Innisfree McKinnon, University of Wisconsin-Stout

President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali, the tallest peak in the country, has resulted in lots of discussion. While for some, such renaming might seem less important than the big problems the country faces, there is a formal process in the United States for renaming places, and that process is taken seriously.

Usually, so people don’t get confused, official, agreed-upon names are used by the government. In the U.S., place names are standardized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which is part of the U.S. Geological Survey, the agency in charge of making maps.

In his executive order, Trump asks the Board on Geographic Names “to honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans” and change its policies and procedures to reflect that.

Usually, renaming a place starts locally. The people in the state or county propose a name change and gather support. The process in each state is different.

How to change a place name

Minnesota recently changed the name of a large lake in Minneapolis to Bde Maka Ska, which the Minneapolis Park Board described as “a Dakota name for the lake that has been passed down in oral history for many years.”

The board voted to change the name and took its request to the county commissioners. When the county agreed, the request was then sent to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which made it official for Minnesota. Then, the state of Minnesota sent the request to the Board on Geographic Names, which made it official for the entire U.S.

It’s a lot of paperwork for something so seemingly minor, but people get passionate about place names. It took 40 years to rename Denali from the name established in the late 19th century, Mount McKinley.

The state of Alaska requested the name change in 1975, but the Board on Geographic Names didn’t take action. Members of the Ohio congressional delegation – President William McKinley was from Ohio – objected over many years to requests to rename the mountain, and the board did not act on those requests.

The president appoints the secretary of the Interior Department. The secretary works with the heads of related agencies to appoint the Board on Geographic Names. Current committee policy states, “Input from State geographic names authorities, land
management agencies, local governments, and Tribal Governments are actively pursued.”

In 2015, President Barack Obama named a new leader for the Department of the Interior, Sally Jewell. Just as Obama made a trip to Alaska in late August 2015, Jewell declared the name change official under a law that allows the secretary of the Interior to change a name if the board doesn’t act on the proposal in a “reasonable” amount of time.

“This name change recognizes the sacred status of Denali to many Alaska Natives,” Jewell said. “The name Denali has been official for use by the State of Alaska since 1975, but even more importantly, the mountain has been known as Denali for generations. With our own sense of reverence for this place, we are officially renaming the mountain Denali in recognition of the traditions of Alaska Natives and the strong support of the people of Alaska.”

If someone objects to a name change, they could ask the courts to rule on whether the name change was made legally. Going back to Bde Maka Ska, some people objected to changing the name from Lake Calhoun, so they took the state natural resources agency to court. Eventually, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the name change was done correctly.

Alaska’s two U.S. senators and prominent state figures have strongly objected to Trump’s renaming attempt.

How not to change a place name

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico is a different kind of case, however, from renaming a geographic place within U.S. borders.

The gulf is not within the territorial U.S. On the coast, the first 12 miles from shore are considered part of that country, but outside of that is international waters.

The Board on Geographic Names could change the name to Gulf of America on official U.S. maps, but there is no international board in charge of place names. Each country decides what to call places. And there is no official way for the U.S. to make other countries change the name.

It’s possible that the U.S. could formally ask other countries to change the name, or even impose sanctions against countries that don’t comply.

If the names were officially changed in the U.S., the government would use the new names in official documents, signage and maps. As for all the people and companies in the world that make maps, they usually use the official names. But there is nothing that would force them to, if they believed that a certain name is more widely recognized.

Innisfree McKinnon, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Stout

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lisa Hajjar, University of California, Santa Barbara

President Joe Biden’s record of handling the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is decidedly mixed. He succeeded in reducing the detainee population he inherited by more than half, but he compounded problems in the military commissions that the Bush administration had invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to try people captured in the “war on terror.” Now all the problems at Guantánamo are again President Donald Trump’s.

When Biden took office in 2021, there were 40 prisoners. Today there are 15, the lowest number since the first 20 Muslim men and boys captured in Afghanistan were airlifted to the base on Jan. 11, 2002.

Biden left Trump four people the U.S. will not release but also cannot put on trial – the so-called “forever prisoners.” He also left intact the troubled military commissions system, with three pending criminal cases against a total of six detainees.

In December 2021, former chief military defense attorney Brig. Gen. John Baker testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “It is too late in the process for the current military commissions to do justice for anyone. The best that can be hoped for at this point … is to bring this sordid chapter of American history to an end.” Baker made clear that the only viable option is to resolve the cases with plea bargains for the defendants.

