Partisanship is the primary driver of voter decision-making in the United States. Partisans expect to prefer their party’s candidates’ issue stances and personal characteristics. Even when they learn negative information, motivated reasoning often keeps them from changing their candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, there is a “tipping point” at which partisans will update their priors and may vote against their preferred party’s candidate. This study seeks to determine whether voters are more likely to reach that tipping point when they see a woman in their party, and under what circumstances. We use a unique experimental design to vary a candidate’s gender, congruence with major elements of the party platform, and their participation in a scandal. We find that women are often evaluated more negatively and that subjects rely on substantive information more when evaluating women candidates. Our findings suggest that campaigns and campaign information may matter more for women candidates.

The extent to which EU competition law applies in the healthcare context remains a contested question. The contemporaneous publication of the European Commission’s Evaluation of State Subsidy rules for health and social services of general economic interest (SGEI) in December 2022, and of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s April 2023 judgment in Casa Regina Apostolorum regarding state support to hospitals in Italy, underscore uncertainty and appear to indicate an impasse. These publications unfold against the backdrop of two tensions: between state and market, and between the EU and national levels. Hospitals illustrate these tensions well due to the expansion of competition mechanisms into the hospital sector (notably expanding private provider delivery of public hospital services, often supported by “patient choice” policies), and of hospitals remaining typically local or regional in character rather than supranational. This article provides a timely and original analysis of the Casa Regina Apostolorum judgment in light of Commission policy regarding SGEI and hospitals and how EU Member States engage with this. It offers insights into the potential legacy of Casa Regina Apostolorum, and indicates where future legal challenges may focus.

Drawing on the two-factor model of organizational justice and social exchange theory, this study investigates the mediating roles of procedural and distributive justice in the relationship between work locus of control (WLOC) and leader–member exchange (LMX). Using data collected from two cultural contexts – the United States and South Korea – this research further examines whether culture moderates the indirect relationship between WLOC and LMX through perceived justice. The findings indicate that subordinates with an internal WLOC tend to report higher-quality LMX relationships, and that both procedural and distributive justice partially mediate this relationship. Moderated mediation analyses reveal that the indirect effects of WLOC on LMX via justice perceptions are significantly stronger in the U.S. sample than in the Korean sample. These results contribute to the literature by identifying perceived justice as a key psychological mechanism linking individual traits to relational outcomes at work, and by highlighting how cultural values shape this process.

The original declarative procedural reflective (DPR) model is a well-established model of therapist knowledge and skill development. To date, although it has been used to guide reflection and discussion around personal and practitioner selves, it has not emphasised the various intersecting identities of practitioners and how these interact within wider concepts such as power, society, service contexts and the patient and supervisory relationships. The learning, development and implementation of CBT skills does not occur in a vacuum or separate to the practitioner identities however relatively little has been written on this. This paper aims to expand the original DPR model to illustrate potential ways that social context, identity and power could be considered within CBT training, delivery and supervision. It delineates and explores the additional components of the model (i.e. practitioner identity(s), context/society and power) and then provides examples of how this framework could inform key CBT activities (including low-intensity CBT).

Eocene snakes of India have the potential to shed light on the nature of snake diversification on the subcontinent following the Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K-Pg), when India was still a northward-drifting isolated landmass prior to its collision with Asia. Here, we report a diverse snake fauna from the Eocene of Kutch, western India. The fauna, dominated by aquatic forms, includes palaeophiids, a giant madtsoiid, and a possible nigerophiid. The palaeophiids from the middle Eocene (late Lutetian) comprise ?Palaeophis Owen, 1841 and Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. Together, these taxa enrich the record of fossil snakes in the poorly known late Lutetian of India and represent the youngest record of Palaeophiidae from the Indian subcontinent. Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. shows intermediate morphology between Palaeophis and Pterosphenus-grade snakes and is phylogenetically the earliest-diverging member of Pterosphenus Lucas, 1898. Additionally, the middle Eocene Pterosphenus biswasi Rage et al., 2003 is reassessed and retained as a valid taxon based on pterapophyseal morphology and overall form. Biogeographic considerations highlight the importance of the Indian fossil record in understanding the origin and diversification of the genus Pterosphenus. The prevalence of niche partitioning is suggested for the palaeophiids, with Pterosphenus rannensis n. sp. recovered from a tidal setting and ?Palaeophis sp. indet. from a marsh/swamp setting. The new Indian madtsoiid from the middle Eocene (early Lutetian) represents a sympatric taxon with the terrestrial/semiaquatic giant Vasuki indicus Datta and Bajpai, 2024 coexisting in a back-swamp marsh setting. The early Eocene (Ypresian) nigerophiid is among the oldest Cenozoic occurrences of this family globally.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/dc529074-73a6-4869-9b49-44caf9e2d956

