Monday, September 01, 2025

Digital Siege of Balochistan

by Syed Salman Mehdi / September 1st, 2025

To the people of Balochistan, connectivity is not meant by scrolling through their social media or by undertaking a light entertainment. Internet access is tenuous at best, which – in one of the most poorly dealt with provinces in Pakistan – serves both as a lifeline to education, economic opportunity, and communication with the rest of the world. However, on 6 August 2025, that lifeline was immediately severed as the provincial government ordered a blanket block on mobile internet access in all of its 36 districts, saying that it would remain blocked until 31 August.

This was not an extraordinary incident. Pakistan has developed an ominous reputation of normalising digital repression. In 2024 alone, internet access was terminated 18 times with a total of more than 9,700 hours of shutdowns, costing the national economies an estimated USD 1.62 billion. Pakistan has become one of the worst culprits in the world next to India and Ethiopia.

A Manufactured Silence

Supporters of these shutdowns argue that blocking internet access is necessary to protect national security and to prevent militant coordination. Contrary to what might be true, some of the deadliest attacks have been in the places already bereft of internet access.

A question, then: assuming that militants can operate offline, what exactly does cutting the internet off to the rest of the population accomplish?

Are these actions maintained in the interest of security or are they in the interest of power centers?

Think of the timing. The inordinate closure of the government is also done around times of political sensitivities. There was a deliberate cell shutdown during the days of Muharram in July of 2024 in a number of districts. In July 2025, following a coordinated effort of insurgent groups to organize Operation Baam, the state reacted not by acting in transparent way, but with another communications blackout.

Everyday Lives, Interrupted

On the human side, the cost is high. Students have missed online classes, exams, and the status of online submission of online applications are uncertain. To the proprietors of businesses, electronic banking and consumer interactions go down in one night. Journalists are not able to verify events, or report on time; hence, it has been termed by many as an intentional information blackout.

In Panjgur, a young student of journalism recalled his 4 years of life without mobile internet, but this was only possible through an expensive landline PTCL connection. In Gwadar, Nafeesa Baloch, a climate activist, complained that she had missed important deadlines to fill out grants and had lost international partners due to the August blackout: “This did not merely happen inconveniently; it silenced us on our work.” It is a bitter irony. While the leaders of Pakistan are so proud to talk about digital innovations, whole communities have to live as if they had never seen the modern internet.

Defying Courts, Defying Citizens

Considerations of executive competence dominate even where the courts intervene. In July, the Balochistan High Court ordered a partial restoring of internet service, but the government has continued the blackout irrespective of the order of the court. When a high court judgment can be blatantly disregarded, does a constitutional assurance of communication and expression have a quality anymore?

Local coalitions, including the All Parties Kech grouping, have criticised curfews and internet cut-offs as an antipathetic step toward the people, an impediment to the supply of basic commodities and a gag order to representatives of people expressing differences with the state apparatus and its controlling corporations .

A Historical Continuum of Control

This is not a recent. On Pakistan Day in 2012, the mobile services were blocked throughout Balochistan. In 2017, Dalbandin had six months of no mobile data). In more recent times, in 2024 during the general elections, they went again to silence a platform, X like they did to YouTube in 2010. The tendency is another pattern that can only be described as the reaching of the off switch by the state on the part of insecurity.

International Alarm, National Denial

Watchdogs of freedom of expression, including the UN Special Rapporteur himself, have criticised the repeated use of blackouts not only as an attack on liberties but also for their effect on the credibility of Pakistan in the international arena. Nevertheless, the authorities perpetuate it, despite realising the damage to Pakistan’s reputation. Pakistan is in need of foreign investment, yet its digital ecosystem is driven to its knees.

What tone relay to investors about the stability of Pakistan’s institutions?

How can one present the country as a tech hub of the future when connectivity is not a right, but a privilege?

The Questions That Remain

If security is truly the objective, then why do militant attacks continue even in areas that are already disconnected from the internet?
What happens to democratic checks and balances, if court orders are not enforced?
When education, healthcare, journalism, and livelihoods are being disrupted, whose security is being given first priority?
Above all: when a government opposes and muzzles its citizens far more than it protects them, who is the government actually serving–the populace, itself, or other interest groups?