A chance to make progress

There are three cases that have not yet gone to trial – the 9/11 case with four defendants facing charges for their connections with the attacks, the USS Cole bombing in October 2000 with one defendant and the Bali bombing in October 2002 with one defendant.

The 9/11 and USS Cole cases have been stuck in the pretrial phase since Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. In the summer of 2024, a breakthrough in the 9/11 case appeared imminent: Prosecutors and defense lawyers for three of the four defendants reportedly reached plea-bargain agreements. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad – the alleged “mastermind” of the attacks – Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty and accept life sentences in exchange for the government taking the death penalty off the table. There was no deal for the fourth 9/11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi.

The deals were approved on July 31 by the top military officer overseeing the Guantánamo commissions, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier. But two days later, Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, stepped into the process and overrode Escallier – whom he had appointed. Austin announced that the plea deals were revoked.

The judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, decided to schedule plea hearings for early January. But after some legal back-and-forth that forced a stay, he had to cancel them. Biden left the case against three 9/11 defendants in limbo.

Witness to the transition

In mid-January 2025, I made my sixteenth reporting trip to Guantánamo. I came for closing arguments on a motion in the 9/11 case that seeks to suppress statements that Ammar al-Baluchi made to the FBI in January 2007. That was four months after he and 13 others were transferred to Guantánamo from CIA black sites where they were held for years. The litigation to suppress those statements started in 2019.

In Chapter 10 of my book, “The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture,” I detail how the litigation on this suppression motion made public previously unknown details and under-acknowledged horrors of the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program.

These closing arguments were the culmination of six years of litigation on the key question in the 9/11 case: Does torture matter in the pursuit of justice in the military commissions?

Can Guantánamo be closed?

Of the 780 people ever detained at Guantánamo, 540 were released during the presidency of George W. Bush, who established the detention facility. Obama, who signed an executive order on his second day in office pledging to close Guantánamo within a year, released 200.

In his first term, Trump pledged to keep the facility open. The only man to leave Guantánamo during Trump’s first term was Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2018 to serve out the remainder of his sentence from a 2014 plea bargain agreement.

When Biden took office, he said that he supported shutting down the military prison at Guantánamo. In the early years of his presidency, there was a slow stream of transfers, mostly people who had been cleared for release long ago and were freed.

In Biden’s last months, the pace of transfers quickened. In December 2024, a Kenyan detainee, two Malaysian members of al-Qaida who had pled guilty the previous January, and a Tunisian man who had been in Guantánamo since the day the facility was opened were all repatriated to their countries of origin and freed. In January 2024, 11 Yemenis were transported from the prison to Oman to be resettled.

15 men left behind

The Biden administration had also planned to repatriate a severely disabled Iraqi detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, to serve out his plea-bargained sentence in a Baghdad prison. But a federal judge blocked that transfer, ruling that al-Iraqi would not get necessary medical treatment in Iraq and might be subject to abuse there.

Al-Iraqi is one of the 15 that Biden left behind. Three of them – a Libyan, a Somali and a stateless Rohingya – have long been cleared for release. Their continuing detention without charges highlights a key element of the Guantánamo problem: No one can be released unless the U.S. government finds another country willing to accept them.

One of the remaining detainees, Ali Bahlul, is serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit war crimes. Six others, including the four 9/11 defendants, are awaiting their trials.

There are also four detainees whom the government refuses to transfer but cannot put on trial for lack of evidence.

These so-called “forever prisoners” include Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born man of Palestinian descent who was taken into CIA custody in 2002 and was used as the guinea pig for the CIA torture program. The government long ago conceded that Abu Zubaydah was not a top leader of al-Qaida – in fact he was not even a member. But he will not be released because he knows how he was treated by the CIA, and that treatment remains highly classified.

The newest forever prisoner is one of the original 9/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh; in September 2023, he was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. Now he is uncharged, unreleased and untreated for his psychological maladies that were caused by the torture he endured in CIA black sites.

The ‘War on Terror’ is not over

When Biden pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan in August 2021, he claimed to have ended America’s longest war – and repeated this claim in a January 2025 speech. But the Guantánamo prison remains open, and as long as it is, the “war on terror,” which first put U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001, is not over.

How Trump will deal with Guantánamo is an open question. If he focuses on the death penalty, he will press ahead with military commission trials like his predecessors, hoping for unanimous guilty verdicts and death sentences. If he prioritizes cutting wasteful government spending, he will release additional detainees and allow the three plea bargain agreements to go into effect.

No one I spoke to during my last trip was willing to predict what a second Trump term might bode for Guantánamo – except that it won’t be closed.

