policy experience, who has served as the administration’s lead envoy on some of the most sensitive negotiations in the world.
Or Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who, despite having no background in foreign policy, was entrusted with key roles in Middle East diplomacy, while his investment firm pursues deals with the same Gulf states he is negotiating with on behalf of his country.
These are not appointments that a merit-based system would produce. But right now in America, officials serve the sultan, not the republic, which is why their speeches are regularly given for an “audience of one.”
Furthermore, in seeking the sultan’s favour, appointees regularly debase themselves on television, such as when Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to be the next head of the Federal Reserve, refused to admit Trump lost the 2020 election.
This sultanistic pattern of rewarding loyalty and punishing defiance is expanding. Federal disaster relief, long treated as a non-partisan obligation of the government, has become a stark illustration of this logic.
Since the start of his second term, Trump has approved just 23 per cent of disaster funding requests from blue states, compared to 89 per cent for red states. In some cases, the conditionality for disaster aid has been made explicit: for example, in 2025, as fires ravaged Los Angeles, Trump threatened to withhold aid unless California enacted voter ID laws — a condition with no relationship to disaster recovery.
This fear of punishment also helps explain why, fearing for their businesses, many media companies are bowing to “the court of King Trump.”
Finally, Weber’s framework sheds light on what may be the most defining feature of the Trump administration: a blurring of the lines between public office and private enrichment. Under sultanism, the distinction between the ruler’s personal wealth and the state’s treasury is, at best, notional.
Trump and his team have governed accordingly, with perhaps the most egregious example being hundreds of millions of dollars of insider trading around the Iran war. In a healthy democracy, this “orgy of corruption” would be investigated and prosecuted. But in a patrimonial system this is simply how things work: the state exists to serve the ruler and his inner circle.
This is what the world must now manage. A sultanistic system does not respond to appeals to shared values or long-standing agreements. It responds to leverage, personal relationships with the ruler and transactional incentives.
Policymakers and business leaders increasingly understand they are dealing with a court that rewards fealty and punishes defiance. That’s why the Swiss gave Trump a gold bar in exchange for lower tariffs, and why the Qataris gave him a “palace in the sky.”
In 2026, appeals to shared democratic values or common national interests are pointless; bring the sultan something he wants or face punishment. Weber helps explain why.
Christopher Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Pattaya, Thailand – Authorities have launched a full-scale investigation and ordered the immediate shutdown of an illegal nightclub following the death of a Chinese tourist who was brutally assaulted by staff and patrons inside the venue. Ten people from Thailand, China, and Myanmar have been arrested and claimed self defense and that the victim was […]
Pattaya Police Chief Orders Immediate Closure of Illegal Pub After Chinese Tourist Beaten to Death, Ten People Arrested
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TPN National News - Real. Unbiased. Impactful. In the moment.
Ofsted, the schools inspectorate in England, was the subject of a UK parliamentary inquiry after the death by suicide of Ruth Perry, headteacher of Caversham Primary school in Berkshire, in 2023. The coroner’s report had concluded that Perry’s death was “suicide, contributed to by an Ofsted inspection”.
The parliamentary inquiry called for submissions of evidence about Ofsted from members of the public. Our recent research has analysed the 233 published submissions, many of which were from teachers. One submission to the inquiry included an impact statement by a headteacher written in 2022. It read:
The manner in which the inspection was conducted and the lack of integrity from the Lead Inspector has meant that my family have had to support me through suicidal thoughts and through countless occasions of being in floods of tears as soon as I think back to that day.
“It seems incredible that an issue like the conduct of school inspection should be a life-and-death matter, but so indeed it has become,” the submission from her school stated.
Sociological theory helps us ask questions and seek radical answers about how societies function, including government policy such as the inspection of schools.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim’s theory of suicide argues that suicide does not only happen because of mental illness, but that it also has a social context. Durkheim examined how the interaction of people and social control, as well as notions of shame, guilt, failing expectations and feeling trapped, might result in someone having suicidal thoughts and feelings.
We found evidence of teachers feeling shame. One submission mentioned “the enormous shame and distress that is felt by those leading and working within the school”.
Teachers also reported feeling trapped:
In my last inspection in November 2019, I lost half a stone in the three days (starting from the phone call) and lost my voice. My family suffered, there were arguments and I slept on the couch. The stress and pressure was all too much. As a school leader, I live in fear and I came into education because I love teaching but now I feel trapped.
The risk of a less than good inspection was “petrifying”. Having to be always ready for an inspection was “intolerable”. The thought of letting colleagues down by making a mistake was “unbearable”.
