This article examines the underexplored role of the Spanish Socialist Party of the Interior (PSI), later the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), in the transnational struggle against Francoism and the democratisation of Spain. Moving beyond the dominant historiographical focus on the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, it investigates how the PSI–PSP forged a robust international network – particularly with the Socialist International (SI) – through a distinct strategy of informal diplomacy. The study’s central aim is to highlight the originality and effectiveness of the PSI–PSP’s communicative tactics, which blended official channels with informal, academic and personal connections, in navigating Cold War–era political dynamics.

Anchored in the conceptual frameworks of informal diplomacy, multi-track diplomacy and new diplomatic history, the article situates the PSI–PSP’s initiatives within broader debates on soft power and the role of non-state actors in international relations. Methodologically, it relies on a wide range of primary sources, including unpublished internal documents from the personal archive of the former secretary general of the party, international archives and oral history interviews with former PSI–PSP members. Press sources are also utilised to triangulate key events and statements.

The article aims to demonstrate that while the PSI–PSP ultimately failed to gain formal recognition from the SI, its informal diplomatic practices yielded significant symbolic and practical outcomes. It concludes by arguing for a reconceptualisation of transnational socialist networks, emphasising the indispensable role of informal relations in shaping the institutional and political architecture of European social democracy during Spain’s transition to democracy.

The ending speech in Aesopic fables, where stories conclude with direct utterances from characters, is not merely a didactic tool but a crucial narrative device constructing hermeneutic complexity. This study systematically examines the narrative function of ending speech through computational analysis of 600 Aesopic fables from Laura Gibbs’ edition. We quantitatively analyzed the complex relationships between ending speech, story content, explicit morals and speaker identity using natural language processing techniques. The analysis reveals three key findings. First, the average similarity of ending speeches (0.1820) is significantly lower than that of stories (0.3578), confirming that ending speech forms a unique semantic domain rather than serving as a simple summary of the narrative. Latent Dirichlet allocation analysis also shows that ending speeches are differentiated into 13 topics, displaying a more complex structure than stories (seven topics). Second, we found that ending speech constitutes a distinct narrative domain from epimythium, with an overwhelming ratio of their relationships being either independent (76.8%) or tensional (21.4%). This indicates that the ending speech is a narrative device that amplifies interpretive complexity, often clashing with the epimythium rather than reinforcing it. Third, 249 different ending speech speakers each represent unique voices and perspectives, with the frequency of utterances – fox (34 times), lion (19 times) and wolf (18 times) – demonstrating a value system in Aesopic fables where wisdom is prioritized over physical strength. These findings indicate that the ending speech establishes complex and sometimes tensional relationships with both story and epimythium, thereby transforming fables into “open work” that can be newly interpreted. This study provides empirical evidence for understanding Aesopic fables not as simple didactic tales but as complex narratives with structural features supporting polyphonic interpretation, demonstrating the potential of computational narratology.

Luminescence dating has developed over the last ∼60 years as a powerful technique for placing environmental and anthropogenic change into a secure temporal framework. However, over time, many have forgotten, or were never introduced to, the history of how of the method developed, particularly the role of unique instruments built in-house that enabled key methodological advances. In this paper we provide a concise history of the technique’s evolution, drawing on our own experiences.

This study explored the relationship between dairy technology adoption (DTA), crop diversification and food security among smallholder farmers practicing mixed agriculture in Bason Werana Woreda, North Shewa Zone, Amhara Region. A systematic sampling method selected 252 households from two randomly chosen government administrative areas (kebeles), proportional to size. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and an endogeneity-corrected recursive conditional mixed process regression model to examine bidirectional causation. Findings showed a 34% adoption rate of dairy technology, with improved housing and vaccination being the most common, while artificial insemination and improved breeds had the lowest adoption. The Herfindahl Iindex for crop diversification was 0.31, indicating a lower-middle level. Food security analysis, based on the Food Consumption Score, revealed that 78.57% of households were food secure, while 16.27% and 5.16% had borderline and poor food security, respectively. The regression results indicated that DTA significantly improves food security, and vice versa, but no causal relationship was found between these factors and crop diversification. The study identified key household-level and policy-related variables that are critical for enhancing DTA and addressing food insecurity. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of designing and promoting context-specific, locally optimal agricultural strategies that are closely aligned with household characteristics. Such alignment is essential for advancing dairy sector development and improving the welfare of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia.