Lisa Hajjar, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Praveen Arany, University at Buffalo

Red light therapy is increasingly viewed as a promising treatment for wrinkles, acne, psoriasis, scars and sun-damaged skin, and as a supportive therapy for some kinds of cancer. But does red light therapy live up to the hype that it’s practically a panacea for all sorts of ailments?

Praveen Arany is a professor of oral biology, biomedical engineering and surgery at the University of Buffalo and an expert on the uses of light and lasers for medical purposes. He explains how red light therapy works, for what diseases and conditions it may be most useful, and if red light home devices are effective.

What is red light therapy?

Treatment with red light therapy involves exposure to red light at a very low dose in a hospital or clinic.

It’s also called low-power laser therapy, soft laser therapy, cold laser therapy and nonthermal LED light therapy.

The umbrella term is called photobiomodulation therapy, which covers other colors, or wavelengths, that have health benefits. These light wavelengths span the visible to the near-infrared spectrum.

Red light is easily the most popular of the photobiomodulation therapies. That’s primarily due to its availability – the treatment has been around more than three decades.

While it’s true that other colors are also clinically and commercially available, researchers are still studying them to determine exactly how effective they are. That said, green light therapy is generally used to treat migraines; yellow light for depression; and blue light to kill resistant strains of bacteria, like MRSA infections, and to treat seasonal affective disorder, a depression that typically onsets in late fall and continues through winter.

How does red light therapy work?

Put simply, red light stimulates the cells in your body, energizing them while initiating blood flow to the affected area. That, in turn, spurs healing, similar to how your body responds to a cut by clotting the blood to heal a wound.

The treatment is simple and painless. The patient, either seated or lying comfortably, is exposed to the red light for three to 15 minutes. They may experience a feeling of warmth during treatment, but it should not be uncomfortable or hot. The clinician will likely recommend eye shields.

Used correctly, red light therapy is very safe. Overdosing – staying under the light too long or receiving treatments at very high power – does not necessarily cause harm, but it might reduce or slow benefits. However, just as some people are more prone to sunburn than others, some patients may be more sensitive to this light and might see redness in the skin. Those patients should receive lower light doses during treatment.

What medical conditions can the therapy help?

Randomized, controlled clinical trials show that red light therapy can reduce pain, inflammation and tissue damage. Because all of these things are prevalent in many illnesses, photobiomodulation may be a powerful adjunct for treating a wide range of diseases.

One example is cancer. There’s now strong evidence that red light therapy can lessen pain and inflammation from radiation, chemotherapy and bone marrow stem cell transplants. Red light therapy has also reduced other complications from cancer treatment, including oral ulcers, scars and fibrosis.

Other recent human clinical studies show that photobiomodulation helps heal diabetic and burn wounds, as well as some types of ulcers. However, this therapy should not replace good wound care treatment, such as disinfection. Photobiomodulation has also worked for patients with neck and back pain and tennis elbow.

What about other uses for red light therapy?

Although not proven to be effective by randomized controlled trials with large samples, which is the gold standard of research, red light therapy has been shown to benefit patients with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, arthritis, macular degeneration, myopia and autism in clinical case reports and lab research studies.

A word of caution, however: Red light therapy may not work for all the medical conditions that proponents say it does. Red light therapy is also used for cardiovascular health, elevating mood, relieving anxiety, improving muscle performance and recovery from sports injuries, and providing anti-aging benefits to the skin. While there’s some evidence to support these types of treatments, rigorous research studies are still missing.

What about its commercial use?

This is a rapidly evolving field. Both LED and laser devices – beds, lamps, helmets and face masks – are readily available in clinical and nonclinical settings, such as medical spas, gyms and beauty salons. They’re also available for at-home use.

Laser devices are more powerful and are typically found at a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. An LED, or light-emitting diode, is less powerful and more often used in commercial or home settings.

The general consensus is that LEDs are OK to use in commercial establishments like beauty salons and medical spas, provided practitioners receive the appropriate training. But the use of laser devices should be relegated to clinical specialists. That’s because lasers, in untrained hands, have the potential to do more damage than LEDs.

As for some home products, their quality and reliability may be questionable; they might not meet minimum quality standards of output power or wavelength.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration appears to be moving toward more rigorous evaluations of these products, especially with lasers, but there is a critical need for a certifying agency or body to take this on. These agencies would test the devices to make sure they’re actually meeting specifications. That hasn’t happened yet, but as it stands now, several scientific and professional organizations are exploring the possibilities.

Praveen Arany, Associate Professor of Oral Biology, University at Buffalo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.