Teachers wrote about ill health because of Ofsted experiences. These accounts included vomiting, physical collapse, panic attacks, incontinence and suspected stroke with a temporary loss of speech. One wrote that they had a miscarriage the day after a deeply stressful Ofsted inspection.
The Education Committee’s report noted that the committee had heard that “Ofsted has lost trust and credibility among many in the teaching profession.”
However, a number of reports on Ofsted’s practice, including the independent learning review commissioned by Ofsted, fail to acknowledge that teachers can have suicidal thoughts and feelings because of Ofsted.
Ofsted’s developments since the inquiry include introducing report cards for schools. Ofsted says this is fairer, but teachers say it creates more stress. An independent risk assessment warns that “the revised framework does not reduce the pressure on leaders to achieve a desirable outcome. The consequence of not meeting the expected standards of the revised framework will remain high stakes in nature.”
Other developments include changes regarding inspections of provision for children in care and inspection frameworks themselves.
But we do not believe that these changes constitute the “root and branch” review of Ofsted previously called for by education leaders.
Professor Julia Waters, Ruth Perry’s sister, has said that our study “presents the evidence of the terrible human cost posed by Ofsted inspections, evidence that Ofsted and successive governments have still not fully grasped”.
Both Ofsted and the government should review how the inspectorate works. Not to do so runs the risk of school inspections remaining a life-and-death matter.
If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, the following services can provide you with support: In the UK and Ireland – call Samaritans UK at 116 123. In the US – call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or IMAlive at 1-800-784-2433. In Australia – call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14. In other countries – visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in your country.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Just days before the opening of the 2026 Venice Biennale, organisers announced that Iran would no longer participate.
A short statement posted to the Venice Biennale website on May 4 said: “With regard to the National Participations in the 61st International Art Exhibition…it has been announced that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not participate.” No explanation was given. I believe that silence is itself revealing.
Iran’s withdrawal is less a sudden decision than the result of converging geopolitical and economic pressures that are reshaping both the global art world and Iran’s place within it.
At the most immediate level, the withdrawal reflects the material realities of crisis. With internet access restricted, international flights suspended and communication networks severely disrupted, even the basic logistics of participation – coordinating, shipping and installing artworks – probably became nearly impossible for Iran.
These conditions have been compounded by intensifying economic pressures, including the sharp devaluation of the Iranian rial, which has made international cultural engagement increasingly difficult to sustain.
Such constraints point to a fundamental condition of contemporary art: global exhibitions rely on infrastructures of mobility and communication that are easily destabilised by conflict and sanctions.
The timing is also significant. The decision comes amid renewed military tensions and escalating political rhetoric surrounding Iran’s position in the global order. In such moments, when political discourse edges toward existential threat, the stakes of cultural visibility are heightened. At the same time, sustaining cultural presence becomes more difficult.
Read more: Middle East conflict looks increasingly like a war nobody can win
More revealing still was the lack of any announced artist, curatorial framework or exhibition concept for Iran’s pavilion, even days before the Biennale’s opening.
Iran’s presence at the Venice Biennale has historically been organised through state institutions, with oversight exercised by the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance since the Iranian revolution (1978-79). As with many national pavilions, this model positions art as a form of cultural diplomacy. But in Iran’s case, it has often produced a disconnect between official representation and contemporary artistic practice.
This gap is significant. The Venice Biennale, often described as the “Olympics of the art world”, remains structured around national pavilions, with each country responsible for presenting its cultural identity on a global stage. Yet, as critics have long argued, it has never been a neutral platform, but a space where art and geopolitics intersect.
More broadly, biennials are deeply embedded in political and institutional contexts, rather than existing outside them. Within this framework, they are often understood as sites of cultural soft power, where nations project influence through artistic production.
Iran’s withdrawal must also be understood in relation to the wider turmoil surrounding the 2026 biennale itself. This year’s edition has been marked by extraordinary controversy, including disputes over the involvement of Russia and Israel, calls for boycotts and the resignation of the entire international jury just days before the opening.
These events expose the fragility of the biennale’s longstanding claim to neutrality. Rather than existing outside politics, it has become a site where geopolitical tensions are actively staged and contested.
To exhibit at the biennale is never neutral: it means entering a highly visible arena shaped by competing narratives of legitimacy and power. For the Islamic Republic, this raises a deeper tension. The biennale’s national pavilion model requires countries to present a coherent cultural identity through contemporary art. Yet Iran’s artistic landscape is anything but singular. It is shaped by internal contradictions between state and independent practices, censorship and experimentation and local production and diasporic circulation.
