Device embolisation is one of the most feared early complications of percutaneous atrial septal defect closure. We report a 40-year-old woman in whom a 12-mm atrial septal defect occluder was accidentally displaced into the descending aorta 24 hours after an apparently successful procedure. The dislodged device was retrieved percutaneously through a 12-F long sheath that was continuously railroaded over a super-stiff guide wire. This “retained super-stiff guide wire” technique secured sheath stability, avoided aortic wall trauma, and allowed the occluder to be slipped into the sheath without change of its orientation. A larger 16-mm small-waist–big-edge device was subsequently implanted uneventfully. The technical details and advantages of keeping the sheath constantly over a super-stiff guide wire are highlighted to facilitate safe trans-arterial retrieval of embolised cardiac devices.

This article argues that modern trust law has undergone a radical global transformation while remaining largely absent from democratic debate, a condition the article terms trust law’s ‘permissive invisibility’. The article traces how trust law’s origins in equity entrenched a judge-centric, normatively charged but socially insulated doctrinal culture, which proved increasingly permissive as trusts were repurposed for regulatory arbitrage in an era of transnational financial capitalism. The article then shows how legislative reform was critically enabled by trust law’s particularly low public salience but inverted, high salience among the owners and operators of concentrated capital. The recursive force of this judicial and legislative permissiveness has now normalised antisocial innovations such as perpetual and massively discretionary trusts. The article concludes by calling for empirically grounded, critical socio-legal study in the tradition articulated by Roger Cotterrell as a necessary precondition for any democratically credible trust law reform agenda.

We revisit the theory of Ihara L-functions in the context initially studied by Bass and Hashimoto and more recently by Zakharov. In particular, we study whether the Artin formalism is satisfied by these L-functions. As an application, we give a proof of the analogue of Iwasawa’s asymptotic class number formula for the p-part of the number of spanning trees in branched $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$-towers of finite connected graphs using Ihara zeta and L-functions. Moreover, we relate a generator for the characteristic ideal of the finitely generated torsion Iwasawa module that governs the growth of the p-part of the number of spanning trees in such towers with Ihara L-functions.

We analyze a model of collective deterrence in which (1) one state may challenge a status quo defended by a great power and an arbitrary number of partners and (2) defender war costs are private information. We show first that the great power’s intra-coalition dominance shapes which cooperative failure, free riding, or uncertainty over others’ willingness to fight may weaken deterrence. Second, increasing the great power’s war payoffs increases both deterrence and partner free riding. Third, the extent of great power dominance determines whether a larger or more capable coalition enhances or weakens deterrence and ensures that size and capabilities work in opposite directions. Finally, increasing uncertainty over a great power’s war costs can decrease or increase deterrence, depending on the prior strength of its commitment. We also use the model to illuminate differing responses of American allies in Europe and East Asia to the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Collaboration between European merchants and Franciscan friars in Mongol-Yuan China is often discussed without sufficient attention to local contexts. Drawing on Latin and Chinese sources, this study shows how friars and merchants pragmatically adapted European practices to East Asia. It examines their co-location of churches and trading houses in Khanbaliq and Zayton, as well as their joint involvement in diplomatic missions to the Great Khan. The analysis situates these interactions within the local culture of religious-commercial symbiosis, the broader framework of tributary diplomacy and the ortoq merchant system under Mongol rule.

Many authoritarian regimes originating in violent rebellion are exceptionally durable. Yet others collapse quickly after their birth. We argue that the structure of the founding rebellion explains these divergent trajectories by shaping power-sharing dynamics in the new regime and the nature of conflict recurrence. Regimes founded by unified rebellions (single armed group) usually become highly durable autocracies because their members can credibly share power within the same armed organization. By contrast, regimes founded by fractured rebellions (multiple armed groups) often fail quickly because armed rivals must attempt to share power across their organizations, prompting defections and recurrent rebellions. Empirically, we support these arguments by analyzing originally compiled data on every regime founded by successful rebellion worldwide from 1900 to 2020. Neither alternative rebellion characteristics, like social revolution or leftist ideology, nor country-level factors can explain why rebel regimes follow divergent trajectories.

