The article examines efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) to enumerate the harm its forces inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi civilians between 2014 and 2018. Drawing on more than 1,300 declassified civilian harm assessments, this article examines the rationale behind the decision to count civilian casualties, the policies that governed how civilian casualties were counted, and what CJTF-OIR officials did with the data collected. Although accurate counts are critical to ethical debates, we show that, on their own, these counts are insufficient when it comes to recognizing the harm inflicted upon civilians and holding militaries accountable. We trace coalition metrics back to concerns about consequence management, showing how martial considerations about optimizing violence—rather than moral concerns about constraining violence—governed the enumerative enterprise. We argue that the way the coalition previously counted civilian casualties erased certain harms from view, including the indirect, cumulative, and reverberating violence that civilians suffered during this conflict. Furthermore, we contend that these numerical indicators tell us little about how civilians experience these harms, a lack of which can become an impediment to ethical consideration. Finally, we contrast the coalition count with Airwars figures to reveal both the numerical discrepancies between the different counts and differences in how these figures have been used. We contend that counting casualties is critical, but also complicated, contestable, and—at times—too constrictive.

We develop a novel asymptotic theory for local polynomial extremum estimators of time-varying parameters in a broad class of nonlinear time-series models, including discrete-valued ones. We show that the proposed estimators are asymptotically normally distributed under weak conditions. We also provide a precise characterization of the leading bias term due to smoothing. We demonstrate the usefulness of our general results by establishing primitive conditions for local (quasi-)maximum-likelihood estimators of time-varying models threshold autoregressions, ARCH models and Poisson autoregressions with exogenous covariates, to be normally distributed in large samples and characterize their leading biases. An empirical study of U.S. corporate default counts demonstrates the applicability of the proposed local linear estimator for Poisson autoregressions, shedding new light on the dynamic properties of U.S. corporate defaults.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

On 28 July 1776, the German-born Philadelphia merchant Jonas Phillips enclosed a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter written in Yiddish to another Jewish merchant, Gumpel Sampson, in Europe. The letter was intercepted and today sits on display in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, with a curatorial note that it was the first copy of the Declaration known to have been sent out of the country. Within a transatlantic economic framework, the outbreak of a war that presented new business opportunities became a field for self-making to a degree that would not have been possible for Phillips within Britain itself. This article traces Phillips’s involvement in the Revolution, his growing confidence that he and other Jews belonged in the new polity, and the assertion of his political voice to rid his state of religious tests for office.

While Manchester enjoyed a thriving chamber music culture at the outset of the twentieth century, signs of decline were already evident in the years leading up to the First World War. The outbreak of war in August 1914 proved agential in the need to rethink the existing models of concert-giving, not least the pre-war reliance on a predominantly Austro-German canonic repertoire and the substantial support it received from Manchester’s large and often prosperous German community. It also faced more practical challenges in the unavailability of male performing artists. The important role of organist and composer Sydney Nicholson in the establishment of Manchester’s Tuesday Mid-day Concerts in 1915 is discussed, arguing that their innovative format, together with the opportunities they offered both for the introduction of newer repertoire and as a platform for local performers, positioned them as one of the most significant but still undocumented legacies of Manchester’s wartime music making.

What does it mean to think about trust as a legal scholar? From one perspective, there comes the broad question of why people trust or mistrust the law as it pertains to their lives and communities. Although there is no shortage of analytical angles from which to examine this question, to configure trust in relation to the lives of people and their communities is to broadly think about trust as a broad social phenomenon. That is because law is all-pervasive in structuring the social relations that shape the lives of individuals and their communities. On this basis, the multi-faceted traditions of ‘law and society’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ must become relevant for selecting the appropriate methods for exploring trust and trusting in relation to the law.

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, by Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce S. Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe, and Ethan Michelson, is an exhaustive, rigorous, and defining study of the US legal profession in the early twenty-first century. Like the profession itself during this period, its primary focus is on corporate practice and the ripple and sequencing effects of beginning a career in a corporate law firm. This review essay examines the takeaways from the questions that animate the book and considers how populism and rising autocracy will shape future research on lawyers’ careers.

Synthetic biology defies traditional views about the scope of biological inquiry (Hull 1978; Waters 2007; Weber 2013). Some authors are skeptical about the epistemic value the field has to the rest of the life sciences (Keller 2009a). This paper demonstrates how artificial biochemistries of life serve an essential epistemic function as semifactual models in biology (Knuuttila and Koskinen 2021). As semifactual models, alternative biochemistries of life facilitate the testing of hypotheses about universal biological constraints. Importantly, clarifying this role also unveils further research questions that would lend greater rigor to synthetic biology research programs.

The Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, has many shallow coastal lagoons. The interest in the study of mangroves and other ecosystems in this area is due to their capacity to store large amounts of organic carbon (blue carbon). To understand this process, sediments can provide information about the evolution over time of the coastal zone, through changes in their physical and chemical composition.

Isotopic techniques have proven to be useful in the study of different coastal processes such as carbon sequestration rates and other events. However, coastal ecosystems are dynamic regions that change over time, representing a challenge for dating with nuclides such as 14C. Previous studies have focused on the dating of fractions of different sizes or fractions in which the carbon comes from different sources. These strategies help to find the most probable date of deposition of the sediments.

In this study we dated 14C paleosol sediment fractions obtained from mangrove-dominated areas that have undergone a transformation process. We dated different fractions such as macrofossils, total organic matter, humin, and humic acids, from sediment cores collected from two paleosol sites with different geological and hydrological characteristics: Jaina in Campeche and Ría Lagartos in Yucatán, Mexico. In both cores we observed that in the absence of macrofossils, the fractions that indicate the best age to report are total organic matter or humin.

Cultural weed management through intercropping helps in weed suppression, resulting in improved crop productivity. Cereal-legume intercropping is the eco-friendly approach to suppress weeds and improve crop performance and soil fertility. Therefore, a two-year field experiment was carried out at the campus of Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute, Ranchi, Jharkhand during the monsoon season of 2023 and 2024 in a randomized block design with three replications using eight cropping systems. Results revealed that sole black gram ensured highest weed control efficiency (55.9%), followed by intercropping system of finger millet and black gram (1:2) (49.5%). Finger millet + black gram (1:2) and sole black gram recorded higher growth attributes and yields of finger millet and black gram, respectively. However, finger millet + black gram (1:2) also recorded high growth and yield attributes of black gram. System productivity was maximum in sole black gram (4730 kg/ha), followed by intercropping system of finger millet and black gram (1:2) (3900 kg/ha), along with protein content (23.4%) and consequently, the production economics (net return: Rupees 56830/ha; benefit: cost of 1.90). It also resulted in the highest residual soil fertility. Additionally, the combined land equivalent ratio (LER) (1.44) was higher in the 1:2 intercropping system of finger millet and black gram, indicating a 44% yield advantage. Thus, in Eastern Plateau and Hill Zone of India, an intercropping system of finger millet and black gram (1:2) is recommended for cultivation in monsoon to achieve high weed suppression, crop productivity, and economic profitability.

This study investigates the effects of psychopharmacological drug on male reproductive health, with a specific focus on sperm parameters, DNA integrity, and chromatin structure. The aim is to understand the potential risks these medications pose to fertility. A comparative analysis was conducted involving 14 individuals undergoing psychopharmacological treatment and 15 non-users. Key seminal parameters, including volume, concentration, count, morphology, and motility, were evaluated to assess the impact on overall sperm quality. Additionally, genetic markers such as DNA fragmentation and chromatin structural integrity were measured to determine the extent of damage to genetic material. The study also analysed Protein Kinase A (PKA) expression, a critical enzyme in the cAMP-mediated signalling pathway, to explore its role in regulating sperm function. Significant statistical differences were observed in semen parameters, DNA fragmentation, chromatin integrity, and PKA protein expression between the two groups. Individuals using psychopharmacological drugs exhibited marked impairments in sperm quality and genetic markers compared to non-users. These findings suggest a potential link between psychopharmacological drug use and adverse effects on male reproductive health. The study underscores the importance of understanding the reproductive risks associated with these medications. It highlights the need for increased awareness among healthcare professionals and patients about the potential consequences of psychopharmacological treatment on fertility. Further research is essential to explore the underlying mechanisms and develop strategies to mitigate these adverse effects, ensuring better reproductive outcomes for individuals undergoing such treatments.

Police reform has been a cornerstone of activism in Toronto for decades. Activists, organizations, and community groups have applied pressure to politicians, government officials, and other decision-making bodies specifically for them to intervene in a pattern of racialized violence on the part of the Toronto Police force. At the same time, external interventions of any kind have been vehemently resisted by Toronto Police and its Board of Commissioners. This paper will address the question: How does Toronto’s municipal government respond to demands to address racialized police violence in a city that is defined by its diversity and racially harmonious sensibilities? Through a detailed genealogy of Toronto government records and centering the killing of Albert Johnson as an “event,” this paper reveals how Toronto government policies and practices addressing racism and racialized violence in policing become the mechanisms through which to continuously obscure and protect such violence against public accountability and to recirculate Toronto as the city without racism. The paper concludes by drawing parallels to and thus complicating the idea of civilian oversight bodies as a potential solution to police racism, as advocated by politicians, government officials, activists, organizations, and community groups across Toronto and beyond.