On July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice delivered a unanimous advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, the third opinion on climate change from an international judicial body. Requested by consensus by the UN General Assembly in 2023, the proceedings drew unprecedented participation from ninety-six states and eleven international organizations. In the Opinion, the Court confirmed its advisory jurisdiction over the legal questions posed and found no compelling reason to decline the request. It identified the “most directly relevant applicable law” as the climate change treaties, UNCLOS, other environmental treaties, customary international law, and international human rights law, and held that the climate change treaties are not lex specialis. The Court affirmed obligations under the Paris Agreement to pursue the 1.5°C “primary temperature goal” and that there were limits to parties’ discretion in formulating their nationally determined contributions. Drawing on its prior decisions, the Court held that the customary duty to prevent significant environmental harm applies to the climate system under a stringent due diligence standard, and recognized cooperation as a legal obligation rather than a matter of choice. On sea-level rise, it found no obligation to update maritime baselines that were established in conformity with UNCLOS and concluded that statehood persists despite the loss of a constituent element. On legal consequences, the Court applied the customary law of state responsibility and observed that the entire panoply of legal consequences could apply to breaches, but indicated that particularized remedies would be fact-specific.

In Britain in the 1970s and 1980s public perception of the dangers of asbestos changed dramatically as asbestos came to be understood as an environmental and public health risk, rather than one limited to those who worked in the industry. The invisible presence of asbestos in the everyday spaces of life caused widespread anxiety and prompted community action in towns and cities across the UK. This article examines how, in the 1980s, asbestos in schools became the focus for public concern. It tracks how different levels of government responded to these concerns and how different conceptualizations of risk were used to push for action or reject it. The focus for this study is London, where, in 1983, the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC) committed to removing all asbestos from schools in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). While local governments attempted to remove asbestos, national government resisted calls for new policy and financial assistance and instead cited government-commissioned research by consultant scientists to dismiss concerns. The government response was contested by activists, including Nancy Tait and Alan Dalton, and fueled a growing distrust among concerned parents. Drawing on archival sources from unions, campaigners, and national and local government and media, this article demonstrates how asbestos was caught up in wider questions about regulation and the state’s role in negotiating risk in everyday life.

Israel’s war on Gaza has prompted a wave of protests against human rights violations that has spread across most European countries. As universities have become arenas of contestation, there has been an increase in forms of repression of academic freedom and of political rights within academia. Our systematic, case-oriented analysis of an original database enables us to identify specific repertoires of repression employed by different institutions, as well as the characteristics of the targeted academics. By comparing Germany and the United States as case studies of high and increasing levels of repression—albeit characterized by differing systems of higher education and conceptions of academic freedom—we analyze the strategies used by these actors and how they interact. In this article, we focus on the mechanisms through which repression has been promoted, anchored in a resignification of antisemitism that treats it as distinct from racism and accords it a special status in the defense of Western civilization. We use the concept of moral panic to analyze the construction of a narrative that portrays a specific challenge to society’s fundamental values, which has resulted in the scapegoating of the Left and migrants. We also identify the main moral panic entrepreneurs responsible for the creation of this environment both within and outside universities.

This article reconstructs the student experience at St Mary’s College, Hammersmith (c.1854–1914), the first Catholic teacher training college in Britain. Using diaries, correspondence, magazines, and administrative records, it outlines the profile of the student body as predominantly young men of Irish descent from working-class communities in northern England and Scotland. It examines their educational formation, devotional practices, domestic routines, leisure pursuits, and the distinctive homosocial culture that bound them together as ‘Simmarians’. The article argues that St Mary’s was more than a site of professional preparation: it functioned as an ‘emotional community’ in which Catholic masculinity, vocation, and identity were consciously shaped. By situating the Simmarian experience within the wider development of Catholic schooling and the history of emotions, the study shifts attention from policy to lived formation, offering new insights into the making of Catholic teachers and the cultural significance of male community life in Victorian and Edwardian England.

