🚨 WOW! An emergency room physician just revealed that since President Trump took office, he went from seeing a DOZEN fentanyl overdoses daily to just 1-2
Raul Garcia: "Sometimes we even go 3 days with NO fentanyl overdose!" 👏🏻
China consumed more cement in just 2 years than the United States used during the entire 20th century.
Between 2011 and 2013, China poured approximately 6.6 billion tonnes of cement—surpassing the 4.4 billion tonnes the United States used over the full 100 years of the 20th century.
In roughly 1,000 days, China achieved a scale of concrete construction that the U.S. took an entire century to reach.
While America built its legendary interstate highways, towering skyscrapers, and sprawling suburbs across generations, China replicated—and exceeded—that monumental physical legacy in under three years.
This breathtaking acceleration reflects an unprecedented transformation in global development, driven by the world’s most rapid urbanization in history.
Key factors included the construction of vast megaprojects (such as the Three Gorges Dam) and the explosive rise of high-density cities.
Unlike the U.S., where residential building long favored lighter, wood-framed single-family homes, China’s modernization prioritized concrete-heavy high-rise apartment towers, extensive metro systems, bridges, airports, and industrial infrastructure to house and connect hundreds of millions moving from rural to urban areas.
Yet this architectural triumph carries a heavy price. Cement production is one of the largest single sources of human-generated CO₂ emissions—accounting for roughly 8% of the global total. The sheer volume China produced during this period alone generated an enormous carbon footprint, highlighting the stark tension between breakneck economic and infrastructural growth and the urgent demands of climate change mitigation.
[China National Bureau of Statistics / World Cement Association reports]
'I was beaten, tortured, I was left in the desert for 72 hours.'
Albert Douglas details his time in a Dubai prison where he was held for nearly five years. He says the Labour Government and previous Conservative Government were unable to do anything 'through lack of trying'. pic.twitter.com/Ja86HsiKpW
In 1963, a man in Türkiye knocked down a wall while searching for his missing chickens and rediscovered an ancient underground city built thousands of years ago that descends up to 18 levels.pic.twitter.com/TY54yvA9AT
The United Arab Emirates doesn’t do half-measures when it comes to political Islam. It does not indulge euphemisms. It does not pretend that ideology dissolves when it crosses a border or dons a blazer. In Abu Dhabi, the Muslim Brotherhood is banned, branded, and broken up with administrative efficiency. Its literature is treated as toxic. Its networks are viewed as subversive. Its long game is understood for what it is: power, patiently acquired.
That is why the UAE has quietly and decisively cut state fundingfor students wishing to study in the United Kingdom. British universities, once a favoured destination for Emiratis, are now seen as exposure sites for dangerous ideas. The concern is not drunken undergraduates or fashionable radicalism, but Islamist incubation.
The Emirati position is blunt. They do not want their children radicalised on campus.British officials, predictably, responded with soothing talk of academic freedom. Two cultures passing in the night. One sees ideology as a weapon. The other insists it is a discussion topic.
This is where the British posture stops looking naïve and starts looking dangerous.
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The Brotherhood is not banned in the UK. It is not proscribed. It is treated as a problematic debating society rather than what it has always been: a disciplined, hierarchical, mission-driven movement with an explicitly political theology. Its founder, Hassan al-Banna, was not confused about the objective. Society must be reordered. Law must submit. Faith must govern. The state comes last, after the mind is captured.
The Brotherhood has long pursued a patient, decade-spanning plan to embed itself within Western institutions, entrenching its influence inside the very systems meant to safeguard liberal democracy. The aim is not confrontation but corrosion, not revolution, but quiet replacement. It builds student groups, nurtures charities, and cultivates “community leaders”.It speaks the language of welfare, representation, and inclusion.It understands that liberal societies mistake patience for harmlessness and pluralism for neutrality. Over time, access becomes influence, influence becomes authority, and authority is exercised without ever having been formally granted.