In Balochistan, every outage is not merely a time out in communication–it is another brick in the wall of isolation under duress. There is a danger that these emergency regulations would become a never ending reality of digital instability.

When the only infrastructure between a people and the rest of the world is a susceptible bridge of connectivity, how long before such a bridge falls entirely?

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Syed Salman Mehdi is a freelance writer and researcher with a keen interest in social, political, and human rights issues. He has written extensively on topics related to sectarian violence, governance, and minority rights, with a particular focus on South Asia. His work has been published in various media outlets, and he is passionate about raising awareness on critical human rights concerns. Read other articles by Syed.

“Greetings from 51 Pegasi b”: How NASA made exoplanets into tourist destinations

A new JCOM paper analyzes the synergy between artists and scientists in a popular exoplanet science communication campaign

Sissa Medialab

Videonews — video:
Video news illustrating the paper by Ceridwen Dovey "Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters" JCOM 2025
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Credit: Images in the video are published in Public Domain by NASA. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Looking for the perfect vacation? Do you crave late-night fun? PSO J318.5−22, the planet with no star where nightlife never ends, is perfect for you! Prefer some peace and a chance to catch some rays? Kepler-16b, the land of two suns—where your shadow always has company—is waiting!

In 2015, NASA launched an unusual and brilliant exoplanet outreach campaign, offering retro-style posters, virtual guided tours, and even coloring books. The project quickly went viral worldwide. What explains the success of a campaign about a relatively young field of science that—unlike other areas of space research—lacks spectacular imagery?

Ceridwen Dovey, science communicator, writer, filmmaker, and researcher, has just published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) a Practice Insight paper that presents a case study focusing on the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s poster campaign. Dovey describes the productive working relationships between scientists and artists that produced this standout work and shows how, in contexts like this, artists are not merely in service to science but can also inspire research itself and help scientists clarify their own thinking.

As Dovey explains, the NASA creative team—led by visual strategist Joby Harris, who has a film and music background—faced at least two challenges.

First, the available visuals: “We live in an age of extraordinary astronomical imagery—the Hubble telescope’s stunning images, for instance—that everybody knows well for their beauty, color and precision”, explains Dovey. “But with exoplanet science imagery, at the moment there’s really not very much to see - and this is a known challenge for the communication of exoplanetary science to the general public.”

The presence of a planet orbiting one or more extremely distant stars is generally inferred from the analysis of large quantities of data: we usually don’t see the planet directly, and must deduce its existence from the effects on its star or on the light the star emits. Even when scientists are lucky enough to obtain a direct image, it’s often rather underwhelming: “There are very few direct images of exoplanets, and usually they are not very visually appealing: they’re just a grainy dot around a sun,” says Dovey.

The second challenge is the rather inhospitable nature of the observed exoplanets: in the vast majority of cases, they are anything but welcoming to humans, a fact that, given the campaign’s concept of imagining exoplanets as tourist destinations of the future, complicated the team’s task.

“The team at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau chose to use 1930s retro-nostalgic image styles inspired by the lovely posters of National Parks like Yosemite created by the Works Progress Administration. Those campaigns sought in part to provide work after the Depression and to attract tourists to iconic national parks like Yellowstone. These posters aimed to evoke the romance of visiting these places and the kinds of nature encounters that would be possible there,” explains Dovey.

Joby Harris and his team decided to create a series of posters imagining exoplanets as if they were just around the corner—your next vacation destination. A playful way to encourage the public to imagine them as real places, drawing on the aesthetics and imagery of the historic series of U.S. national park posters. However, an important issue immediately arose during the discussions between artists and scientists: “Many of these exoplanets would be really nasty places to visit at a human level”, Dovey points out. “So the team, in their public and online presentations about their work, describes having a lot of interesting conversations with the scientists, where they worked together to imagine these planets as places. This created a really interesting creative process of continuous back-and-forth between artists and scientists.”

Perhaps the most interesting insight to emerge from Dovey’s work is precisely this: “What I hadn’t realised, until I started going to exoplanet science workshops for my research, was that the scientists are also doing a lot of work to try to imagine these places, to a degree.” Over the course of her study, Dovey came to understand that scientists in this field also make an imaginative leap to turn abstract scientific data into something concrete about a particular planet. Helping the public to “see” the object of their scientific research in these creative image-making practices can help the scientists to steer new lines of inquiry and encourage the public and funding bodies to remain committed to supporting exoplanet research.