This article explores how nation and nation-state materialize in interactional contexts and shape the social construction of gender in everyday life with a focus on Turkey. Judith Butler’s (2004) concept of “undoing gender” has influenced debates within the “doing gender” literature, a sociological body of work on the social construction of gender in everyday life, with particular attention to the deconstruction of heteronormativity. However, the more contestation of heteronormativity proliferated, the more the roles that the nation plays in the social construction of gender stayed obscured. I offer a corrective to nation-bound or nation-blind analyses of gender and propose the concept of the “heteronational matrix” as a perspective for analyzing how gender and sexualities are dynamically woven into the symbolic and material construction of the nation and nation-states, and how these constructions, in turn, shape the social construction of gender in everyday life.

This article examines the legitimacy of the Ashkenazi leadership via the meat hall in Amsterdam between 1673 and 1815, a central institution in a community marked by internal tensions from its inception. Drawing on archival sources and Suchman’s pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy (Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy”), it analyses how the meat hall functioned as a welfare mechanism and instrument of social control. The meat hall was faced with issues related to legitimacy from the beginning, evidenced by persistent meat smuggling, complaints about price and quality, and conflicts regarding supervision. This was exacerbated by high meat prices and limited welfare outcomes. The institution endured until the end of the 18th century because no viable alternative existed. When changing perceptions of religion, state, and citizenship rendered the monopoly increasingly unintelligible, it finally collapsed. The case illustrates how communal institutions can persist despite weak legitimacy until their underlying political order dissolves.

Failures of retraction are common in science. Why do they occur? And what determines whether a retraction is successful? We use data from citation records and Altmetrics to test proposed answers to these questions. LaCroix et al. (2021) employ network models to argue the social spread of information helps explain failures of retraction. One prediction is that widely known results, surprisingly, should be easier to retract, since their retraction is more relevant. Our results support this conclusion. We find highly cited papers show more significant reductions in citation after retraction and garner more attention to their retractions as they occur.

India’s Tele-MANAS (Tele Mental Health Assistance and Networking Across States) programme, launched in October 2022, is the world’s largest government-led tele-mental-health initiative. Operating via a multilingual 24/7 helpline, it provides stepped-care support, offering immediate counselling and escalating complex cases to psychiatrists or local services. In its first few years, Tele-MANAS has responded to more than 3.43 million calls across all Indian states and union territories. The majority of callers present with anxiety, depression or psychosocial stressors, while a critical minority report suicidal distress. Features such as linguistic inclusivity, anonymity and integration with India’s digital health ecosystem have driven rapid uptake, particularly among young adults. A World Health Organization (WHO) assessment has recognised Tele-MANAS as a scalable and equity-focused solution. The initiative illustrates how low- and middle-income countries can leverage technology and task sharing to reduce the treatment gap, offering a potential global blueprint for digital mental health care. This article aims to provide a programmatic overview of Tele-MANAS, including its design, early outcomes and key implementation challenges.

This article develops a theoretical framework of hybridization to reconceptualize norm diffusion in International Relations. Rather than treating norm diffusion as convergence towards a global standard and deviation as failure or resistance, it theorizes norm uptake as a process of normative recombination, theorizing hybridization as a structured, scope-condition-bound mode of norm evolution. The framework advances a typology of hybrid outcomes, ranging from dominant foreign influence to balanced hybridization to dominant local influence, and identifies key scope conditions explaining their variation, including economic dependency, institutional capacity, geopolitical hedging, and sector-specific dynamics. Empirically, the article applies this framework to a comparative analysis of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, examining how these states engage China’s Digital Silk Road and mediate its embedded political–technological norms. The findings reveal that despite China’s significant infrastructural and economic presence, its normative influence remains so far limited. In particular, cybersecurity governance converges around Western-derived standards with minimal local adaptation, while ethical artificial intelligence governance reflects balanced hybridization shaped by domestic values and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-mediated multilateralism. Hybrid norms are thus not intermediate compromises between global and local models, but structured configurations shaped by institutional capacity, strategic positioning, and transnational contestation.

