L’expérience des pays de la Grande Caraïbe dans l’arbitrage international en matière d’investissement a connu une évolution spectaculaire durant ces trente dernières années. Sitôt qu’ils se sont adaptés au régime de protection internationale des investissements, plusieurs États de la Caraïbe ont été submergés par le règlement des différends entre États et investisseurs étrangers (RDIE). Cette situation a conduit à des sentences arbitrales souvent coûteuses qui peuvent aggraver la condition socioéconomique des États faibles. Cet article présente la critique du mécanisme RDIE qui a trouvé un écho particulier dans le contexte caribéen. Il examine les efforts de réforme entrepris par les pays de la région et cherche à savoir si ces propositions peuvent vraiment favoriser une réaffirmation des droits souverains dans l’arbitrage d’investissement. Il conclut qu’à défaut d’un projet régional cohérent le paysage caribéen en matière d’investissement reflète actuellement un pluralisme désordonné, allant de l’approche radicale inspirée de l’Alliance bolivarienne pour les Amériques et du modèle brésilien aux différents éléments de réforme orchestrés par les États puissants. Si l’option réformiste semble être dominante dans la région, néanmoins elle ne répond pas aux véritables préoccupations de légitimité que soulève la pratique de l’arbitrage d’investissement. En suivant le standard conventionnel des pays plus forts, les pays caribéens se montrent pour l’instant incapables d’innover et de créer leur propre voie institutionnelle face à une légalité transnationale dont les implications sont préoccupantes pour la préservation des objectifs d’intérêt public.

In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

During the 1930s, the British government in Palestine introduced new regulation for the country’s banking sector. This regulation brought about a sharp decline in the number of banks and consolidated the large banks’ position in the country. Contrary to prior accounts of the subject, which view the regulation as a welcome governmental response to an unstable banking sector, in this article I argue that the main forces behind the regulation were the British Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial, and Overseas) and the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank. Based on governmental reports and internal banking correspondence, I show how, despite the opposition of local credit institutions, these two large banks successfully pushed for regulations that benefited them at the expense of their smaller competitors. The regulation of Palestine’s banking sector is therefore a case study of regulatory capture in the context of the British Empire.

In this note, we prove that every Salem number is expressible as a difference of two Pisot numbers. More precisely, we show that for each Salem number α of degree d, there are infinitely many positive integers n for which $\alpha^{2n-1}-\alpha^n+\alpha$ and $\alpha^{2n-1}-\alpha^n$ are both Pisot numbers of degree d and that the smallest such n is at most $6^{d/2-1}+1$. We also prove that every real positive algebraic number can be expressed as a quotient of two Pisot numbers. Earlier, Salem himself had proved that every Salem number can be written in this way.

This paper considers the structure and priorities of the Carthaginian state in its imperial endeavours in both North Africa and across the Mediterranean, focusing especially on the well-documented period of the Punic Wars (264–146 BC.). It suggests that Carthaginian constitutional structures, in particular the split between civil shofetim (‘judges’) and military rabbim (‘generals’), impacted the strategic outlook and marginal bellicosity of the city, making it less competitive against its primary peer-rival in the Western Mediterranean, Rome.

Bamboos are mainly distributed in subtropical to tropical areas. Bamboos provide numerous ecosystem services, while the expansion of bamboo gives negative impacts on forest ecosystems. Despite big impacts of bamboos on a forest ecosystem, ecological characteristics of bamboo remain poorly understood. The spatial distributional patterns of three bamboo species, Cephalostachyum pergracile, Bambusa polymorpha, and Dinochloa maclellandii, were studied in a commercial tree plantation of native deciduous tree species in the Bago Mountains, Myanmar. A point process analysis revealed a clumped distribution for each bamboo species. The distributional overlapping of the species was analysed for every pair of two species. The distribution of C. pergracile was little overlapped with those of D. maclellandii and B. polymorpha. Cephalostachyum pergracile was significantly more abundant on gently sloping ridges, whereas D. maclellandii was more abundant on a steeply sloping site. Bambusa polymorpha did not show these patterns with topography. The exclusive distribution of C. pergracile and D. maclellandii may be, at least partly, explained by the opposite topographic preferences of the species. Cephalostachyum pergracile tended to be found far from large trees that cast shade, although B. polymorpha tended to be found with large trees, suggesting that B. polymorpha may be more shade tolerant than C. pergracile. The difference in shade tolerance may contribute to the exclusive distribution of the species. The habitat preference information obtained in this study will contribute to sound bamboo management practices in Myanmar and enable bamboo population sizes to be increased through creation of favourable habitats in forests.

This is a personal essay about breasts. It focuses on my experiences as a young girl, moving through adolescence to a history of breast cancer in my family, including my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. As a physician, patient, and wife, I reflect on the choices that I have to make and what this means for my identity as a woman and mother.

The fate of captives designated as ‘communist’ prisoners during the Vietnam War has largely been overshadowed by that of US POWs detained north of the Seventeenth Parallel. This article, based on newly released archival sources in multiple languages, considers their classification and treatment in captivity. In particular, civilian captives and members of the National Liberation Front were often categorised as ‘civil defendants’ by South Vietnam and thus deprived of their rights as POWs, as codified in the Geneva Conventions. Yet, as representatives of a state dealing with both an insurgency and an invasion at the same time, South Vietnamese officials realised the significance of enemy captives. By illustrating the complex policies and practices of prisoner taking and incarceration, this article interprets and explains the gap between civilian and military law and informal and oftentimes self-serving practices on the ground. Thus, the Second Indochina War foreshadowed a global trend of excluding captured irregular combatants from the laws of war.