The secrecy of intelligence institutions might give the impression that intelligence is an ethics-free zone, but this is not the case. In The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions, Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Andrew Alexandra, Patrick Walsh, and Roger Bradbury examine the ways that liberal democracies have come to rely on intelligence institutions for effective decision-making and look at the best ways to limit these institutions’ power and constrain the abuses they have the potential to cause. In contrast, the value of Amy Zegart’s and Miah Hammond-Errey’s research, in their respective books, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence and Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted, is the access each of them provides to the thoughts and opinions of the intelligence practitioners working in these secretive institutions. What emerges is a consensus that the fundamental moral purpose of intelligence institutions should be truth telling. In other words, intelligence should be a rigorous epistemic activity that seeks to improve decision-makers’ understanding of a rapidly changing world. Moreover, a key ethical challenge for intelligence practitioners in liberal democracies is how to do their jobs effectively in a way that does not undermine public trust. Measures recommended include better oversight and accountability mechanisms, adoption of a ‘risk of transparency’ principle, and greater understanding of and respect for privacy rights.

The brachyurans Tehuacana tehuacana Stenzel, 1944 and Dromilites americana Rathbun, 1935 have historically been difficult to place in families. A reevaluation of type and referred material from several institutions suggests that the two species are referrable to separate genera in Palaeoxanthopsidae. Hyphalocarcinus new genus is erected to accommodate H. americanus new combination, and Tehuacana remains a distinct genus. Palaeoxanthopsidae evolved and radiated in the Atlantic Ocean, ranging from Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) to early Eocene (Ypresian) in age. This work adds to the known diversity of Palaeoxanthopsidae and demonstrates that the family survived and thrived in the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of the end-Cretaceous extinction. Differential preservation of specimens must be evaluated carefully when placing superficially similar taxa at the family, genus, and species level.

UUID: http://zoobank.org/73da26c7-aff7-4abe-8aa5-768944bbf6ee

Many aspects of migration policy involve hard moral dilemmas. Whether the dilemmas are concerned with refugee accommodation and integration, temporary labor migration, or the prospects of rejected asylum seekers, policymakers must sometimes make tough choices between competing and equally compelling moral values. Through in-depth discussion of various concrete examples, contributions to this roundtable argue that recognition and systematic analysis of the “ethics of migration policy dilemmas” can both increase philosophical and social-scientific understanding of public debates and policymaking on migration and provide ethical guidance for migration policy. Before introducing the roundtable’s individual contributions, this essay argues for the distinct epistemic value of the Dilemmas perspective by contrasting it with an approach that emphasizes the “busting” of myths; that is, the empirical uncovering of influential falsehoods in public and policy debates, often in the hope of improving policymaking through stronger evidence. We argue that while such myth busting can be valuable, it is insufficient and sometimes unhelpful for understanding how migration policy comes about and can be improved. Policymaking is not just shaped by empirical facts and understandings but also by interests and goals, including moral ones, that give empirical considerations deeper meaning and action-guiding potential. Often, these moral goals are numerous, similarly or equally compelling, and in profound tension with one another. Where this is the case, we should not simply introduce more and more accurate factual descriptions; we must also analyze dilemmas.

Behavioural activation (BA) is recommended for the treatment of depression but most research focuses on working age adults and there is a dearth of literature concerning the delivery of BA with people with co-occurring depression and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This case study outlines a BA intervention with a male in his late 60s with depression and MCI and describes appropriate adaptations that were useful. Treatment consisted of psychoeducation of depression and BA, formulation, activity monitoring and scheduling, tackling self-critical thoughts and rumination, and relapse planning. The 12-session BA treatment resulted in a decrease in both depressive symptoms and psychological distress as well as an increase in the individual’s engagement with meaningful activities. This case study adds to the literature and strengthens the argument for the use of BA in the treatment of depression in older adults with MCI. Adaptations, conclusions and limitations are discussed.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To gain an understanding of the use of behavioural activation (BA) in the treatment of depression in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

2. (2) To illustrate treatment of depression using BA with an older adult utilising the current evidence base.

3. (3) To outline adaptations that can be made to BA to help deliver this treatment with an older adult who has MCI.

On what policy areas and with what strategies should businesses and their leaders be involved in political activity? Advocates of “stakeholder capitalism” endorse companies and their leaders taking stances on social, environmental, and economic issues that advance the interests of their communities, not just of their shareholders. We juxtapose this view with two alternatives: companies and their leaders should a) stay out of politics or b) advocate only for their narrow business interests. We survey the mass public and business leaders. The public has little appetite for corporate leader engagement. However, business leaders, especially Democratic ones, endorse more active engagement from their firms on most issues, though they favor their firm leaders engaging in behind-the-scenes strategies rather than those that mobilize employees or customers. We find there is an elite appetite for business leaders to move beyond particularistic lobbying and to influence broader economic and social policy.

The effect of different levels of residue from the extraction of cassava starch (REAM) in the diet of multiparous lactating Holstein cows was investigated. The experiment was carried out at the Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná. Five multiparous Holstein cows, with mean milk production of 30.65 ± 1.17 kg/day were distributed into five treatments, using Latin squares (5 × 5). Treatments consisted of inclusion (0, 8, 16, 24 and 32% dry matter basis) of REAM in the diet. Intake, digestibility, milk production and composition as well as blood parameters were measured. Except for ether extract and total digestible nutrients, the intake variables did not differ significantly between treatments. Except for the digestibility of crude protein, all digestibility values decreased progressively with inclusion levels of REAM. The inclusion of REAM in feeding of lactating Holstein cows up to 32% of the diet reduced milk production by 15%, however, it did not alter milk production efficiency, fat, total solids and blood parameters. We conclude that up to 16% of REAM can be included in the diet; however, higher levels may lead to a significant fall in productivity.