The UAE understands something else. The Brotherhood’s brutality is not always loud, and not always explosive, but often bureaucratic. It is enforced through pressure, shame, and separation. Women coerced into conformity. Dissenters isolated. Children shaped early.A parallel moral order imposed over time.
This is why, in addition to the UAE, multiple other Muslim-majority states, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan have banned the Brotherhood outright. They have seen how civic engagement becomes leverage. They understand that the Brotherhood does not abandon its objectives when it enters democratic systems. Instead, it adapts its methods. The end point is not coexistence within plural societies, but authority over them. Britain’s refusal to draw the same conclusion is a refusal to learn from those who learned the hard way.
The 2015 UK government review concluded that the Brotherhood was not directly engaged in terrorism on British soil. A narrow finding, proudly clutched ever since. It ignored the more troubling evidence. Brotherhood-linked figures in Britain have openly expressed support for Hamas, refused to condemn suicide bombings, and continued to circulate the writings of Sayyid Qutb, one of the movement’s most influential ideologues. Qutb did not write poetry or theology in the abstract. He supplied a framework that sanctifies violence, divides the world into believers and enemies, and justifies savage acts in the name of moral purification.
On campuses, the picture has worsened. Islamist referrals under the Prevent programme have risen, but the numbers tell only part of the story. Student protests increasingly obliterate the line between activism and intimidation, turning lecture halls and libraries into pressure zones rather than places of learning. Jewish students are told to keep their heads down. Dissenting voices are shouted out or shut out. University administrators respond with statements about dialogue and wellbeing, while avoiding the harder task of enforcement. Everything is recast as passion, grievance, or youthful excess. Nothing is named for what it is.
The UAE watches all of this and draws its own conclusions.
The Brotherhood’s genius has always been procedural. It builds ecosystems rather than parties. Cradle-to-grave provision. Mosques with gyms. Charities with counselling services. Youth groups that teach sport and submission in the same breath. The aim is not recruitment in the crude sense, but insulation. A world within a world.
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s most influential cleric, once explained the goal plainly. Muslims in the West must form a small society within the larger one, lest they dissolve “like salt in water”. Britain nodded along while the subversion was declared outright.
The UAE’s scholarship ban is a damning verdict, delivered without press conferences or parliamentary theatrics. It carries a simple message: we have seen this before, and we know how it ends.
Experts discuss role of AI and other technology in future of mental health care
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
January 13, 2026 long read
Recent reports suggest we are experiencing a loneliness epidemic and mental health crisis. Suicide rates in the U.S. have risen over the past two decades; a recent surgeon general’s report flagged troubling statistics on the well-being of American youth; and more than a billion people globally have a mental health condition, according to new World Health Organization data.
Technologies such as smartphones, social media, and chatbots inevitably come up in any discussion about mental health — often as forces for harm. But could these same tools be used to help?
Whenever mental health comes up, inevitably technology becomes part of the conversation. AI-powered chatbots are powerful tools, clearly. Several cases have grabbed headlines, though, of potentially negative impacts — they’ve even been accused of encouraging suicide. How closely do we need to monitor these chatbots for harmful interactions?
Nock: As I think about new technologies, I think about old technologies. A lot of the conversations that we’re having now about chatbots we had a few years ago about social media, we’ve had about TV and telephones, and so on. They are tools. For each of them, we’ve got to figure out how do we use them in a way that maximizes the good and that minimizes the harm.
Lunbeck: I appreciate the nod to history. I’ll bring up another data point. The first chatbot for mental health was the ELIZA machine, which was set up by Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, and he found immediately that people reacted to the chatbot as if it were a person. And there’s an apocryphal story of him — his secretary was using it in the interface and asked him to leave the room because she was having a private conversation with the chatbot. And even his colleagues who were computer scientists, he complained that they should have known better. There’s something very alluring about this technology that we don’t fully understand yet all these years later.
Smoller: Chatbots are increasingly good at tapping into some of the machinery that we have ourselves in terms of identifying a connection with something and then anthropomorphizing it.
