Globally, women experience poverty at disproportionate rates to men, with the situation being worse for Indigenous women and women of colour. Social security systems are one avenue for income redistribution that can alleviate poverty. However, such systems are themselves embedded within and produced by unequal social relations, meaning they can also serve to perpetuate and exacerbate social inequalities. This is exemplified under neoliberal welfare reforms, which have disproportionate negative impacts for women across the world (e.g. increased poverty and stigma, reduced health/wellbeing, and more). Again, this is particularly the case for Indigenous women and women of colour.

In this article, we offer an intersectional feminist analysis of an intensive form of neoliberal welfare conditionality, Australia’s ‘compulsory income management’ program (CIM). CIM quarantines social security incomes onto cashless bank cards to restrict expenditure to ‘approved’ items. Drawing on interviews and surveys with 170 individuals who have personally experienced CIM, we show that it has myriad negative impacts that are especially borne by (Indigenous) women. These are not, we argue, unintended policy impacts, but are instead symptomatic of the gendered and racialised violence that is woven into patriarchal capitalism more broadly. Thus, the experience of CIM holds lessons for welfare states internationally.

The previously unindexed laboratory X-ray powder diffraction data of mosapride dihydrogen citrate dihydrate, an API used to stimulate gastrointestinal motility, has been recorded at room temperature. Using these data, the crystal structure of this API has been refined in space group P21/c (No. 14) with a = 18.707(4) Å, b = 9.6187(1) Å, c = 18.2176(4) Å, β = 114.164(1)°, V = 2990.74(8) Å3, and Z = 4. The structure of this material corresponds to the phase associated with CSD Refcode LUWPOL determined at 93 K. The Rietveld refinement, carried out with TOPAS-Academic, proved the single nature of the sample and the quality of the data recorded.

In 1975, the Ugandan state established an Economic Crimes Tribunal to investigate and penalize smuggling, hoarding, overcharging, and other commercial malfeasance. In the coming years, innumerable Ugandans were arrested and charged with contravening the state's economic regulations. Prior observers have seen this as another instance of a capricious state, but in this article, I demonstrate the popular investment in economic regulation. Ugandans demanded better stewardship of money and things because they were aghast at the ungovernable world of commodities. For one thing, the inaccessibility of so-called “essential commodities” — sugar and salt, preeminently — impeded ethical expectations surrounding social reproduction, hospitality, and masculine respectability. More troubling, essential commodities were not completely unavailable; rather, they were available on exclusionary and confusing terms. Relative deprivation was more upsetting than absolute scarcity because it offended a sense of consumptive entitlement. As a result, it was not only the state that accused citizens of economic crimes. There were widespread accusations in which allegation and denunciation circulated among neighbors, families, and bureaucrats in an urgent effort to discipline commodities and people.

Postcolonial governments often restrict the market alienability of land rights for various policy reasons. One policy aims to treat all citizens equivalently and safeguard vulnerable social communities equally, as an unrestrained land market could allow one affluent social group to buy out one that is less affluent. Another policy is to set a standard that is easy to apply in the same way in every case, as a bright-line rule banning land alienation is simpler to administer than a standard that requires case-by-case considerations. Today, in Ethiopia, such laws face opposition from proponents of a free market economy and private property rights. Thus, international development institutions and influential Ethiopians are spearheading an ambitious reform to Ethiopia’s post-socialist law that bans land alienability, arguing that the law has impeded social and economic progress. This article shows, however, that the legal ban has never prevented land transfers. Many people have utilized legal constructs such as gifts, bequests, loans, and leases to sell their land. Such transfers have circumvented the ban amidst aggressive land expropriation by the state and other agents. These intricate local and national dynamics undercut the misleading sense of regularity created by the inalienability law, raising serious questions about the persistent demand by international development institutions to privatize land rights and create land markets through law reform without paying close attention to the lived experiences at the local level.

Many Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries invest heavily in labor-market programs to prolong careers. Although active labor-market programs have frequently been evaluated, less is known about passive programs supporting unemployed seniors financially. We focus on the latter by investigating the hiring opportunities of candidates who partake in a regime that ensures dismissed seniors a company supplement alongside regular unemployment benefits. Therefore, we conduct a scenario experiment in which genuine recruiters evaluate fictitious candidates who have spent varying durations unemployed in regimes with and without the company supplement. Because recruiters evaluate candidates' hireability and productivity perceptions, we can identify underlying mechanisms. Overall, we find no evidence of employer-side stigma hindering the re-employment of seniors unemployed in the program. Conversely, longer-term unemployed even benefit from this regime because it mitigates regular stigmatization of long-term unemployment, especially for men. Specifically, recruiters judge them more mildly – particularly regarding flexibility – when they receive the supplement and still apply.