In all this, Dovey believes, collaborating with artists is crucial: “Artists and filmmakers and writers and visualizers—we don’t have to be just an add-on at the end of a project to transmit scientific knowledge,” Dovey says. “We can really be helpful to the scientists, too: not only by questioning their assumptions about how things work, but by going back to the foundations of their planning—mission planning—and showing how research design can be enriched by bringing in a multidisciplinary team from very early on.”

The paper, “Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanets Travel Bureau posters,” by Ceridwen Dovey, is available open access on JCOM.

Journal

Journal of Science Communication

Method of Research

Case study

Article Title

Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA’s iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters

Article Publication Date

2-Sep-2025

"Like Luke Skywalker's planet "Tatooine" in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Kepler-16b is a gas giant, like Saturn, so it would have no solid surface to stand on. The view here is of and from an imagined nearby moon. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren't good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie's iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction."

Credit

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech https://science.nasa.gov/resource/where-your-shadow-always-has-company/?layout=magic_shell&travel_bureau=true&intent=021

"Discovered in October 2013 using direct imaging, PSO J318.5-22 belongs to a special class of planets called rogue, or free-floating, planets. Wandering alone in the galaxy, they do not orbit a parent star. Not much is known about how these planets come to exist, but scientists theorize that they may be either failed stars or planets ejected from very young systems after an encounter with another planet. These rogue planets glow faintly from the heat of their formation. Once they cool down, they will be dancing in the dark."

Credit

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/where-the-nightlife-never-ends/?layout=magic_shell&travel_bureau=true&intent=021

Psychedelic research transforms global mental health treatment paradigms

Professor Gregor Hasler reveals breakthrough discoveries in neuroplasticity and rapid antidepressant mechanisms affecting millions worldwide

Genomic Press

image:
Gregor Hasler, M.D., University of Fribourg, Switzerland
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Credit: Gregor Hasler

VILLARS-SUR-GLÂNE, SWITZERLAND, 2 September 2025 -- In a revealing Genomic Press Interview published today in Psychedelics, Professor Gregor Hasler unveils transformative discoveries that are fundamentally reshaping international approaches to mental health treatment through psychedelic research. As Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Fribourg and Director of the Molecular Psychiatry Lab, Professor Hasler stands at the vanguard of a scientific revolution that promises to alleviate suffering for millions worldwide who struggle with treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions. The interview, part of the Innovators & Ideas series, captures decades of pioneering research into how psychedelics rapidly enhance neuroplasticity and offer enduring therapeutic benefits that conventional treatments cannot match.

Revolutionary Mechanisms Transform Global Treatment Approaches

Professor Hasler explains in the interview how his research has uncovered remarkable mechanisms through which psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA fundamentally reorganize brain function. Unlike traditional antidepressants that require weeks to show effects and often provide only temporary relief, psychedelic-assisted therapies can produce profound improvements lasting months or even years after just a few carefully supervised sessions. His interdisciplinary team has demonstrated that these substances work by rapidly enhancing neuroplasticity, essentially allowing the brain to rewire itself and break free from the rigid patterns that characterize depression, PTSD, and addiction.

The interview reveals that Professor Hasler discovered mGluR5 as a biomarker for neuroplasticity and for nicotine dependence in particular. This breakthrough exemplifies his unique ability to translate complex molecular research into practical clinical applications that directly benefit patients worldwide. His work on glutamate and GABA neurotransmitter systems, which he considers his greatest scientific achievement, has fundamentally altered scientific understanding of mood disorders, opening entirely new therapeutic avenues for conditions previously considered untreatable.

Could these discoveries lead to a complete paradigm shift in how psychiatric disorders are conceptualized and treated globally? The evidence increasingly suggests they will, as international research teams build upon Professor Hasler findings to develop next-generation treatments.

From Swiss Innovation to Worldwide Impact

Switzerland has long been recognized as a crucible of psychiatric innovation, having given the world antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and even the original discovery of LSD. Professor Hasler continues this tradition while extending its reach far beyond national borders. As President of the Swiss Society for Drug Safety in Psychiatry and a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, he ensures that emerging psychedelic therapies meet the highest safety standards for global implementation.

