This study examines how to counter the legalization of proceeds from illicit drug trafficking in the context of Kazakhstan’s digitalizing economy. It analyses industry reports and applies Walker’s gravity formula and a related conceptual model. Such proceeds account for 2 to 5% of annual gross domestic profit globally, highlighting a serious economic issue. In Kazakhstan, this problem is intensified by the country’s location on major drug trafficking routes and insufficient alignment of its financial sector with international standards for monitoring financial transactions. The risks are worsened by the anonymity and speed of digital tools, which hinder the detection and blocking of suspicious activity. Criminals exploit digital technologies – such as debit cards, peer-to-peer platforms and privacy coins – to launder illicit funds. To combat this, the study recommends using big-data analytics to detect risks, machine learning to respond to them, international cooperation to establish transaction standards, and continuous monitoring to ensure compliance. Implementing these measures will require multi-sectoral reforms and coordinated efforts across public administration.

Excessive car ownership in cities has led to issues including congestion, air pollution and resource consumption. This paper investigates the impact of rail transit openings on automobile purchases in China based on detailed car sales data during 2013–2015 and using two-way fixed effects panel models. Our study reveals an average decrease of 2.27 per cent in car sales due to rail transit openings. Further analyses of cars with different fuel economy reveal stronger effects on fuel-efficient cars, indicating larger substitution elasticity between public transportation and driving for people with less income. Results also show the negative impact of rail transit openings is larger in cities with more developed economies, higher public revenue, larger population, bigger area and fewer buses. The decline in car sales translates into savings of 7.9 billion liters of gasoline and a reduction of about 20.3 million tons in life-cycle carbon emissions.

We focus on the existence of ground state solutions to the following class of elliptic equations

\begin{equation*}-\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N} u+V(x)u=f(u) \quad \hbox{in} \quad \mathbb{B}^N,\end{equation*}

where $\mathbb{B}^N$ is the disc model of the Hyperbolic space and $\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N}$ denotes the Laplace–Beltrami operator with $N \geq 2$, $V:\mathbb{B}^N \to \mathbb{R}$ and $f:\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ are continuous functions that satisfy some technical conditions. With different types of the potential V, by introducing some new tricks handling the hurdle that the Hyperbolic space is not a compact manifold, we are able to obtain at least a positive ground state solution using variational methods.

As some applications for the methods adopted above, we derive the existence of normalized solutions to the elliptic problems

\begin{equation*}\left\{\begin{aligned}&-\Delta_{\mathbb{B}^N} u+V(x)u=\mu u+f(u) \quad \hbox{in} \quad \mathbb{B}^N,\\&\int_{\mathbb{B}^N}|u|^{2}\,dV_{{\mathbb{B}^N}}=a^{2},\end{aligned}\right.\end{equation*}

where a > 0, $\mu\in \mathbb{R}$ is an unknown parameter that appears as a Lagrange multiplier and f is a continuous function that fulfils the L2-subcritical or L2-supercritical growth. We do believe that it seems the first results to deal with normalized solutions for the Schrödinger equations in the Hyperbolic space.

Despite recent advances in the scholarship of history and architectural history, the practice of urban slavery is distinctly understudied in North American archaeology in contrast to plantation archaeologies. This is due largely to the fundamental challenge of investigating urban households, where many individuals of differing social and economic status (free and unfree, Black and white) occupy the same limited space and dispose of their refuse in shared locations, thereby contributing to a highly mixed archaeological record that is difficult—if not impossible—to parse. However, when the researcher pivots to imagining individual entanglements within a shared material world, new interpretations emerge in the noise and dissonance of urban life. This article considers the narratives of three enslaved individuals (two men and one woman) who lived and labored at 87 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, during the eighteenth century. Although this is an illuminating approach, traversing archival (archaeological) silences and highlighting individual lives and worlds in the archaeological record demands considerable interpretive caution and care.

The prominence and significance of research on specific learning differences (SpLDs) in language learning, teaching, assessment, and teacher education have substantially increased in the past ten years, which justifies the need to review the findings of studies conducted in recent years. The growth of the field also requires that the scope of the review is extended to research in the area of L2 assessment and teacher education. In our paper, we first offer a short discussion of different views of disability and inclusion and a succinct summary of the definitions of SpLDs. We then summarize recent research developments in five main areas: (1) the impact of SpLDs on L2 learning and achievement, (2) the identification of SpLDs in multilingual contexts, (3) teaching techniques and programmes in supporting language learners with SpLDs, (4) assessing the second language competence of test-takers with SpLDs, and (5) raising language teachers’ awareness and knowledge of SpLDs.

In our conclusion, we highlight the implications of recent scholarship in this field for language teaching and testing, teacher education, and suggest further research directions.

