Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU’s efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU’s strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU–Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU–Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU’s actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU’s involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

In 1961–2, when a three-year international moratorium on nuclear testing was broken by the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States agreed to resume testing in partnership: Britain would test underground at the American site in Nevada and the US would use the British site at Christmas Island for a new series of atmospheric tests. This article uses archival evidence to examine the British government’s position, showing that there was a great reluctance to resume testing and that, contrary to stereotypes, there was no strong lobbying for tests from the military or atomic scientists. While it was convenient to express the need for nuclear testing as a technical necessity, the requirement was fundamentally political: to support the United States. Meanwhile, Britain’s atomic scientists were working hard not only to test nuclear weapons but to ban testing, and the article also introduces the extensive scientific work done in support of nuclear test detection and arms-control verification. Although histories today emphasize the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, at the height of the Berlin crisis it was the nuclear arms race that worried politicians and scientists above all.

Given a smooth variety X over $\mathbb {C}$, a smooth divisor $i:Y\hookrightarrow X$ and a global function f on X which vanishes on Y and on its critical locus, we compute the map induced on Hochschild homology by the pushforward functor $i_{\ast }:D^b(Y)\to D^{abs}(MF(X,f))$ in terms of the Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg isomorphisms.

Political actors, scholars, and citizens have long worried that the United States Supreme Court poses a “countermajoritarian difficulty”: the concern that policy making by unelected judges undermines democratic governance. In political science, a prominent response has come from a school of thought known as “regime theory,” which contends that this concern is misplaced because the court acts in alignment with a dominant governing coalition in the elected branches. In this article, we revisit regime theory and argue that it relies on unstated scope conditions. Specifically, it best explains periods characterized by low levels of interparty competition and intraparty cohesion. Since the 1970s, however, both these conditions have gradually eroded. We develop a revised theory of court–party relations to account for changing party dynamics. Under contemporary conditions of high interparty competition and high intraparty cohesion, the court is aligned with one of two competitive party coalitions rather than a dominant governing coalition. In this context, the court can support its aligned coalition in distinct ways that are indeed countermajoritarian. To illustrate our theory, we trace the functions of Supreme Court decision making for its aligned coalition over three periods (1930s–60s, 1970s–90s, and 2000s–present) and show why normative concerns about judicial power as a threat to democratic governance are well founded in the contemporary period.

We consider non-autonomous conformal iterated function systems (NACIFSs) and their limit sets. Our main focus is on harmonic measure and its dimensions: Hausdorff and packing. We prove that these two dimensions are continuous under perturbations and that they satisfy Bowen’s and Manning’s type formulas. To achieve this, we establish general results about measures, and more broadly about positive functionals, defined on a symbolic space. We also develop tools from thermodynamic formalism in a non-autonomous setting.

This Article argues that the classic “what is law” question deserves more attention in EU legal studies. First, it shows that questions about the nature and concept of law are of great practical relevance for EU law. Second, the Article endorses a distinctively realist outlook on EU law. This analysis concludes that a realist(ic) concept of EU law cannot be distilled from legal realism as a theory of adjudication. What is needed instead is a theory of law that can account for the social reality of EU law by weaving together law’s ideational and material dimensions. From the realist perspective, EU law is neither autonomous nor singular. This inquiry into the nature of EU law illustrates why different variants of legal and constitutional pluralism and inter-legality provide insufficient tools for theorizing EU law. Moreover, it challenges the EU’s current “politics of legality” and problematizes the law-power relationship in EU law, depicting the concept of law as key to the EU’s prolonged authority crisis.

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Survey of Canadian English presents a unique opportunity to examine change in Canadian English over five decades of real time. A partial replication of the original survey was therefore conducted in 2023-24, gathering a similar number of responses (approximately 14,000) from every province of Canada. The new survey reprised 45 of the old survey’s questions, including variables of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and spelling, many of these contrasting British, American, and in some cases Canadian variants. A comparison of the two datasets at the aggregate level finds that the proportion of American variants has grown and continues to grow at the expense of British and Canadian variants, though not all variables show this trend and the spelling variables are generally an exception; that Canada’s provinces vary in the extent to which they display this shift; that vocabulary is more regionally variable than pronunciation, grammar or spelling; and that regional variation is declining today, compared to its prevalence in 1972.

This paper addresses three key objectives. First, weighted Sobolev trace embeddings are studied for a class of function spaces defined in the upper half-space. Second, Liouville-type theorems are proved, providing essential insights into the nonexistence of solutions for a class of quasilinear elliptic problems with indefinite boundary conditions under specific constraints. Third, by combining the derived embedding results with the fibering method, the existence of solutions for such problems is established. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the analytical and variational properties of these elliptic equations.

Aphis gossypii Glover is a highly polyphagous pest causing significant economic losses worldwide. In Greece, while the species is a primary threat to various crops, comprehensive molecular data regarding its insecticide resistance status remain scarce. This study, the first time in Greece, developed and implemented droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) to detect and quantify the frequency of key resistance mutations (R81T, S431F, A302S, L1014F/M918L, and A2666V – resistance to nicotinic acetylcholine receptor competitive modulators, dimethyl carbamates, organophosphates and carbamates, pyrethroids, and keto–enols, respectively) in field populations from citrus, cotton, and cucurbits plantations between 2021 and 2025. Our results identified four out of the six target mutations (L1014F and A2666V mutations were not found in any of the samples). Cucurbit populations exhibited the highest resistance levels, with S431F being fixed in seven populations and reaching a total resistance allele frequency (RAF) of 75%. The mutations A302S and M918L were also prevalent in cucurbits (total RAF of 40% and 49%, respectively), while the neonicotinoid-associated R81T mutation was detected at lower frequencies (total RAF of 9%). In contrast, citrus and cotton populations showed lower resistance diversity, with citrus populations possessing only the S431F mutation. The high resistance frequencies in cucurbits likely reflect intense selection pressure from specific insecticides used in these crops. Given the predominantly asexual reproduction of A. gossypii in Greece, the persistence of resistant genotypes poses a significant challenge. The ddPCR diagnostics developed here provide highly sensitive tools for monitoring target-site resistance, supporting effective insecticide resistance management.

Observational vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies provide essential real-world evidence but are prone to bias. Valid synthesis relies on rigorous risk-of-bias (RoB) assessment in systematic reviews of VE studies. Following JBI guidance, we mapped and described RoB assessment methodologies in systematic reviews of VE studies. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science from 1 January 2013 to 17 May 2023 and the grey literature from 1 January 2018 to 15 August 2023. Of 367 identified reviews, 38 lacked any RoB assessment, yielding 203 systematic reviews. Of these, 190 used existing tools (NOS (85/190, 44.7%), ROBINS-I (46/190, 24.2%), and JBI (11/190, 5.8%)) and 13 used an author-developed tool (13/203, 6.4%). Tools were adapted in 16.7% (34/203) of reviews and 7.2% (14/203) used multiple tools. Reviews included 20 (±25.7) observational studies, commonly cohorts (175/203, 86.2%), with COVID-19 (66/203, 32.5%) and seasonal influenza (62/203, 30.5%) frequently studied. VE was reported descriptively in 25.1% (51/203) of reviews, while 74.9% (152/203) provided meta-analyzed estimates primarily based on laboratory-confirmed infection (137/203, 67.5%) and symptomatic disease (130/203, 64.0%). Our findings indicate heterogeneous RoB assessment, reflected by use of different/multiple tools, frequent adaptations, author-developed methods, and absence of RoB assessment, highlighting the need for clearer guidance or tailored tools.