Dyslipidemia is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation and immune dysfunction, but the immunological effects of dietary phytosterols in humans remain unclear. We conducted a secondary analysis of an outcome-assessor-blinded, randomized controlled feeding trial to evaluate the effects of a high-phytosterol (HPS) diet, using phytosterol-enriched corn–wheat germ blended oil, compared with a low-phytosterol (LPS) diet using peanut oil, on systemic inflammatory markers, humoral immune markers and peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets in Chinese adults with dyslipidemia. After a 2-week run-in period, 104 participants were randomized to the HPS group (n=52) or the LPS group (n=52) for 12 weeks. In intention-to-treat analyses, the HPS group had a higher CD4+/CD8+ ratio at 12 weeks than the LPS group (adjusted mean difference: 0.561; 95 % CI: 0.060, 1.063; P = 0.03) and a lower CD8+ T-cell count (adjusted mean difference: -116.315 cells/μL; 95 % CI: -215.781,-16.849; P = 0.02). No significant between-group differences were observed for systemic inflammatory markers, humoral immune markers or most other lymphocyte subset outcomes. In per-protocol analyses, the difference in CD4+/CD8+ ratio remained significant, whereas the reduction in CD8+ T-cell count was attenuated. These exploratory findings suggest that a 12-week phytosterol-enriched corn–wheat germ blended oil intervention may be associated with changes in T-cell subset balance in adults with dyslipidemia, although the results should be interpreted cautiously given the exploratory nature of this secondary analysis.

Older adults in long-term care (LTC) homes experience complex nutrition-related challenges and care staff are central to supporting nutrition care, eating assistance, and positive mealtime experiences. However, nutrition care education is often inconsistently addressed in staff training. This scoping review mapped the scope, characteristics, and reported the outcome measures of nutrition care education and programs for LTC staff. This review followed JBI methodology and was reported according to PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Four databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, and PsycINFO) were searched from May to October 2024, with an updated search in September 2025. Grey literature and reference lists were also searched. Sixteen studies met the eligibility criteria. Programs varied in content, delivery format, duration, target staff groups, implementation supports, and outcomes. Common outcomes included staff knowledge, confidence, attitudes, eating assistance practices, mealtime environment, feasibility indicators, and selected resident nutrition outcomes. Future research should improve reporting, follow-up, outcome definitions, implementation, feasibility, and continuity.

We contribute to research addressing links between forest restoration and human well-being with an experimental study testing how exposure to a restored forest and birdsong impact mental stress, positive and negative experiences and perceived restorativeness. This study engaged 106 campus participants at North Carolina State University in a 2 × 2 experiment to assess the impacts of soundscapes (i.e., traffic noise versus birdsong) and a restored riparian forest (compared to proximate grey space). Soundscape and location were drivers of all well-being metrics (p < 0.001 for main effects in every case, with effect sizes ranging from η2 = 0.05 to 0.34). The restored forest with birdsong combination elicited the lowest stress, lowest negative experiences, highest positive experiences and highest perceived restorativeness (p < 0.05). The grey space with traffic noise combination was always the least beneficial (p < 0.05), and mixed treatments yielded intermediate results. These results build evidence that exposure to restored forest reduces stress, increases well-being and assists with perceived restorativeness; they also suggest that birdsong soundscapes have additive beneficial effects. These findings support the value of ecological restoration in urban areas, particularly when landscape restoration is accompanied by restoration of bird communities.

AI provides a rich source of challenging examples for theories of agency because it allows relevant features to be relatively freely combined. This paper considers agency in sequence models: models that have been trained to predict the next item in a sequence. Training models on sequences of observations and actions can yield systems that use reinforcement learning in context, as well as ones that merely imitate agents. Investigating AI systems from this group suggests a requirement that agents must learn about the environment in part from their own interaction with it. It also suggests a distinction between two alternative approaches to understanding agency.