Lunbeck: People talk about it — them hacking our attachment system.
There’s been a lot of focus on the sycophancy, the way that they are primed to agree with us, to mirror us. A recent study was just reported that the “yes” answers from ChatGPT outnumbered the “no” by 10 to 1.
Nock: But what are we comparing them to? How I learned to do therapy in the room as human to human, I say “yes” a lot more than I say “no.” I do a lot more validating. We’re trained, and the evidence suggests, there’s benefit to validating a person’s experience — “yes and…” I rarely, when I do therapy, say, “No, you’re wrong, and don’t do that.”
Lunbeck: Well, Freud said the analyst should be as a mirror to the patient. And now, we complain about chatbots mirroring, but that is part of what therapists do.
Nock: I think we should acknowledge the positive here. There are a lot of people who have mental disorders and don’t have the access to care. And here comes a technology that not everyone but a lot more people have access to. The possibility, the upside here is incredible.
Alvin Powell (from left), Elizabeth Lunbeck, Karestan Koenen, Jordan Smoller, and Matthew Nock.
It seems you are in agreement that there’s great promise here, but are these tools ready for prime time when we hear about these troublesome cases?
Lunbeck:Well, you can talk about suicide. Obviously, we need better guardrails. For a long time we’ve known that relationship is the key to effective psychotherapy. People have said, well, it’s not a relationship with a human, but I’m more focused on what’s the nature of that relationship people are forming with the chatbot? In what ways does it matter, in what ways doesn’t it matter that it’s not human? If it’s giving you something useful that you didn’t have before, who are we to say…?
Koenen: Is that better than nothing?
Lunbeck: If it’s preventing you from seeking help, that’s a problem. If it’s responding to your suicidal ideation with, “yay, go girl,” that’s terrible.
Nock: I see this, as in many areas of health and medicine, there’s an iteration that has to happen, and we think about: Are we ready? Is the treatment ready? There are people dying now. Let’s get the best treatment we can in the hands of people, test it out through the scientific process, see what works, and see if we can make it more effective.
The same approach is needed here.A lot of these platforms weren’t designed to provide therapy, but people are using them for a pseudo-therapeutic kind of relationship. I’d love to see more collaboration between industry and independent scientists to iteratively improve these technologies in ways that improve the health of society.
Lunbeck: I don’t want to lose sight of the dangers, though, because you did start with that. There has to be more attention to regulation and more pressure on the companies. It’s kind of a semantic question. What’s therapy, and what’s emotional support? There are ways to build in some guardrails — if you’ve been on it for five hours, for the bot to say, “maybe you should take a break” or something like that — and we just have to keep pressure on the companies to do that.
Would it be preferable if we boosted human connection?
Smoller: One of the things that we’ve studied is looking for the factors that are likely to be causally protective against developing things like depression. And over and over, two things come up: physical activity and social connection.During the pandemic, we had a study in which people who had good social and emotional support early in the pandemic had half the rate of developing significant depression.
So I think, absolutely. It’s a difficult thing to do. Our society is being structured in the opposite direction too much.
Koenen: And you’ve had studies, I know, where you’ve looked at people at high genetic risk of depression in the military, and found that those in units with high support, high conviction in their military units, even though they had high risk of depression genetically, had less new depression later. So even with high genetic risk, the social support and connection can buffer against that.
“Freud said the analyst should be as a mirror to the patient. And now, we complain about chatbots mirroring, but that is part of what therapists do.”Elizabeth Lunbeck
We’ve talked about large language models, but what about cellphones? Are there innovative things going on in that area?
Nock: We did a study at Harvard a few years back where we interviewed teens who were getting psychiatric treatment, and we asked them about their social media use and what is helpful, what is harmful.Everyone said there are aspects of it that I love: I connect with other people, I see what the new trends are, I learn skills that I can use for my mental health. And on the negative side, I do social comparison, and I feel lonely, and I feel like I don’t have enough, and kids bully me, and so on.