These tensions are difficult to reconcile within a state-managed exhibition framework. The very premise of the pavilion – art as national representation – sits uneasily with a system in which artistic expression is subject to ideological and institutional control.
At the same time, the Biennale embodies forms of global circulation, cultural competition and visibility tied to international art markets that do not always align with the cultural and political ethos of the Islamic Republic. Representation therefore involves negotiating how a nation appears, to whom, and on whose terms.
The current moment makes this tension even more acute. As political rhetoric escalates and the possibility of large-scale destruction is invoked in global discourse, cultural visibility becomes more urgent. Art offers one of the few spaces through which narratives beyond conflict and diplomacy can emerge. Yet for Iranian artists, cultural presence is becoming more fragmented, shaped by diasporic networks, constrained by national borders and limited by economic and infrastructural pressures.
Iranian artists, particularly those working through independent and diasporic networks, have for decades operated beyond the frameworks of state representation, with their work circulating internationally through alternative artistic circuits. Iran’s missing pavilion, then, does not signal the disappearance of Iranian art. Rather, it reveals the precarious conditions through which that art circulates.
Iran’s absence from the Venice Biennale also highlights the limits of the national pavilion model. The system has frequently been criticised for reducing complex artistic practices to simplified national identities, even as contemporary art now operates through transnational networks that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state.
In Venice this year, the missing pavilion reflects an art world shaped as much by political crisis as by artistic production. Iranian art is not absent from the global stage. Yet the conditions under which it circulates and remains visible have become increasingly fragile.
Katayoun Shahandeh works for SOAS University of London.
Artificial intelligence can now outperform doctors at diagnosing patients in the emergency department, according to a new study in Science.
The AI was given written notes from real emergency department records from a hospital in Boston, US, and asked to weigh in at different points during the patient’s care. At the earliest stage – triage, when a patient first arrives – the AI identified the correct diagnosis, or something closely related, in 67% of cases.
The two doctors used for comparison managed 50% and 55%. That’s a meaningful gap, especially at the moment when information is scarcest and uncertainty is highest.
This study matters because the field is moving so fast. Earlier research showed that large language models – the technology behind systems like ChatGPT – could pass medical licensing exams. Interesting, but not all that illuminating. Passing an exam is not the same as being useful on a ward.
This new study goes further. It puts AI alongside doctors across several tasks, using genuine clinical text from a real emergency department. That makes it more directly relevant to medical practice than most of what’s come before. It suggests these systems are developing into something that could genuinely help doctors think through a wide range of possible diagnoses, especially in situations where missing a serious condition is the main concern.
There are good reasons, though, not to get carried away.
The AI was working entirely from written text. It never saw the patient, never noticed how breathless or frightened they looked, never examined them, spoke to their family, weighed up the chaos of a busy department, or took any responsibility for what happened next. It was not practising emergency medicine. It was offering a written opinion based on selected information.
There’s also a gap between producing a list of possible diagnoses and actually improving patient outcomes. A longer list might help a doctor think more broadly, but it could equally generate new problems: unnecessary tests, over-treatment, extra workload, or unwarranted confidence in an answer that sounds plausible but turns out to be wrong.
And some of the benchmark cases used in studies like this may have been publicly available when the AI was trained, which doesn’t undermine the emergency department findings, but is another reason to treat headline numbers with some scepticism.
So the question isn’t really whether AI can help doctors think through difficult cases. The harder question is how this should be tested and governed in real clinical settings like the NHS.
That question is already urgent. A Royal College of Physicians snapshot found that 16% of UK doctors were using AI tools in clinical practice every day, with another 15% doing so weekly. Doctors are already using these tools in their daily work – before hospitals and health systems have properly worked out how to assess them, train staff to use them safely, spot when they’re causing harm, or decide who is responsible when something goes wrong.
It’s tempting to say that the solution is to keep a human in the loop. But that phrase does very little work on its own. We need to know which human, in which loop, and with what authority. A doctor’s ability to override an AI suggestion is not, by itself, a safety system. Someone still has to decide which tools get used, who can change how they behave, how harms are spotted, and who is responsible when the tool quietly starts failing.
This study represents genuine progress. But it doesn’t, on its own, change how medicine should be practised. The right response is neither to prohibit these systems nor to let them quietly become part of the routine before anyone has thought it through. They should be trialled in real clinical settings, used as a form of second-opinion support rather than a substitute for clinical judgment, and measured against what actually matters to patients: care that is better, safer and faster.
Ewen Harrison receives funding from a number of grant-giving bodies including UKRI, NIHR, HDRUK, and Wellcome Leap. He is a Deputy Editor with NEJM AI.
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