One of the most recognizable cases of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is X-linked diseases. Diagnosis of fetal sex is essential for couples who are known to be at risk of some X-linked disorders. The objective of this study was to discriminate between female (XX) and male (XY) embryos by detecting sex chromosomes-specific sequences in spent culture medium and comparing these results to PGD/CGH array results. It may open new window for the development of a non-invasive PGD method. 120 Embryo’s spent media from Day 3 and Day 5 embryos were collected. Modified phenol-chloroform solution was used for DNA extraction from spent media. Sex determination was performed using SRY, TSPY and AMELOGENIN evaluation through quantitative polymerase chain reaction (q-PCR) method. IBM SPSS and MedCalc were used for statistical analyses to compare sex determination of embryos by spent medium with PGD/CGH array results. Culture time was demonstrated to increase the DNA amount among day 5 embryos culture medium samples. Non-invasive PGD by means of spent culture medium gave a sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 100% for sex determination. Results of sex determination using spent medium by q-PCR were consistent with the results of PGD/CGH array. Improvements in cell-free DNA extraction and PCR amplification procedures provide us an effective method to perform a PGD test without biopsy in the future, especially about X-linked diseases.

Federal law prohibits deceiving the public by falsely marking an item as patented. The “false marking” prohibition has been enforced primarily by private lawsuits on behalf of the United States, with the party plaintiff and the government splitting the penalty. When a court decision dramatically increased the potential recovery for false marking claims, lawyers pounced immediately, filing more cases per week than had previously been filed in years. Indeed, many lawyers who did not previously work on patent cases joined the fray. Within two years, Congress eliminated this type of false marking suit and terminated all pending cases. Using empirical data, interviews with lawyers, legislative history, litigation documents, and news sources, this article tells the instructive history of false marking litigation. This history shows that the supply of private enforcement—lawsuits by private parties to enforce laws in the public interest—is sensitive to market forces. It also shows that, even when concentrated interests encourage Congress to cut back on private enforcement, Congress does not move as quickly as the bar. This matters because once Congress authorizes private enforcement, the maintenance of that system depends on judges and lawyers interpreting private enforcement statutes.

Lower limb rehabilitation robots based on linkage-based mechanisms have recently drawn significant attention in the field due to their numerous advantages. The control of previously proposed linkage-based gait rehabilitation robotic orthoses has been achieved using constant speed control without consideration for the interaction forces. However, such an approach can be harmful to people with stroke since the level of disability varies among individuals, and it may cause potential injuries when excessive force is applied by the robot. To overcome this limitation and improve the rehabilitation process, it is necessary to recognize the force exerted by the person during walking and adjust the robot’s assistive torque accordingly, to provide synchronized motion. Thus, in this work, a human-cooperative approach based on a stiffness control strategy for the six-bar linkage-based gait rehabilitation robot is presented. The proposed methodology can serve as a solid foundation for developing a human-cooperative approach for linkage-based lower limb rehabilitation robotic orthoses. The control was validated and tested with eight healthy human subjects. As a result, customized robotic assistance with this mechanism can be provided during training to meet the individual needs of stroke patients, which can lead to increased engagement and contribution, thus improving treatment outcomes.

Hydrogen is playing an increasingly important role in China's energy and climate policy, with significant implications for the development of a global hydrogen industry. However, China's approach to the regulation of hydrogen, and, in particular, the role of local authorities in promoting hydrogen refuelling stations and fuel cell vehicles, has so far received limited scholarly attention. This article aims to contribute to the literature on hydrogen regulation and to the transnational environmental law scholarship on decentralization by examining how China promotes hydrogen at the national and local levels. The case of China shows how, in jurisdictions with a sufficient degree of decentralization, local initiatives can play a key role in driving the development of hydrogen. By testing different approaches to hydrogen regulation, local experimentation helps to manage the uncertainties associated with this new energy source. At the same time, China's experience confirms the ‘environmental federalism’ theory on the importance of regulatory harmonization to reduce transaction costs and local protectionism. As the Chinese government develops its national regulatory approach on hydrogen, it has the opportunity to take into account both local and international experience and engage with other major economies in an effort to promote an internationally harmonized regulatory landscape.

CO2 release rates from soils via soil respiration play an important role in the carbon budget of terrestrial ecosystems. Though the roles of soil temperature and moisture on soil respiration are well recognised, less is known about how their effects vary across different land-cover types. This study looked at the interactive effects of land-cover change and microclimate on temporal patterns of soil respiration in a montane forest-grassland-plantation mosaic in a highly diverse but climatically sensitive ecosystem in the tropical Western Ghats of India. Across all vegetation types, soil respiration rates were highest during south-west monsoon (June–October), when root growth, litter decomposition and microbial activity are relatively high and were lowest during the summer. Among vegetation types, soil respiration rates were higher in grasslands compared to non-native pine plantations, whereas that of forest and invasive wattle (Acacia mearnsii) plantations were intermediate between grasslands and pine plantations. The decline in respiration rates following conversion from grasslands to pine plantations could be due to relatively lower microbial activity, soil temperatures and, subsequently, slower litter decomposition. In addition, the sensitivity of soil respiration to changes in temperature and moisture differed between different vegetation types. Across all vegetation types, respiration was largely insensitive to changes in soil temperature when moisture levels were low. However, when soil moisture levels were high, respiration increased with temperature in grassland and wattle patches, decreased in the case of pine plantations and remained largely unchanged in shola forests. Our results suggest that changes in aboveground vegetation type can significantly affect soil C cycling even in the absence of any underlying differences in soil type.