Kids are using social media. This is the world they’re living in. How do we find out how to maximize health and minimize harm?
Smoller: Social media is not going away. The numbers I’ve seen are that 75 percent of young people get mental health information from social media, and there’s room for raising the game there. I worry about that because there’s so much misinformation and investment in psychiatric illness as being an important part of people’s development, and a lot of expression of distress through the labels of psychiatric illness, often inappropriately. It’s another thing we have to keep our eye on because that’s where people are getting their information, and it’s not always good.
Lunbeck: I couldn’t agree more. It’s become a marker of identity. Through TikTok, there are whole communities around entities that aren’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but that have been named by users. We have to think about other ways for people to express their emotional vulnerabilities and concerns.
Nock: We teamed up with an industry partner who developed an algorithm to find people on social media platforms who were in distress, and then we experimented with how do we get them to crisis services. And we found that through a little tweak, we could boost use of crisis services by about 25 percent.
I worked with another platform to find blog posts that people found helpful and inspiring, and then randomized people to get those versus not.And found that people who got these blog posts had a significant decrease in their suicidal thinking, and they felt more hopeful, more optimistic, more connected with others. There are ways to use platforms and new technology in ways that boost people’s mental health rather than decline it.
Koenen: We have a study where we’re doing an app-based treatment in Kenya for PTSD. I was a little skeptical but we’re finding positive effects. People’s PTSD symptoms are really going down with this mainly app-based treatment, and they meet occasionally with a facilitator.
That’s by people’s smartphones, not something we could have done a decade ago. And it’s reaching many more people than we could have reached if we were waiting for a therapist trained in the specific evidence-based treatment to see individual patients in their office.
How do you see mental health care changing in 10 years?
Smoller:The problem with mental health care that dwarfs most others is access to care. We have to solve that problem. People with serious mental illness, psychotic illness actually have a shortened lifespan of 10 to 15 years.
My hope also is that we’re going to advance into this possibility of more precise, personalized treatment that’s more effective. And, I hope, a much bigger focus on prevention and early detection because most of what we do now is reactive.
Lunbeck:For years, it’s been the case that about half of the people who seek psychotherapy do not meet the criteria for any diagnosable mental disease. They go for support, for advice, for companionship, for changing oneself, a whole range of reasons.
From where I sit in therapy communities, there’s a lot of worry, will therapists survive this, the new technology? Will there be a role for actual human-to-human interaction? And I’m a big proponent of things happening when people actually talk to each other.
Nock:Thinking about suicide, half of people who die by suicide saw a clinician in the four weeks before they died. So they’re getting to care. One of my biggest questions is — and this is a focus of the center that Jordan and I lead at Harvard MGH — how can we use new technologies to provide better round-the-clock care, reach people when they need it, not in the absence of humans, but in addition to their human connections?
Koenen: And I think the other piece that we need to think about is the brain doesn’t exist separate from the rest of the body. As Jordan mentioned, there is good evidence that exercise can prevent depression.
There’s recently been large clinical trials where they’ve compared a cognitive behavioral therapy — that’s the gold standard for people with PTSD — against trauma-informed yoga. Randomized. They had the similar effects on PTSD symptoms, and there was less dropout from the yoga.
I would have said you can’t recover from PTSD without talking about your trauma. There was no talk about the trauma in the trauma-informed yoga. So what’s going on there? I don’t know, but there is this place for other things besides talking.
Maybe it was the community of doing yoga in the group. I don’t want to trivialize people with psychotic disorders or suffering from severe mental illness and say that yoga is going to cure them, but I think there are a lot of exciting developments in mind and body that we don’t really understand that could also help address this.
So it may be that a future Dr. Chatbot tells you to shut off the chatbot and go for a run, preferably with a whole group of people.
