A first integrative survey of the genus Usnea in the southern Philippines, taking into account morphological, anatomical, chemical and molecular characters, resulted in the recognition of 20 taxa, including three species new to science: Usnea angulata Ach., U. baileyi (Stirt.) Zahlbr., U. bismolliuscula Zahlbr., U. brasiliensis (Zahlbr.) Motyka, U. confusa Asah., U. croceorubescens Stirt., U. dasaea Stirt., U. himalayana C. Bab., U. krogiana P. Clerc, U. longissima Ach., U. nidifica Taylor, U. norsticornuta A. Gerlach & P. Clerc sp. nov. (characterized by a moderately thick cortex and by the presence of norstictic acid), U. paleograndisora A. Gerlach & P. Clerc sp. nov. (characterized by an orange subcortical pigmentation in the medulla, with enlarging soralia and a moderately thick and shiny cortex), U. pectinata Taylor, U. pygmoidea (Asahina) Y. Ohmura, U. rubicunda Stirt., U. rubrotincta (Stirt.) Zahlbr., U. spinulifera (Vain.) Motyka, U. subscabrosa Motyka and U. yoshihitoi P. Clerc & A. Gerlach sp. nov. (characterized by a lax medulla with non-conglutinated hyphae). Usnea krogiana is a new record for Asia; Usnea brasiliensis, Usnea confusa and U. croceorubescens are new records for the Philippines. This is the first phylogenetic study to include DNA sequences of Usnea from the Philippines. Molecular data from the ITS rDNA (76 newly generated sequences) are presented for most taxa except for U. himalayana, U. longissima and U. subscabrosa. At least six further taxa remain unidentified, awaiting the collection of additional specimens.

If all national identity is performative, the Northern Irish national identity offers a particularly pronounced model of this performative instability. Such precarity was emphasized when the 2016 UK EU ‘Brexit’ referendum raised contentious questions over Northern Irish citizenship. This article explores how two recent Northern Irish performance pieces, David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue (2016) and Clare Dwyer Hogg’s Hard Border (2018), probe the unsettled plurality of Northern Irish national identity through the casting of actor Stephen Rea in their respective central roles. Rea’s own personal and professional history, as a figure inflected in the public mind with an extreme range of potential ‘Northern Irish identities’, encapsulates the shifting boundaries of an unstable, performative spectrum of ethno-national selfhood. This article explores how the lingering memories of Rea’s on- and offstage past offer a fittingly multilayered, even contradictory, representation of contemporary Northern Irish identity.

This paper reports the preliminary results from three seasons of excavations in the Christian cemetery by the Tunisian-British Bulla Regia Archaeological Project. In 2017–2019, excavations in, and around, the Late Antique church in the western cemetery uncovered a complex funerary landscape with a variety of different tomb types, including mosaic caisson tombs, simple masonry tombs, amphora tombs, and earthen graves and multiple funerary mensae. The mosaics, inscriptions and finds (ceramics, glass, coins) studied in 2022 support a fourth to seventh century date for the main period of use of the cemetery.

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

This Research Communication aims to compare the effect of A1A2 and A2A2 cow milk diets on the biochemical and histological parameters of rats. The rats were divided into four groups and fed with a normal diet, A2 milk powder, A1A2 or A2A2 cow milk diets for 90 d. Blood glucose, kidney function, liver function and lipid profile were examined during the experimental period. The study showed an increase in the body weight of the A1A2 group whereas a slight decrease in the A2A2 group, and blood glucose levels increased from d 0 to day 90 in all experimental groups. However, none of these changes were found to be statistically insignificant (P > 0.05). Moreover, no significant changes were recorded in other parameters (serum glutamic pyruvic transferase and serum glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase for liver function, bilirubin direct, cholesterol, triglycerides, creatinine and uric acid). The histology of the liver, kidney and pancreas also showed no changes in all groups. Overall, this study revealed no significant difference in the nutritional values of A1A2 and A2A2 milk types and hence equally beneficial for health. Although the present study showed no significant difference in the effect of both milk types in 90 d, further studies might be conducted to evaluate their longer term effects.

The prevailing white racial frame surrounding discourse on the sailor work songs called chanties (popularly, “sea shanties”) means that discussions tend to ignore or minimize these songs’ African American heritage. Articulating revised and more just historical narratives of chanties is additionally challenged by the normative approach of setting discussions within the spatial frame of the sea. We may overcome these challenges by recentering the frame of discussion on an adjacently situated space of shoreside labor and its actors, cotton screwmen. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States’ cotton export trade depended upon screwmen's work of stowing cotton bales aboard ships in port. Although all screwmen were Black men during the profession's formative period, by mid-century, white men had joined the profession in complementary proportion. This created an unusual case, not only of both racial groups performing the same labor but also of white men entering and accommodating to an already-established “Black” labor environment. Importantly, from the advent of their profession, screwmen practiced singing to coordinate their labor. I argue that white sailors who came to work seasonally as screwmen were compelled to acculturate to existing African American work singing, and thus acquired the material and conceptual bases to develop the shipboard work songs best remembered as “chanties.” As the first ever sustained exposition of screwmen's forgotten singing, this essay contests both popular narratives’ granting of exclusive agency to white seafaring and academic discussions that tokenize African American heritage as an “influence” rather than the chanty genre's foundation.

In September 2022 Samson Kambalu attracted international attention when his 5.5 metre statue of John Chilembwe, who led a brief, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful revolt against British colonial rule in Nyasaland in 1915, was displayed on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. This impressive statue towers above an accompanying statue of British missionary, the Rev. John Chorley, who was then Chilembwe’s only known white friend and confidant. The reason for their disparate heights is stated to be an indicator of their respective relevance and locus each to the other in Malawi’s rich history. The artistic merit of the statues is unquestioned. Unfortunately, an apparent lack of rigour in providing historical context to the statues may have unwittingly detracted from the already well known, powerful and compelling story of John Chilembwe. This article seeks to redress the balance in terms of historical accuracy and provide timely context to Chilembwe’s aspirations, tribulations and untimely death at the hands of African police.

‘Newsround’ offers a platform for new discoveries that do not appear within the specialist contributions of this year’s Archaeological Reports, but which nevertheless warrant emphasis, either as a result of their particular characteristics or for the contribution they make to broader archaeological narratives. This section is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an overview of archaeological research in Greece. It comprises largely preliminary reports (results of excavations that took place up to and including August 2023, where possible) that complement the digital content made available through Archaeology in Greece Online (https://chronique.efa.gr). Due to the diachronic nature of a number of the sites, and for ease of reference, the material is organized geographically in the first instance and then chronologically (earliest to latest) within each section as far as possible.