This article addresses how air services agreements (ASAs) are starting to be used to regulate carbon emissions from international aviation. International aviation is regulated by a combination of multilateral aviation-specific conventions and bilateral ASAs. The Chicago Convention of 1944 and annexes that contain the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) are the primary multilateral sources of international aviation law. These SARPs mainly cover the technical requirements of aviation safety with the notable exception of Annex 16: Environmental Protection. With the goal of reducing the climate impact of aviation-related carbon emissions, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) was adopted as SARPs. However, the legal status of SARPs remains controversial. Since they are not an integral part of the Chicago Convention, they do not have the same legal force as the convention itself. Although the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopts and manages SARPs, it lacks a way to enforce compliance. Despite this limitation, however, bilateral ASAs give SARPs legal force. ASAs determine the level of aviation market access between states, and most ASAs permit the imposition of operational bans in case of non-compliance with SARPs on safety standards. From exclusively dealing with the exchange of commercial rights for international air transport, a new generation of ASAs has started to cover environmental protection. Based on a review of 620 publicly available ASAs, this article assesses how SARPs on aviation safety are effectively enforced by ASAs and anticipates how SARPs on carbon emissions will gradually follow suit.

Much is known about the factors that shape partisan campaign activism in the United States and other democracies. In contrast to this voluminous literature, political scientists have given relatively little attention to an emerging phenomenon in contemporary party politics: the mobilization via “emigrant party branches” of partisans living outside of the territorial borders of their native country. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of Democrats Abroad—the official overseas arm of the US Democratic Party—during the 2024 election cycle. Drawing from an original two-wave panel survey of party members, we demonstrate that some of the forces that prompt campaign activism in the domestic United States hold for partisans overseas. At the same time, factors pertaining to the migration experience and settlement in another country also affect engagement in American campaigns. Most notably, we find that overseas Democrats who become integrated into the party system of their residential country are more likely to participate in American elections from the distance. This finding contributes a fresh perspective to models of political transnationalism and “campaign spillover” in electoral research—that is, the impact that partisan engagement in one context has on subsequent involvement in separate domains.

Political news consumption is highly uneven today: few people consume from news outlets directly, while many encounter news incidentally through social media and aggregators. Because outlets depend on direct consumers for revenue, they respond primarily to this core audience’s preferences. Several contemporary styles of news coverage—which emphasize partisan conflict, employ specialized jargon, engage in predictive analysis, and use clickbait language—are attractive to core consumers, but may also make news less accessible for others. In a pre-registered survey experiment (n = 2,233), I show that, relative to a public interest style that prioritizes key information about policy and democratic norms, typical news styles weaken post-exposure recall of key news information—that is, they are under-informative. Recall penalties are especially severe for those with lower baseline political engagement, yet still affect highly engaged consumers as well. This study shows that contemporary approaches to news coverage broadly under-serve the public by inhibiting political learning.

This article examines the many afterlives of the Tendaguru Expedition—a 1909–13 fossil excavation in the colony of German East Africa that unearthed the tallest mounted dinosaur in the world, still on display in Berlin. The long process of dinosaur assembly, which took more than three decades, meant that the Tendaguru project effectively outlived the German empire. Accounts of the expedition alongside the dinosaur exhibitions served as attempts to both theorize prehistoric life and write a history of the empire in terms compatible with the many twentieth-century German regimes that followed. These (re)negotiations of Tendaguru were reckoned with an ever-growing list of lost worlds: the prehistoric, the imperial, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar Germanies. At stake in these dinosaur stories was not merely the progress of some neutral, apolitical, or abstract paleontological science but rather national pride, international authority, civilizational superiority, and imperial legitimacy.

This paper presents a broadband metasurface (MS) antenna designed through characteristic modes analysis. By introducing horizontal slots into a 3 × 3 MS array, a pair of degenerate modes is successfully separated and the dominant mode is reconfigured as TM10 mode. Optimizing feed position simultaneously excites the TM10 modes of both the patch antenna and the MS, expanding the −10 dB impedance bandwidth from 4.09–4.22 GHz to 3.45–4.5 GHz with a gain variation of less than 1.9 dB. Furthermore, a dual-port multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna is constructed by orthogonally arranging two elements. The exclusive TM10 mode enables inherent decoupling, achieving over 23.6 dB isolation. Measured results exhibit good agreement with simulations, demonstrating an operational band of 3.44–4.39 GHz, effectively covering the 5G NR (New Radio) n48 band.