The interview traces his intellectual journey from early psychoanalytic training through rigorous neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health, where mentors Dennis Charney and Wayne Drevets encouraged him to pursue substances with rapid and robust effects. This unique combination of depth psychology and cutting-edge neuroscience positions Professor Hasler to bridge different therapeutic traditions in ways that benefit the entire international psychiatric community.

His book, Higher Self: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy, synthesizes years of clinical experience and research wisdom, proposing bold visions for the future of mental healthcare that resonate with practitioners worldwide. Recognized with prestigious honors including the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award and the Robert Bing Award from the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Hasler demonstrates how rigorous science can coexist with compassionate clinical practice.

Ensuring Safe Integration into Global Healthcare Systems

Perhaps most crucially, the interview addresses how psychedelic therapies can be safely integrated into mainstream medicine worldwide. Professor Hasler emphasizes the critical distinction between scientific research and wholesale legalization, advocating for careful, evidence-based approaches that maximize therapeutic benefit while minimizing potential harm. His current research focuses on clinical applications for depression, trauma-related disorders, and even post-stroke neurorehabilitation, expanding the potential impact of these treatments across multiple medical disciplines.

The Genomic Press platform, accessible at https://genomicpress.kglmeridian.com/, provides open-access dissemination of such groundbreaking research, ensuring that scientific advances reach researchers and clinicians globally regardless of geographic or economic barriers. This commitment to open science accelerates the translation of discoveries into practical treatments that can benefit patients everywhere.

What safeguards must be established as psychedelic therapies move from research settings to clinical practice worldwide? Professor Hasler addresses this crucial question, drawing on his extensive experience to outline frameworks that protect patients while preserving therapeutic innovation.

Personal Insights Illuminate Scientific Vision

The interview reveals personal dimensions that humanize this scientific pioneer. Professor Hasler credits his father, a mathematician-economist who recognized depression as the primary cause of human suffering and economic burden, with inspiring his career trajectory. This early influence instilled a conviction that improving mental health treatments represents one of the most meaningful contributions to human welfare.

His current research centers on understanding how psychedelics influence consciousness, neuroplasticity, and brain function through advanced neuroimaging techniques. By combining molecular psychiatry with clinical observation, his teams are decoding the mechanisms that make psychedelic therapy uniquely effective for conditions that have resisted conventional treatment approaches.

When asked about his hopes for the field, Professor Hasler envisions treatments that do not merely suppress symptoms but open pathways for personal growth, recovery, and development. This perspective could make psychiatry more appealing to young doctors and researchers while improving its public image and attracting crucial research funding. As he notes, the psychedelic renaissance coinciding with the peak of his career offers a rare opportunity to participate in a transformative moment that will reshape mental healthcare for generations.

Professor Gregor Hasler's Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators & Ideas that highlights the people behind today's most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist's impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators & Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our publications website: https://genomicpress.kglmeridian.com/.

The Genomic Press Interview in Psychedelics titled “Gregor Hasler: Three Guiding Questions—How do psychedelics shape the brain? How can they heal psychiatric disorders such as depression and PTSD? How can we ensure their safe and responsible use?” How can we ensure their safe and responsible use?," is freely available via Open Access on 2 September 2025 in Psychedelics at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/pp025k.0032.

About Psychedelics: Psychedelics: The Journal of Psychedelic and Psychoactive Drug Research (ISSN: 2997-2671, online and 2997-268X, print) is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. Psychedelics is dedicated to advancing knowledge across the full spectrum of consciousness altering substances, from classical psychedelics to stimulants, cannabinoids, entactogens, dissociatives, plant derived compounds, and novel compounds including drug discovery approaches. Our multidisciplinary approach encompasses molecular mechanisms, therapeutic applications, neuroscientific discoveries, and sociocultural analyses. We welcome diverse methodologies and perspectives from fundamental pharmacology and clinical studies to psychological investigations and societal-historical contexts that enhance our understanding of how these substances interact with human biology, psychology, and society.

Visit the Genomic Press Virtual Library: https://issues.genomicpress.com/bookcase/gtvov/

Our full website is at: https://genomicpress.kglmeridian.com/