Understanding the spatiotemporal variability of global summer monsoons and the factors controlling them is essential for testing and predicting their future changes under the anticipated global warming. Here, we reconstructed a series of East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) patterns over South Korea. Based on radiocarbon dates, grain size, carbon/sulfur (C/S) ratios, and high-resolution X-ray fluorescence core scanning (XRF-CS) data (e.g., Ti/Al and Zr/Al ratios) from a paleo-bay site in Hadong area, southern Korea, we investigated the multi-decadal- to centennial-scale variation in the terrestrial element inputs as a proxy for the EASM rainfall during the period from 8600 to 7800 cal yr BP and compared previous results from the Buan area, western coast of Korea, to test possible synchronous local-scale hydroclimate change. We also explored global teleconnections among EASM over Korea, the Indian summer monsoon (ISM), and the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). We found that the EASM variability was positively correlated with that of the ISM through latitudinal shifts of the ITCZ. High-latitude cooling climates, including the 8.2 ka cooling event, were also directly connected to the weakened EASM via the intensified winter monsoon and southward shift of the westerly jet position over the Tibetan Plateau. To predict future changes in summer rainfall, synchronized changes in the global summer precipitation should be considered in terms of ITCZ and high-latitude climate change, including westerly jet shifts over Asian regions.

Drawing on two decades of collaborative legal ethnographic research with Indigenous communities, this article weaves personal narrative and lived experience to highlight working-class scholar-activism and embodied spiritual rituality as an act of resistance within academia. It critically challenges Western research ethics paradigms by emphasising ethics as a lived, relational practice grounded in rituality and interconnectedness rather than mere compliance. Through an audiovisual lens, it demonstrates how visual storytelling can embody and amplify more-than-human voices, fostering relationality and responsibility. The paper offers two key contributions: recentring the positionality of working-class scholars and recentring the agency of the more-than-human int he field of law as vital in knowledge production. While decolonial and Indigenous scholarship advocate for diverse epistemologies, they often overlook working-class perspectives rooted in societal justice. I argue that a heart-based resistance grounded in critical care, relationality, Indigenous ontologies and spirituality can foster transformative academic knowledge.

Los contextos zooarqueológicos de Pampa y Norpatagonia argentina, permitieron proponer procesos de intensificación y economías de amplio espectro en sociedades cazadoras recolectoras durante el Holoceno tardío. Se presentan los resultados del estudio de los conjuntos de fauna menor del sitio Zoko Andi 1 (transición Pampeano-Patagónica oriental). El sitio presenta dos componentes arqueológicos datados en el Holoceno tardío inicial (ca. 1500-1300 años aP) y final (ca. 800-400 años aP), lo que permite evaluar si existieron cambios en las especies faunísticas explotadas a través del tiempo. Los modelos planteados para el área proponían procesos de intensificación durante los últimos 1000 años aP, pero los resultados obtenidos del análisis conjunto de las especies de tamaño mayor y menor de Zoko Andi 1 indican que las estrategias asociadas con este proceso fueron implementadas desde al menos 1500 años aP. Se discuten y analizan las causas de su desarrollo en función de la riqueza y disponibilidad de recursos y de factores relacionados con la movilidad recursiva, la redundancia ocupacional, la construcción del espacio y su valoración basada en esferas mortuorias y rituales que habrían alentado el desarrollo de estrategias diversas e intensivas en la explotación de recursos.

Recent debates over how to address racial injustice in the United States often center on two types of policies: redistributive measures that redress material inequities between groups and symbolic reforms that challenge dominant racial narratives. How do citizens evaluate these differing approaches to advancing racial justice? How do recent removals of Confederate symbols shape support for each of these policy types? In a survey of American adults, we find that support for redistributive and symbolic policies is positively correlated across partisan, racial, and regional lines. However, when pressed, respondents express a stronger preference for redistributive measures, often viewing symbolic reforms as insufficient or distracting. In an experimental framework, we find that informing respondents about recent Confederate statue removals does not significantly alter support for either policy type. Looking at qualitative reactions to the treatment, we identify a plausible explanation for this null finding: most respondents see the removals as a fight over history and less directly relevant to a broader racial justice policy agenda.

