The impact of politically irrelevant events on government responsibility attribution and political support has long intrigued political science scholars. This study examines whether non-political events cause attribution errors, focusing on the dramatic victories of Japanese athletes winning their first and second gold medals in judo, a key Olympic sport for Japan. Using data from 1,347 Japanese participants surveyed before and after these victories, we estimate the sharp average treatment effect and conduct extensive robustness checks, including unexpected events during survey design (UESD). Our findings indicate that these medal victories had no measurable effect on political support, suggesting that voters can differentiate between external sporting successes and political accountability. These results underscore the context-specific nature of how such events influence political attitudes.

Despite increases in the military capabilities of Sahelian jihadists over the last decade, similarities and differences between the fighting styles of groups with common transnational jihadist affiliations remain underexplored. This article compares the activities of the two Islamic State (IS)-affiliated groups in the wider Sahel: the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP). Despite a common affiliation, these groups operate in different local contexts, over a thousand kilometres apart. Similarities and differences in their military approaches can thus help us understand the respective impact of local and transnational dynamics on jihadist behaviour. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and quantitative/geospatial analysis, this article explores this issue through analysis of strategic goals, command and control, military hybridisation, tactics/attack profiles and spatial variations. While their activities are by no means uniform, we find a growing convergence between these groups over time driven by a mix of IS influence and local dynamics.

We consider the approximation or recovery of functions based on a finite number of function evaluations. This is a well-studied problem in optimal recovery, machine learning and numerical analysis in general, but many fundamental insights were obtained only recently. We discuss different aspects of the information-theoretic limit that appears because of the limited data available, as well as algorithms and sampling strategies that come as close to it as possible.

We also discuss (optimal) sampling in a broader sense, allowing other types of measurements that may be nonlinear, adaptive and random, and present several relations between the different settings in the spirit of information-based complexity. We hope that this article will provide both a basic introduction to the subject and a contemporary summary of the current state of research.

Royal commissions are the most prestigious form of Australian public enquiry with important investigative, fact-finding, policy-making and truth-telling functions. It is no coincidence that Australia has had three royal commissions in the last five years into the care and support sector. This ground-breaking article is the first to compare the final reports of the Victorian Mental Health and Commonwealth Aged Care and Disability Royal Commissions to analyse the systemic problems in each sector and the recommended reforms. It provides a useful overview of each commission and how the three reports intersect with each other. The article identifies seven interconnected themes which recur across the three commissions: (i) difficulty accessing services and supports; (ii) a lack of choice and control; (iii) negative social attitudes and discrimination; (iv) the overuse of restrictive practices; (v) an undertrained and underpaid workforce; (vi) problems with oversight and complaints processes; and (vii) chronic under-funding. It also sets out the different approaches to reform in each report which should arguably be adopted across all three sectors. Finally, it provides an update about government implementation of each report. Given the dire state of the care and support sector, the problems highlighted by the seven themes require urgent attention.

Wild licorice is increasing in abundance across sandy grasslands of the Canadian Prairies, yet little is known about how to manage this plant. We conducted two field studies documenting the long-term impact of different herbicides applied one-time in either spring or summer, and annual mowing in either spring or summer, on the abundance of wild licorice for up to five growing seasons (2016-20). Herbicides led to variable reductions in licorice density and biomass between sites and over time, with the greatest reductions coinciding with summer rather than spring herbicides during the first two years post-treatment. Greater and more consistent decreases were evident from the application of aminopyralid and aminocyclopyrachlor, although all herbicides, including dicamba and 2,4-D, exhibited some suppression of licorice out to four years after treatment. Reductions in wild licorice also varied with growing conditions, as drought reduced licorice biomass across all treatments, including the non-treated control. Unlike herbicides, annual mowing, particularly in summer (late July; 9-10 leaf stage), increased wild licorice total annual biomass produced for up to two growing seasons, coincident with above-normal rainfall. With the onset of drought in year three, mowing effects dissipated and did not reappear through year five. Finally, while initially effective in reducing wild licorice, hand-pulling effects on licorice were short-lived, and the selective removal of neighboring herbs led to an increase in licorice during drought. Overall, these results highlight the challenge of managing wild licorice populations in grasslands and provide insight into the strategies that may aid the management of this species.

Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixed-status couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.

The regulation of emerging technologies often involves prolonged legislative processes that demand significant attention and resources. Setting a future-proof framework is therefore imperative: not only to accommodate innovation, but to hedge against the uncertainties that render detailed legislation obsolete. The drafting of legal frameworks to regulate emerging technologies increasingly engages a variety of future-proofing techniques.

Surveillance laws are more susceptible to the need for future-proofing. The nature of intelligence agencies and their operational need to remain secretive provide powerful incentives to prevent their governing legal framework from undergoing frequent legislative revision. Accordingly, surveillance laws are often drafted in a manner catering to these constraints.

This article maps and assesses the principal future-proofing strategies available to legislators. It then examines Israeli surveillance law as a test case. The article analyses the Israel Security Agency (ISA) Law, which, inter alia, governs the online surveillance activities of Israel’s domestic security agency, the ISA. The article examines the language of the ISA Law currently in force. It explores a past expansion of its purposive domain through the deployment of ISA surveillance for COVID-19 contact-tracing, and the subsequent judicial narrowing of the statutory provision enabling this deployment. The article then discusses in detail the future of ISA surveillance powers and their future-proofing mechanisms pursuant to the recently published ISA Amendment Memorandum.

Hexahydrocannabinol (HHC) is a semi-synthetic cannabinoid that recently emerged as a legal alternative to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol. Due to emerging concerns regarding its neuropsychiatric safety profile, including psychosis, it was banned in July 2025. We report two cases of HHC-induced psychosis in adolescents requiring inpatient psychiatric admission, both with no prior psychiatric history. Both individuals required about six weeks of inpatient treatment, with their symptoms resolving following abstinence from HHC and antipsychotic medications. These cases support recent regulatory measures banning HHC and highlight the need for ongoing clinician awareness of this agent and its associated risk of psychosis.

The AAA algorithm for rational approximation is employed to illustrate applications of rational functions all across numerical analysis. For example, rational functions enable strikingly effective methods for numerical differentiation and integration; interpolation of equispaced data; locating zeros, poles, and branch points; analytic continuation; computation of inverse functions; imputation of missing data; computation of nonlinear eigenvalues and resonances; model order reduction/reduced order modelling; solution of Wiener–Hopf and Hilbert transform problems; conformal mapping; and solution of the two-dimensional Laplace, biharmonic and Helmholtz equations. The paper also surveys various improvements and generalizations of the AAA algorithm that have developed since its original appearance in 2018.

A new species Acutigebia succinacia from the Pacific coast of Honshu and Kyushu, Japan, is described and compared with A. simsoni (Thomson, 1893). The new species differs from A. simsoni in having a spine on the lower margin of antennal article 1, whereas A. simsoni is unarmed. The genetic divergence of partial 16S rRNA gene sequence (491 bp) between A. succinacia sp. nov. and A. simsoni is 6.34–6.60%. A key to the seven species of Acutigebia is presented.

Canine angiostrongylosis is a life-threatening disease caused by infection with the metastrongyloid nematode Angiostrongylus vasorum. As animal travel and translocation have increased in recent times, many infectious agents, including A. vasorum, have expanded to new geographic areas. Here we report the first molecularly confirmed case of angiostrongylosis in a translocated dog in Estonia. We also analyse the phylogenetic relationship of the isolate with previously described European isolates and describe the challenges encountered in diagnosing this disease. Given the expanding geographic distribution of A. vasorum across Europe, our findings underscore the need for improved diagnostic awareness to control the parasite’s transmission.