Pursuit of justice borne of personal experience with injustice
Jacob Sweet
Harvard Staff Writer
October 27, 2025 9 min read
Rosalie Abella, the first Jewish woman on Canada’s Supreme Court, was shaped by her parents’ resilience after Holocaust
A series focused on the personal side of Harvard research and teaching.
Rosalie Abella was 4 years old when she learned that her father hadn’t been allowed to practice law in Canada.
“I had no idea what that even meant,” said Abella, the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court of Canada. “But it galvanized me and committed me to the idea that I would be what he couldn’t be.”
An émigré and child of death camp survivors, Abella faced daunting challenges in becoming one of Canada’s most influential jurists.Now the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, she lifted barriers for others through her work in labor and disability rights, constitutional law, and human rights jurisprudence.
Abella’s father, Jacob Silberman, was born in Sienno, Poland, and entered Krakow’s Jagiellonian law school in 1930 as one of the few Jewish students in the program.
By the time he graduated, practicing in his home country was no longer an option. The Nazis had taken over, and he and his wife were sent to concentration camps. They both survived, but Silberman’s parents, three younger brothers, and first-born son — Abella’s brother — were killed.
Abella was born in 1946 in a displaced person’s camp in Stuttgart, Germany. Her father taught himself English and was briefly able to practice law alongside American lawyers, helping to develop a system of legal services for displaced people.
The family got the chance to move to Canada in 1950. Silberman assumed he’d be able to practice there, too. He brought letters of reference from the American judges and lawyers he’d worked with, who wrote glowingly about his abilities.
Their endorsements proved meaningless.
“He came home and said, ‘I can’t do it because I’m not a citizen,’” Abella said. The process to get citizenship would take half a decade, and Silberman had a family to support. He became an insurance agent instead.
In the decades that followed, Abella never heard her parents complain about the injustices they had experienced. Instead, they carried a level of optimism and positivity that was sometimes hard for her to comprehend.
“I don’t think I ever saw them angry about anything that happened to them,” Abella said. “It’s amazing when I think about it. They were so grateful for what they had found in Canada that they didn’t dwell on what they had lost.”
They raised their children to carry themselves as if they could achieve anything with enough hard work and determination.
“It was a rigorously programmed life in terms of the unstated expectation that we would do the best we could possibly do,” Abella said. “I never heard them say, ‘Why can’t you do it as well as so-and-so?’ It was always measuring me against my abilities and stretching them as far as they could go.”
Abella liked working hard and asked for extra homework because her parents taught her that education was important. She saw school as the “last meritocracy,” where nobody could hold you back based on race, color, and religion as long as you put in the work.
By the time she graduated from law school, she’d become aware of the barriers for women in the professional world, but she wasn’t daunted. “It was too late because I was already formed,” she said, “and I was formed as someone who was not afraid.”
Abella saw herself as an outsider. She knew she didn’t dress or think like many of her peers in classes and later in courtrooms, being both Jewish and a woman. But she proceeded with her studies as if the differences wouldn’t matter.
“This was Canada, the land of opportunities,” she said, “and if people were willing to give them to me, I was going to grab them — even if people around me were saying, ‘Wait a minute, that isn’t what women are supposed to do.’”
She fell in love with a history professor — Irving Abella — who, like her parents, also didn’t see any reason why a woman shouldn’t pursue the career she wanted.
“The transfer of confidence from my parents believing in me to a husband who believed in me was total luck — kind of, as Bette Midler would say, ‘the wind beneath my wings.’”
Abella didn’t have any end goal in sight, except to be a lawyer — a good one. She was particularly hungry for chances to learn, willing to bypass higher salary and prestige for a job that would broaden her experience.
After starting her career in private practice, she accepted an appointment — when she was pregnant with her second child at 29 — to the Ontario Family Court, becoming the youngest person and the first pregnant woman ever appointed to the bench in Canada.
There she handled cases involving issues such as child protection and young offender proceedings. At times, she would have to determine whether people could keep their children — as she herself thought of her two young sons at home.