Let G be a locally compact topological group and $\mathcal {L}(G)$ the space of all its closed subgroups endowed with the Vietoris topology. Let $\mathcal {L}_c(G)$ be the subspace of all compact subgroups of G. Any continuous morphism $\varphi \colon G\to H$ between locally compact groups G and H functorially induces a continuous map $\varphi _*\colon \mathcal {L}_c(G)\to \mathcal {L}_c(H)$ given by $\varphi _*(L)=\varphi (L)$. The main problem addressed in this paper is that of determining the relationship between the openness of $\varphi $ and the openness of $\varphi _*$. For example, we show that if G is locally compact with compact identity component and H is locally compact and totally disconnected, then $\varphi $ is open if and only if $\varphi _*$ is open.

Central to the UK’s Referendum on EU membership, immigration concerns underpinned support for Leave. This article examines ethnic minority support for Brexit, comparing their immigration attitudes with white British voters. Why immigrants and ethnic minorities would support immigration controls through voting Leave presents a theoretical puzzle with existing research finding they generally hold positive attitudes to immigration. Drawing on focus groups and interviews, I find opposition to Eastern European immigration motivated ethnic minority Leave support, who bolstered their own position as “good” immigrants while denigrating Eastern Europeans as “bad” immigrants. This echoes emerging trends of minoritized groups opposing newer migrants, including increased Latino/x support for Trump in 2024. White British Leave voters, however, rarely distinguished between EU and non-EU migrants, often including British ethnic minorities in their “mental image” of immigrants. Thus, tighter borders may do little to quell qualms over immigration which (partly) reflect concerns over rising racial diversity.

This paper examines what Seneca, Controuersiae 9.2 can contribute to understanding of the maiestas laws under Augustus and Tiberius. In this period, two distinct judicial spaces are known to have hosted cases tried under these laws: the traditional Republican standing court and the new senatorial court, which supplanted its predecessor at the latest from the years immediately following the accession of Tiberius. Yet in the same period a third judicial space acquired new prominence: the schoolrooms of the declaimers, in which teachers of rhetoric, their pupils and sundry adult performers gathered to participate in the fictional trial fοr maiestas laesa of L. Quinctius Flamininus. Moving between these spaces and considering the interrelationship of the different statutes that they employed, this paper shows how the superficially escapist practice of trying Flamininus could also offer a vehicle for reflection on the drastic legal and political changes taking place in the world outside. Building on close analysis of the contribution of Votienus Montanus, the paper seeks to reconstruct key provisions of the hypothetical late Augustan lex Iulia maiestatis. It finally details how many of those quoted in the exercise risked or actually underwent prosecution for maiestas or themselves launched such prosecutions.

Dustin Sebell has written an excellent book on Xenophon—the most thorough and comprehensive account of Book IV of the Memorabilia known to me. He develops his argument powerfully, rigorously, and his conclusions about the character, methods and goals of the Socratic education are compelling. Book IV has often been described—not without reason—as dull and insipid. Sebell succeeds in showing, however, that while Socrates’s education of the young Euthydemos is indeed a caricature, a careful reader can discover through that caricature the core of the Socratic education. In my view, the most important contribution of the book is to offer a masterful explanation of how and why Socrates often chose to educate good natures indirectly, not through dialogue but by making them the silent witnesses of the “education” of youths who could not be truly enlightened. By revealing his thought “with a view to” Euthydemos—the ungifted pupil of Memorabilia IV—Socrates was simultaneously able to adumbrate his genuine thoughts to good natures (36). And Sebell explains convincingly the reasons for Socrates’s indirect pedagogy.