This essay argues for a shift in sociolegal scholarship on lawyers’ careers from a framework centered on stratification to one attentive to reconfiguration under changing institutional conditions. Building on the findings of the After the JD project and related scholarship, we suggest that enduring hierarchies of race, gender, class, and professional prestige are increasingly reorganized through fragmentation of the professional field, technological change, shifting forms of capital, transformations in the social organization of legal work, and in politics and the economy. Rather than displacing earlier insights about inequality, we argue for extending them through a more dynamic account of careers, institutions, and professional change across time.

This article examines a 2024 trolling campaign targeting a Russian-speaking Facebook group in Finland, in the context of Russian information warfare against the EU. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, it explores how pro-Kremlin trolls localized their messaging to exploit vulnerabilities of Russian-speakers in Finland. Two strategies – “fat” and “subtle” trolling – provoked emotional responses and led users to reproduce propaganda narratives, amplifying them and pre-existing tensions. The sentiment that the Russian-speaking audience “had no home” in Finland was a sensitive area. The article highlights the audience’s role in negotiating the meanings of troll messages. The trolls drew on local media content and sociocultural tensions. While some users succumbed to provocation, others resisted, restoring group cohesion. The article underlines the importance of micro-level analysis of audience responses to understand their vulnerabilities and recommends further research in this area. To counter the threat of polarization by information warfare, it also recommends recognizing the “pain points” of target audiences and including them in public discourse as members of multicultural societies that accept difference rather than marginalize it.

We study automorphisms and invariants for the algebra ${\mathbb O}$ of octonions and octonionic slice regular functions $f:{\mathbb O}\to{\mathbb O}$.

This paper demonstrates how a decolonial labour history can illuminate the systemic entanglements of science with slavery and empire. To do so, it reinterprets the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh (1804–24) as a site where scientific authority was produced through racialized, gendered and classed labour relations. Combining microhistorical method with decolonial critique, the article reconstructs the choreography of everyday labour – the cleaning, heating, guarding, labelling and preserving of collections – that underwrote the museum’s credibility. It shows, first, that the museum’s intellectual order depended on precarious labour and material care; second, that this labour was unevenly valued, rendering women’s work largely nameless in the record and Black and colonized labour disposable; and third, that the museum’s growth was inseparable from imperial circuits of extraction that moved specimens, techniques and people across the British Empire. A case study of the formerly enslaved taxidermist John Edmondston (aka John Edmonstone) reveals how artisanal skill, racialized evaluation and institutional discipline converged in the processing of major accessions, illuminating natural history’s entanglement with plantation labour regimes. The paper concludes by proposing a new way of writing institutional histories, one that treats material maintenance and racial capitalism as constitutive of scientific modernity.

Spontaneous rupture of a giant coronary artery aneurysm is a rare and almost uniformly fatal complication of Kawasaki disease. We report an 18-month-old boy with incomplete, immunoglobulin-resistant disease whose giant aneurysms ruptured despite pulse corticosteroids, anakinra, bedside sternotomy, and extracorporeal support. Six comparable paediatric cases are reviewed, underscoring that aggressive therapy may not prevent rupture once structural arterial wall destruction has occurred.

This special issue of Twentieth Century Music explores how music and sound were created, performed, perceived, discussed and/or understood throughout different kinds of transatlantic encounters, occurring all along the twentieth century. In order to reflect on the interactions within and across the Atlantic Ocean, the issue focuses on various human and non-human actors and practices that originated from these encounters. In this perspective, the polysemic term encounter is meant to designate a wide range of phenomena, from fruitful intercultural exchanges to downward cultural domination, including different forms of incomprehension, opportunistic behaviour, and conflict. Thus, this issue tries to understand how certain moments of encounter (limited in time and space) might have shaped ways of making and understanding music and sound. The authors propose emphasizing moments of encounter as a rich source for transversal and intersectional analysis, allowing for a multiscale account of musical and sonic encounters.