Every directed graph $G$ induces a locally ordered metric space $\mathcal{X}_{(G)}$ together with a local order $\tilde {\mathcal{X}}_{(G)}$ that is locally dihomeomorphic to the standard pospace $\mathbb{R}$; both are related by a morphism ${\beta }_{(G)} G:\tilde {\mathcal{X}}_{(G)}\to {\mathcal{X}}_{(G)}$ satisfying a universal property. The underlying set of $\tilde {\mathcal{X}_{(G)}}$ admits a non-Hausdorff atlas $\mathcal{A}_{G}$ equipped with a non-vanishing vector field ${{f}}_{G}$; the latter is associated to $\tilde {\mathcal{X}}_{(G)}$ through the correspondence between local orders and cone fields on manifolds. The above constructions are compatible with Cartesian products, so the geometric model of a conservative program is lifted through ${{\beta }_{G_1}} \times \cdots \times {{\beta }}_{G_n}$ to a subset $M$ of the parallelized manifold $\mathcal{A}_{G_1} \times \cdots \times \mathcal{A}_{G_n}$. By assigning the suitable norm to each tangent space of $\mathcal{A}_{G_1} \times \cdots \times \mathcal{A}_{G_n}$, the length of every directed smooth path $\gamma$ on $M$, i.e. $\int {{|\gamma '(t)|}}_{\gamma (t)}dt$, corresponds to the execution time of the sequence of multi-instructions associated to $\gamma$. This induces a pseudometric ${{d}}_{\mathcal{A}}$ whose restrictions to sufficiently small open sets of $\mathcal{A}_{G_1} \times \cdots \times \mathcal{A}_{G_n}$ (we refer to the manifold topology, which is strictly finer than the pseudometric topology) are isometric to open subspaces of ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ with the $\alpha$-norm for some $\alpha \in [{{1}},{{\infty }}]$. The transition maps of $\mathcal{A}_{G}$ are translations, so the representation of a tangent vector does not depend on the chart of $\mathcal{A}_{G}$ in which it is represented; consequently, differentiable maps between open subsets of $\mathcal{A}_{G_{1}} \times \cdots \times \mathcal{A}_{G_{n}}$ are handled as if they were maps between open subsets of ${\mathbb{R}}^n$. For every directed path $\gamma$ on $M$ (possibly the representation of a sequence $\sigma$ of multi-instructions), there is a shorter directed smooth path on $M$ that is arbitrarily close to $\gamma$, and that can replace $\gamma$ as a representation of $\sigma$.

This article explores how staff at the UN Regional Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) tried, with mixed success, to incorporate Soviet knowledge and experts into their activities and how these challenging efforts, paradoxically, created a space in which economics could be a shared language of communication across the Cold War divide, both within UN spaces and in adjacent academic networks. This conceptual move allowed economics knowledge to pool between East and West, even though the divide between the blocs was originally expressed in economic terms. In the 1960s, with the global transformations of decolonisation, the ECE’s experts, including those embedded in British academic networks, worked to export their shared knowledge beyond Europe, using the triangulated international space of the UN to promote – and continue gathering – economic information from the Soviet Union.

Diet in the first years of life is a key determinant of lifelong disease risk and is highly affected by socioeconomic status (SES). However, the specific relation between SES and food consumption in toddlers and preschoolers is poorly understood. This study assesses SES-related differences in food consumption in 1–5-year-olds in Germany using weighed food records (3+1 days) of a subsample of 887 children from the cross-sectional Children’s Nutrition Survey to Record Food Consumption (KiESEL) undertaken 2014–2017. Children were categorized as having a low, medium, or high SES depending on parental income, education, and occupation. A two-step generalized linear model corrected for age and sex was applied to assess differences in food consumption, using bootstrapping to address unequal group sizes. Differences between SES groups were found for unfavourable foods (and the subgroups sugar-sweetened beverages and confectionary/desserts), fruit, bread/cereals, and fats/oils (pBoot < 0.05). Mean daily consumption in the low SES-group as compared to the high-SES group was 84 g lower for total fruit, 22 g lower for bread/cereals, and 3 g lower for fats/oils, while being 123 g higher for sugar-sweetened beverages and 158 g higher for unfavourable foods in total (based on bootstrap 95 % confidence intervals). In conclusion, this study suggests a social gradient in the diet of German toddlers and preschoolers, with lower SES linked to lower diet quality. To prevent adverse health trajectories, public health measures to improve early life nutrition should address all children, prioritizing those of lower SES.

Extensive damage to over 1000 plant species, including food crops, oil and industrial crops, vegetables, fruit trees, ornamentals, fodder species and weeds, has been caused by emerging phytoplasma-mediated diseases, thereby posing significant threat to global food security. Multiple factors, including environmental changes, invasion pathways, vector transmission and the emergence of new pathogen lineages, contribute to the spread of these diseases. Effective management requires stable, long-term strategies to safeguard plant health. Key approaches include comprehensive loss assessments, integration of climate change impacts, predictive modelling, enhanced disease surveillance, and improved detection techniques targeting phytoplasmas. This review highlights phytoplasma-associated plant diseases, emerging pathogen threats, and the factors facilitating their spread, alongside methods for surveillance and detection. In addition, case studies and global collaborative efforts are discussed. Finally, we outline future research priorities aimed at improving the management of phytoplasma-induced plant diseases.