We study necessary and sufficient conditions for a 4-dimensional Lefschetz fibration over the 2-disk to admit a ${\text{Pin}}^{\pm}$-structure, extending the work of A. Stipsicz in the orientable setting. As a corollary, we get existence results of ${\text{Pin}}^{+}$ and ${\text{Pin}}^-$-structures on closed non-orientable 4-manifolds and on Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere. In particular, we show via three explicit examples how to read-off ${\text{Pin}}^{\pm}$-structures from the Kirby diagram of a 4-manifold. We also provide a proof of the well-known fact that any closed 3-manifold M admits a ${\text{Pin}}^-$-structure and we find a criterion to check whether or not it admits a ${\text{Pin}}^+$-structure in terms of a handlebody decomposition. We conclude the paper with a characterization of ${\text{Pin}}^+$-structures on vector bundles.

2024 marked ten years since the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) took effect. Firmly rooted in international human rights and humanitarian law, the ATT is the first legally binding instrument to regulate international arms transfers. It is a framework for national action to (i) contribute to peace and security, (ii) reduce human suffering caused by irresponsible arms transfers and (iii) promote transparency in the international arms trade. This piece exploresrecent developments in the ATT process that represent a pivot from building treaty infrastructure toward more expansive stakeholder engagement, increased information exchange centred on state practice and a sharper focus on the ATT’s human impact. Key new features are discussions on actual arms transfer decisions and the examination of the independent human rights responsibilities of industry that operate alongside government risk assessment obligations. Finally, this piece assesses the potential impact of these efforts on the achievement of the ATT’s humanitarian purpose.

We evaluated large language model (LLM)-based agents integrated with the electronic medical record to assess blood culture appropriateness. While sensitivity was high, specificity remained low. Performance was shaped by prompt phrasing, sycophantic behavior, and semantic triggers, reflecting both the potential and limitations of LLMs in real-world clinical decision support.

In a 1950 essay, Heinz Politzer provided an on-the-spot evaluation of Menotti’s opera The Consul, which had debuted that year, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City. As a Kafka scholar, and a Jewish refugee from Vienna who naturalized as a US citizen, Politzer possessed strong credentials for assessing the opera’s portrayal of the tyranny of modern border control. His essay affirmed one of the central claims of David Armitage’s final Niemeyer lecture, “Refugee Songs,” that The Consul acutely illuminates the plight of the modern refugee, and thus provides a striking example of opera’s long-standing preoccupation with individuals caught up in international rules. According to Politzer, Menotti “has an authentic modern subject … worthy of serious treatment, and capable of evoking authentic emotion … the action is contemporary: we have lived through it … the struggle for a visa to the land of freedom, good life, redemption.”1

In 1872, Hong Kong’s colonial government passed an ordinance prohibiting hawkers from crying wares in the parts of town where Europeans lived and worked. This was precipitated by a local discourse on ostensibly Chinese noise that took shape in the English-language newspapers that constructed Chinese people as intrinsically noisy and Europeans as noise averse. These ideas drew upon existing rhetoric produced in response to noise nuisance in London and a broader transatlantic discourse on the relationship between noise and civilization. The transformation of these ideas in Hong Kong established a model whereby Chinese people were producers of noise, unaffected by hearing it, while intrinsically quiet Europeans suffered from hearing noise. This process justified the differential treatment of space, enabling the creation of a privileged ‘European’ zone legally protected from ‘Chinese’ noise.

Despite Taiwan’s exclusion from many treaty regimes, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court (TCC) has at times cited international law, particularly international human rights norms. To analyse the authority and influence of these citations, this article proposes a typology along two dimensions: legal effect (whether the Court treats international norms as legally binding or merely advisory) and impact level (whether international norms are used to reaffirm or alter existing constitutional jurisprudence, or to guide future developments). Applying this framework reveals that the TCC’s traditional tendency to treat international norms as non-binding and reaffirming is evolving. In recent years, the TCC has increasingly invoked international law to articulate new rights protections and has begun to recognise its legal authority, suggesting a deeper engagement. Beyond the case study of Taiwan, this typology offers an analytical tool for distinguishing varying degrees of judicial engagement with international law and for underscoring the evolving nature of such engagement.