The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report.

The end of the constitutional right to abortion with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health stands to generate massive conflict between abortion regulation and the First Amendment. Abortion exceptionalism within constitutional doctrine -- which both treats abortion differently than other areas and favors anti-abortion over pro-choice viewpoints -- will not retreat but advance, unless confronted by the courts.

The use of bio-based construction materials in Haiti could help the construction sector to transition, from non-seismic unreinforced masonry structures towards materials that can reverse catastrophic deforestation, promote ecological regeneration, and help save the soil. Architecture has a role to play in this vision, by creating new designs and incentivising clients to invest in new materials.

Three twig-growing lichen species belonging to the family Teloschistaceae from southern Patagonia are described as new to science: Marchantiana pyramus sp. nov., with minute apothecia, orange due to dominant content of emodin, M. ramulicola sp. nov., with minute olive apothecia with dominant parietin and Austroplaca thisbe sp. nov., with clear yellow apothecia also with dominant parietin. Marchantiana subpyracea, M. epibrya and M. queenslandica are new combinations for species which, so far, are known only from New Zealand and Australia. Blastenia circumpolaris is shown to be very common in Patagonia and Marchantiana asserigena is documented for the first time from the Southern Hemisphere, viz. the Falkland Islands. The genus Marchantiana is analyzed here using three genes and is shown to be closely related to Yoshimuria; although appearing as paraphyletic, a monophyletic origin cannot be ruled out. Morphology, ecology and distribution support a monophyletic treatment and Marchantiana is therefore treated as such.

It is common for historians to focus their attention on turning points in the past. The risk with this is that it overstates how dramatic change was and the extent of stasis and stability in between those turning points, at its most extreme form in notions of punctuated equilibriums. We need to remember the importance of continuities across those turning points and transitions in order to understand the roots of change and have a more nuanced picture of the nature of change. This is as valid for the relationship between firms, governments, and global governance frameworks as it is for any other historical subject.

On the cover page of the September 23, 1922, issue of the Chicago Defender, editor Robert S. Abbott announced Go-to-a-White-Church Sunday. Less than a month later, the Federal Council of Churches announced its inaugural Race Relations Sunday. Through a comparative analysis of these two events, this article reconsiders historians’ tendency to assume and emphasize a shared faith across racial lines when discussing interracial religious practice in various historical contexts. Go-to-a-White-Church Sunday was intended both to introduce white churchgoers to black respectability and to provide moral guidance to white churchgoers, whose racism rendered their faith something other than true Christianity. Notwithstanding ceremonial nods to interracial religious brotherhood, Abbott's campaign hinged more so on shared understandings of respectability than on shared Christian faith. While the FCC's Race Relations Sunday differed in its valorization of white Christianity, with proclamations that interracial religious brotherhood was sufficient to solve “the race problem,” both events displayed a shared faith in the power of interracial proximity in itself to accomplish their respective ends. Historians have replicated this problematic faith in interracial proximity by using language of racial transcendence and writing as if interracial religious practice is egalitarian unless proven otherwise. This article calls for more critical, contextually mindful approaches.

Although epiphytic lichens are widely adopted as environmental indicators, they are not yet included among the target species listed in Annex II of the Habitats Directive, to which the system of protected areas of the Natura 2000 network refers. In this work, we aim to test the effectiveness of this system, mainly designed for the conservation of other groups of species, in protecting lichen species richness. For this purpose, we considered a case study (Central Italy) with half of the territory included in protected areas. Statistical differences in species richness and lichen communities were tested between sites located in 16 Protected Areas (PA) and 11 Non-Protected Areas (NPA) using non-parametric tests, multi-response permutation procedures (MRPP), non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) and Indicator Species Analysis (ISA). Despite the broad overlap between epiphytic lichen communities of NPAs and PAs and a similar number of total and common species, PAs contain a significantly higher number of nationally rare and extremely rare species, including cyanolichens. These results are also confirmed by the indicator analysis. Although the Natura 2000 network does not explicitly address the conservation of lichens, the protected areas in our study can play a role in protecting the diversity of epiphytic lichens, especially nationally rare and endangered species. However, the future inclusion of red-listed epiphytic lichens among the target species of Annex II of the Habitats Directive would be welcome to better protect these organisms on a European level.