The 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a remarkable political movement to foster what was then called “socialism with a human face” by merging the egalitarian-distributive vision of socialism with quasi-Western democratic values. This article investigates the social and emotional origins of Czechoslovak reformism and argues that the movement was rooted in the intersection between social class discontent and the collective emotional pain of a revolutionary intelligentsia that I call the “red-collars.” In doing this, the article explores how the post-revolutionary class structure and shared “melancholic” feelings of the red-collars (a mix of discontent with their material/social circumstances and regret for their part in Stalinist revolutionary excesses) shaped their ideological transformation from Stalinism to democratic socialism between 1948 and 1968. Throughout the 1960s, by declaring emotional pain over their past Stalinism, the red-collars voiced their desire to reform the system and reclaim what they considered the “humanistic core of socialism.”

This article critically examines the claim that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has acquired “legislative powers”, as suggested by the practices over the last two decades. This purported “legislative” role derives from Resolutions 1373, 1540, and 1422. However, an expansive interpretation of Chapter VII powers or viewing the UNSC as a legislative body within a “World Government” does not hold. Additionally, shifts in the international political landscape have made the expansion of UNSC’s legislative powers impossible, and the UNSC has largely refrained from adopting legislative resolutions in the past decade as they have learned the lessons from Resolution 1540. Finally, this article proposes a solution that although these resolutions do not qualify as a direct source of law under Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), their binding nature remains as acts détournement de pouvoir and shall not be regarded as ultra vires.

The superfamily Diplostomoidea Poirier, 1886 is a large, globally distributed group of digeneans characterized by the presence of a unique holdfast organ and parasitic in most major groups of vertebrates (birds, mammals, reptiles, fishes) as definitive hosts. A number of diplostomoideans are associated with diseases in their intermediate and, more rarely, definitive hosts. Prior to this work and upon the recent synonymization of the Brauninidae Wolf, 1903, the Diplostomoidea included 5 families: Bolbocephalodidae Strand, 1935; Cyathocotylidae Mühling, 1896; Diplostomidae Poirier, 1886; Proterodiplostomidae Dubois, 1936; and Strigeidae Railliet, 1919. The separation of these families was based primarily on the structure and shape of prosoma and holdfast organ as well as the presence/absence of cirrus sac and paraprostate. More rarely, distinguishing among families was based on life cycles and types of larval stages, excretory system or even host specificity. However, due to the inconsistent nature of most of morphological and biological characters across the Diplostomoidea and nearly universal lack of agreement on their relative value, the systematic history of the group has been extremely tumultuous, and none of many classification systems proposed over the last 140 years has become broadly accepted or supported by phylogenetic analyses. Extensive molecular phylogenetic studies of the Diplostomoidea in the last 15 years helped to partly improve the classification system and resolve multiple taxonomic questions. Notably, practically all molecular phylogenies have clearly demonstrated non-monophyly of the two largest families, the Diplostomidae and the Strigeidae and indicated it as systematic problem. We provide a brief overview of the history and current state of knowledge of diplostomoidean systematics and re-evaluate the classification system of the Diplostomoidea based on morphological and molecular evidence. We propose changes in the classification system that reconciles the traditional morphological and life cycle data with molecular phylogenies. The major element of the proposed classification system is the synonymization of the families Proterodiplostomidae and Strigeidae with the Diplostomidae as the only feasible way to resolve the problem of consistent non-monophyly of the latter two families and provide stability to the classification system.

Governments are the most frequent interveners at the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). However, we know little about government interventions, with the last substantive study only providing coverage of Charter cases up to 2007. To update this body of research, we provide an analysis of government interventions across all constitutional cases decided by the SCC between 2013 and 2023. Building upon earlier work by Hennigar (2010) and Radmilovic (2013), our study shows that despite changes to the intervener landscape in the past decade, governments continue to primarily intervene defensively in Charter cases. Importantly, however, our findings reveal complexity in how governments intervene across various constitutional cases, with distinct intervening behaviour in division of power disputes and reference cases.

Sternal cleft is a rare congenital condition associated with unprotected viscera and respiratory failure. We present a case of a sternal cleft, absent right clavicle, and congenital diaphragmatic paresis in a neonate. The sternum was closed primarily, and the patient was taken back for plication of the diaphragm. At 3 years follow-up, the patient is free from complications.

Using three waves (2011–15) of CHARLS data, we analyze the short-term effects of widowhood on cognitive function among older Chinese. Fixed-effect models show that widowhood has significant adverse effects on cognition for rural elders but not for urban ones. Furthermore, compared to rural men, rural women exhibit greater declines in cognition, especially in fluid cognition. We explore the possible mechanism from the neighborhood perspective. The results show that community sports and entertainment facilities and public services can effectively mitigate the negative impact of widowhood on cognitive function for rural widows. Sports and entertainment facilities can mainly enhance word recall ability, especially delayed word recall. Public services such as elderly health centers focusing on the healthcare function for the elderly can also improve the word recall ability of rural widows. On the other hand, family-based elderly care centers mainly increase the cognition ability of mental intactness.