“It taught me what the world was for most people,” Abella said, “and it taught me to be open-minded, not to look at court cases as a judge from the top down, and to actually listen to what they were telling you.”
Abella created a definition of equity in employment that would have far-reaching effects in the Canadian justice system: “Equality means accommodating and acknowledging people’s differences so they can be treated as equals.”
She had another chance to listen as the sole commissioner of the Royal Commission on Equality in Employment. Abella held sessions around the country, talking to women, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and others from under-represented groups about employment barriers. Then she met with business and labor leaders to figure out practical ways to solve the issues.
Her time on the Family Court, and her own upbringing, guided her.
“I was always interested in other people’s stories because mine is so different from anybody else’s that I knew growing up,” she said. “I heard what it felt like to have a different color, to have a different gender. I learned the tenacity of a barrier when you’re disabled. I heard about racism. I heard about things that I had not personally experienced, and that’s what being a judge is: learning to listen and not hearing your own story, but actually hearing their story. For me, it was about fairness”
In the commission’s final report, Abella created a definition of equity in employment that would have far-reaching effects in the Canadian justice system: “Equality means accommodating and acknowledging people’s differences so they can be treated as equals.”
“I just felt it growing up. I felt how unfair it had been that 6 million people who were Jewish were exterminated because they were Jewish,” she said. Her time on the Family Court and working in private practice informed her thinking about balancing group rights, which was about human rights, and the civil libertarian theory of the individual. “I wasn’t aware of any of that in law school,” she said. “It was only my clients and then the family court that made me understand.”
Five years later, in its first decision on equality rights, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the citizenship requirement for lawyers using Abella’s definition. Her father, who died a month before she finished law school, wasn’t able to see her complete the circle, but her mother, Fanny, was.
“I felt so grateful for the fact that she was there on their behalf to see what had happened to the career he launched by not being able to be a lawyer in Canada,” Abella said, “a career that she and my husband nurtured and encouraged.”
Abella brought her ideas on equality to the Ontario Court of Appeals, where she began in 1992, and then to the Supreme Court in 2004.
Though she learned to listen differently — to lawyers instead of from clients directly as she had during Family Court — she made decisions with personal ramifications in mind.
“Every case to me was a novel,” Abella said. “It didn’t matter whether it was copyright or tax or equality or freedom of expression. It was always about how the law affected people.”
Taking this approach meant sometimes finding that the opinion she had formed after days studying the case was wrong. “You have to actually hear what parties are arguing and saying,” she said. “And if you can’t do it with an open mind, you shouldn’t be there — because there’s always a chance that you’re wrong.”
Her willingness to go out on a limb to protect or expand rights — and the jurisprudential status quo — often drew criticism. In 2020’s Fraser v. Canada, Abella’s majority opinion found that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers’ pension plan discriminated against women who needed to reduce hours to take care of children. Some justices and academics disagreed, calling it judicial overreach.
Abella’s attention to the law’s treatment of minority groups drove many similar decisions. She wrote the first appellate gay rights rulings and paved the way for marriage equality in Canada, protected workers’ bargaining rights, invented employment equity, and advanced fairness for women and minorities in others.
“There were so many things that caused the public to say, ‘Wait a minute, are we ready for this?’” Abella said. “And it was my view that that’s what you have judges for.” If judges couldn’t make decisions that protected the public interest as opposed to public opinion, “then I don’t think we’re doing our job, and we’re mixing up what elected bodies do with what independent bodies, like the judiciary, do.”
She also credits her husband, Irving, who died in 2022, for encouraging her to ignore the controversies and do what she thought was right. He was excited about Abella’s opportunity to teach at Harvard, as were her two adult sons, both lawyers. “It’s great to have professional satisfaction and respect,” Abella said, “but the core is family.”
All the way, she channeled the lessons she learned from her parents. “They were extraordinary people whose core commitment to integrity was unwavering,” Abella said. “It was important to them that whatever I do, I do with dignity and respect.”
In taking up the career her father was denied, Abella built a legacy all her own.
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