Mountainous regions host globally unique biodiversity, but face growing threats from climate and land-use change. The Alps stand out as a key mountain range in Europe, where the ski industry is extensive and impacts ecosystems and their associated biodiversity. However, climate change is projected to reduce natural snow precipitation, thus understanding snow dynamics and the ski industry’s role is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies. Ski-piste creation generally has detrimental consequences for mountain biodiversity, yet pistes often retain substantial snow throughout spring that, when melting, may create favourable foraging conditions for mountain birds. This study investigates whether ski-pistes provide suitable foraging habitat and explores their broader importance for mountain avifauna. Field surveys in spring 2023 in the western Italian Alps recorded 17 bird species using the melting snow on ski-pistes as a foraging habitat. Snow presence was a significant factor influencing bird presence. Birds systematically selected areas with intermediate snow cover interspersed with muddy patches, a microhabitat that likely has a high availability of invertebrate prey emerging from the soil. Given that snow is retained on ski-pistes for longer than on the surrounding habitat, the pistes may represent a useful source of food for mountain birds in spring. However, this needs to be considered in relation to the negative impacts of skiing on alpine biodiversity, which may include a likely increased reliance on artificial snow in response to the projected decline in natural snow precipitation under climate change. Understanding these effects is essential to ensure that future conservation strategies support mountain bird communities without exacerbating the environmental costs associated with artificial snow production.

This article1sets out to reassess the idea, repeated by many scholars, that there was a bishop from the Central Asian city of Qumul (or Hami) who was present in Baghdad around the time when one patriarch of the Church of the East – Makkika II – was buried and another – Denḥa I – was consecrated. After an initial consideration of what we know about the city of Qumul/Hami, we examine the various authors who have held to this idea and the sources, both primary and secondary, which they invoke as proof that the idea is correct. Gradually moving back to the earliest witnesses, we eventually arrive at the Maronite scholar Joseph Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana and the fourteenth-century primary source, Ṣalībā ibn Yūḥannā. A suggestion is made for how the idea originated and developed, thanks in part to the account of Marco Polo, but more definitively to Michel Le Quien’s Oriens Christianus.

The pandemic revealed significant gaps in mental health support for educators. This letter emphasizes the need for sustained mental health services, urging governments and institutions to provide resources, integrate mental health education into curricula, and create supportive work environments. Long-term strategies such as regular screenings and normalizing psychological support are essential for educators’ well-being.

While apophatic theology has been quickly dismissed by the vast majority of analytic philosophers, Samuel Lebens is among the few who has tried to show that such a theological position is tenable by appealing to two main philosophical moves. The first move is that many of our claims about God are false (or nonsensical). The second move is that such false (or nonsensical) claims about God are illuminating and/or therapeutic. This article presents Lebens’s account of apophatic theology, and defends it from the main criticisms. However, it also shows that, contrary to what has been suggested by Lebens himself, the disjunction which appears in the first move has to be understood as exclusive, that is, either many of our claims about God are false or many of our claims about God are nonsense. Tertium non datur. Moreover, this article argues that, in both cases, Lebens’s account of apophatic theology stumbles upon some important issues. For, if many of our claims about God are taken to be false or nonsensical, Lebens fails to explain how such claims can be illuminating and/or therapeutic.

We investigate the consequences of periodic, on–off glucose infusion on the glucose–insulin regulatory system based on a system-level mathematical model with two explicit time delays. Studying the effects of such infusion protocols is mathematically challenging yet a promising direction for probing the system response to infusion. We pay special attention to the interplay of periodic infusion with intermediate-time-scale, ultradian oscillations that arise as a result of the physiological response of glucose uptake and back-release into the bloodstream. By using numerical solvers and numerical continuation software, we investigate the response of the model to different infusion patterns, explore how these patterns affect the overall levels of glucose and insulin, and how this can lead to entrainment. By doing so, we provide a road-map of system responses that can potentially help identify new, less-invasive, test strategies for detecting abnormal responses to glucose uptake without falling into lockstep with the infusion pattern.