In their submissions to the International Court of Justice in the context of the Policies and Practices of Israel Advisory Opinion, states assessed the legality of Israel’s prolonged occupation using various legal frameworks, including international humanitarian law. In doing so, some participants in the proceedings appear to have endorsed a doctrinal position suggesting that an occupation may become unlawful under international humanitarian law due to its prolonged character. This article demonstrates that such an interpretation of the law of occupation lacks consensus and does not fully align with the law as it currently stands. Building on this observation, and based on the language deployed by states in their most recent submissions, this article suggests an alternative argument: the protracted character of Israel’s occupation is more accurately framed as an abuse of the law of occupation, rather than a violation of this regime.

This paper discusses the work of Japanese painter Nakamura Hiroshi in the late 1950s and early 1960s in light of the politics and literature debate raging among the Japanese intelligentsia in the immediate post-World War II era, focusing specifically on the exchange between Kurahara Korehito and the writers associated with the Kindai bungaku literary journal. A key issue in these debates was that of subjectivity, and this article argues that analyzing Nakamura’s paintings with a focus on this concept reveals how the development of his work was dialectically mediated through the tumultuous political upheavals of the postwar era.

This manuscript examines how growing up with a sibling relates to prosociality and how knowledge of a partner’s sibling background may serve as a behavioral cue. In a series of experimental games, we found that individuals with siblings were significantly more likely to cooperate in stag hunt and contribute more in public goods and dictator games than only children (OC) on average. In two treatments where a sibling status cue is exogenously revealed, only-child pairs exhibited reduced prosociality. OC exhibit different empirical expectations of behavior compared to those with siblings, while generally sharing the same normative beliefs. Language AI analysis of subjects’ written perspectives on the games corroborates these patterns. We conclude that OC exhibit more context-dependent prosociality, with behavior more closely aligned with empirical expectations than normative beliefs, a pattern not observed in those with siblings.

The topic of this paper is fiscal equalization among municipalities in the four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fiscal equalization refers to transfers of financial resources to and between municipalities with the aim of mitigating regional differences in fiscal capacities and spending needs. More specifically, we ask the following research question: How does fiscal equalization impact spatial inequalities? We conduct a comparative empirical analysis of fiscal equalization policies in the Nordic countries. A main contribution is that we construct a granular dataset consisting of all municipalities in the four countries in 2020. We leverage this dataset to analyze inequalities before and after fiscal equalization. Our main finding is that equalization is strongest in Sweden and weakest in Norway, while Denmark and Finland are ranked in the middle.

Diet plays a critical role in development and progression of Crohn’s disease (CD). Dietary indices are important tools to evaluate diet quality and inflammatory potential, and we investigated their associations with pediatric CD in comparison to healthy children. A cross-sectional study including 144 children with CD (122 with clinically active and 22 with quiescent disease) and 57 healthy controls 6-18 years of age was conducted. Dietary intake was estimated using three 24-h dietary recalls. Diet quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI)-2015, alternate Mediterranean diet (aMed) score and dietary inflammatory potential using the modified Children-Dietary Inflammatory Index (mC-DII). Children with active CD had lower total HEI-2015 and aMed scores than healthy controls. A similar pro-inflammatory mC-DII score was found across the three groups. A higher mC-DII score in patients with CD was associated with higher intake of refined sugars, saturated fats and proteins, and lower intake of whole grains and dairy, highlighting dietary components contributing to pro-inflammatory potential. Similarly, healthy children in the highest mC-DII tertile consumed more added sugars and sodium and fewer whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and plant proteins. Fiber intake was significantly lower in children with active CD (median fiber %DRI: 37.0 IQR [22.6-48.3] vs 41.2 IQR [34.1-49.1] vs 45.8 IQR [35.7-62.0], P <0.001). Using three dietary indices to evaluate diet quality and dietary inflammatory potential, both children with CD and healthy children in this cohort consume a poor-quality, pro-inflammatory diet low in fiber, but the quality and fiber content are significantly lower in children with active CD. Future randomized controlled trials are required to evaluate the effect of dietary modification on the risk and progression of pediatric CD.

This study examined how the location of silent pausing (mid- vs. end-clause) may relate to neural processes during spontaneous L1 and L2 speech production. Twenty intermediate-level Japanese speakers of L2 English carried out eight monologic, oral decision-making tasks, four in English and four in Japanese. While completing the tasks, their brain activity was recorded through fMRI scanning. Participants’ speech was transcribed, and the resulting transcripts were annotated for mid- and end-clause silent pauses. Then, for the pauses identified, we conducted whole-brain analyses to identify relevant activation patterns, followed by region-of-interest analyses in language-related areas. We found that mid-clause pauses were linked to increased activation in language-related brain regions, with stronger effects for L2 speech. We also observed heightened activity in conceptualisation-related brain areas at end-clause positions in both L1 and L2 speech. In L2 English, participants also displayed greater activation in a concept-retrieval-related brain region in end-clause than in mid-clause position.

This study examines the interaction between regularity and complexity in the acquisition of morphology and morpho-syntax in Hebrew nominal inflection. Seventy-eight Hebrew-speaking children, ages 4–8, were tested, using sentence completion tasks, on nine structures from three linguistic systems: singular adjectival agreement, noun pluralization, and plural adjectival agreement. Regularity and complexity emerged as organizing factors across ages: regular structures precede irregular ones, and within each level of regularity, less complex structures were acquired before more complex ones. The findings are discussed within the Dual-Route Model pointing to the difference between rule-governed and memory-based knowledge, while suggesting that the advantage of regularity could be attributed to frequency as well as to the strength of regularity cues in language acquisition, as proposed by Usage-Based models. The advantage of less complex structures over more complex ones is accounted for by the greater cognitive and linguistic effort required to acquire the latter.

Judicial rulings on expert evidence determine which specialized knowledge enters the courtroom and, in doing so, shape the credibility of litigants and the legitimacy of their claims. This article examines how disparities in litigant status shape the judicial gatekeeping of expert evidence and how this process relates to the ideological context of the legal forum. Using data from a probability sample of 811 Daubert rulings from United States District Courts, our multinomial logistic regression models show that, overall, higher status litigants are more successful in excluding opposing evidence and in overcoming exclusionary motions. However, this aggregate relationship masks a pronounced ideological divide. Specifically, higher status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to conservative judges while lower status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to liberal judges. These findings illustrate how trial court decisions reflect broader institutional and ideological forces and suggest that ideological contexts can either amplify or temper structural inequalities in the courtroom.