This article investigates the role of European Union regulation in shaping EU companies’ resilience when their supply chains encounter risks in the EU internal market, focusing on the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) as a representative case. In light of increasing global disruptions, the EU has adopted regulatory measures that embed sustainability, human rights, and environmental protection into corporate governance. Through doctrinal analysis and structured coding of legal provisions, the article examines how the CSDDD influences EU companies’ capacity to anticipate, absorb and adapt to supply chain shocks. It argues that while integrating multiple policy objectives within a single legal framework is both necessary and inevitable, doing so requires legal flexibility and institutional design that account for EU companies’ interdependent resilience capabilities. The analysis highlights the importance of adaptive regulatory mechanisms in ensuring that EU law remains effective and coherent in a rapidly changing global environment.

Beginning with the public controversy over matters of conscience between William Gladstone and John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century, this article explores the significance of ‘conscience’ for moral theology in the Anglican tradition. Noting the genealogy of Newman’s thought and his debt to the eighteenth-century divine, Bishop Butler, the lecture also brings this tradition of thinking into conversation with more recent reflection about conscience in Roman Catholic moral theology. While ‘freedom of conscience’ is often emphasized in contemporary moral reflection, the lecture notes that ‘the obligations of conscience’ are also significant in the thought of Newman and others. The article considers the recent intervention on ‘Episcopacy and Conscience’ by the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England, before ending with a series of questions about the place of moral formation in seminary education in the Anglican Communion: how might Newman’s thinking about conscience animate our understanding of the spiritual and moral formation offered to ordinands?

Maternal–infant bonding is essential for early development and long-term well-being. In low-resource settings like Pakistan, perinatal anxiety, though prevalent, remains under-recognized and can significantly disrupt bonding. While perinatal depression has garnered greater research attention, the cultural and relational dimensions linking anxiety to bonding remain underexplored. This qualitative study examined how maternal distress, sociocultural expectations and healthcare limitations influence bonding. Eighteen pregnant and postnatal women (aged 19–45 years) with clinically significant anxiety (Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale ≥ 10) were purposively recruited from public hospitals in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. In-depth interviews were conducted in Urdu and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis. Five major themes emerged: (1) emotional vulnerability during the perinatal period, (2) interpersonal and family dynamics, (3) maternal health and role strain, (4) cultural scripts and structural barriers and (5) participant-driven recommendations. Anxiety often delays emotional connection. Judgment, limited autonomy and lack of support worsened distress, while faith, rituals and relational coping offered resilience. This study provides novel qualitative evidence that perinatal anxiety and maternal–infant bonding are co-constructed within the relational and sociocultural ecologies of low- and middle-income countries like Pakistan. Findings challenge purely symptom-focused approaches, underscoring that effective intervention must address not only the emotional invisibility of mothers but also the relational pathways of distress, such as hypervigilance, exhaustion and performance anxiety, which are intensified by a lack of respect, autonomy and validation. A shift toward contextually grounded, relationship-centered care is urgently needed.

The study confirms a significant biogeographic extension of the goby species Drombus key (Smith) in Indian waters from the Western Indian Ocean to the Northern Bay of Bengal based on nine specimens collected from the mudflat region of the Bahuda estuary, Odisha. The transitional zone of the Bahuda estuary represents an active interface between marine and freshwater systems. The transitional zone experiences extreme salinity fluxes for which some dominant ichthyofaunal assemblages occur like gobies. The species D. key has the unique character of a triangular yellow mark before a black blotch on the pectoral fin upper base. The species was earlier reported from East Africa to Seychelles and Madagascar, and the present study reported the species for the first time from the Indian coast. Additionally, the species D. key has no genetic data in prior studies and this study also adds four COI gene barcodes of the species, which will contribute towards the potential use of the barcode data library.

This article explores how abortion was framed on Twitter as an issue during the 2022 midterm elections directly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. By leveraging a dataset of all tweets sent by US House of Representatives candidates for two months prior to the midterm elections, this study examines how both gender and partisanship impacted the discussion of abortion and shows that partisanship drove the rhetoric surrounding this issue during those elections. Whereas women candidates in general were significantly more likely to discuss abortion than their male counterparts, Democratic women led the way and were more likely to use “women-invoked rhetoric” to frame the issue.