Beginning with the opening-up reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government has treated law as a central tool for regulating the economy and guiding institutional transformation. Over the decades, since 1949, China’s path to modernization has been marked by profound, experimental transformations that selectively combined foreign expertise with Chinese foundations. A key feature of this process has been China’s strategic adoption and adaptation of legal transplants. While initially a recipient of foreign legal models, China is now increasingly exporting its own approaches through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article examines how China’s engagement in shaping the legal and regulatory frameworks of host countries under the BRI differs from traditional models of legal transplants. Rather than imposing, China draws on its historical experience to adopt a pragmatic, adaptive strategy defined by three core characteristics: the combination of Chinese and Western practices; an emphasis on voluntariness tempered by asymmetrical power relations; and a prioritization of policy objectives over autonomous legal principles. While this strategy raises concerns about legal fragmentation and institutional coherence, it also fosters a space for legal pluralism, offering an alternative to the homogenization typically associated with Global North legal transplants.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb to offer a new understanding of regional displacement in what we know as the modern Middle East. The concept of gharīb (pl. ghurabāʾ) has accrued a wide range of meanings across time and space, including stranger, outcast, and exile, as well as pauper. By occupying the space between estrangement and poverty, the gharīb allows for an intersectional understanding of inequality, experienced by a growing number of marginalized and displaced communities in the Middle East. This paper honors the gharīb while making an analytic shift away from the category of the “refugee,” which has long been the dominant framework for personhood in the study of displacement. Combining genealogical analysis of the word gharīb with ethnographic accounts of displaced and impoverished communities in post-2011 Lebanon, I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and lack of protection for marginalized groups. The right to belong, therefore, is less about citizenry and more about a mode of social and economic poverty. This is particularly the case in the margins, where the repercussions of the ongoing crises are first and foremost felt. The gharīb, in contrast to such legal binaries, can be an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism and top-down regional demarcations.

Legal, ethical, historical, cultural, and political questions in relation to African cultural heritage are increasingly the focal point of international, regional, and national debates. It is now widely recognized that African cultural disputes – often between African States (or State institutions) on the one hand, and Western States, State institutions and private actors on the other – are ripe for settlement, especially on the basis of law, including international law. This article focuses on international arbitration as a means for resolving African cultural heritage-related disputes and, for the first time analyses the benefits of all types of international arbitration (State-to-State arbitration, investment treaty arbitration and commercial (contract-based) arbitration) from the perspective of African States and actors in relation to the resolution of African cultural heritage disputes, which include disputes regarding the return of African cultural objects. This article examines for the first time the potential role of all types of arbitral proceedings ((i) State-to-State arbitration, (ii) international investment treaty arbitration (or, as often-called, Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)), and (iii) commercial arbitration) for the resolution of Africa-related cultural heritage disputes.

This article discusses data from a Romance variety spoken in the linguistic region of France referred to as the Croissant. When roots in this language exhibit a phonologically problematic right edge, the problem is treated differently depending on whether the stem is nominal or verbal. We propose that this unequal treatment reflects an underlying distinction: seemingly unsuffixed verbs are in fact underlyingly suffixed, whereas nouns are truly unsuffixed. The final consonant of the verbal stem is therefore not final underlyingly. It is claimed that this solution is preferable to relying on distinct grammars for nouns and verbs or assuming transderivational relations between words. The article also clarifies the purview of Strict CV, the framework that it is couched in. Strict CV is a theory of representations that defines well- and ill-formed structures, some of which are universal. It needs to be complemented by a theory of computation.

Data mining for materials science and structure prediction is growing rapidly. Such an approach relies a lot on the available published and unpublished crystal structure. In this contribution, we are using the experimental pattern reported in the PDF entry 00-058-0728 for the experimental data used to solve the previously unreported crystal structure of RbCdVO4. Contrary to the reported literature, the title compound crystallizes in the monoclinic system P21 with Z = 4. The lattice parameters are a = 12.53678(16) Å, b = 5.82451(7) Å, c = 12.47733(17) Å, β = 105.6169(10)°, and V = 877.47(2) Å3. Its crystal structure type is new and quite complex as it exhibits 28 atoms in the asymmetric unit.

We establish two complementary results about the regularity of the solution of the periodic initial value problem for the linear Benjamin–Ono equation. We first give a new simple proof of the statement that, for a dense countable set of the time variable, the solution is a finite linear combination of copies of the initial condition and of its Hilbert transform. In particular, this implies that discontinuities in the initial condition are propagated in the solution as logarithmic cusps. We then show that, if the initial condition is of bounded variation (and even if it is not continuous), for almost every time the graph of the solution in space is continuous but fractal, with upper Minkowski dimension equal to $\frac32$. In order to illustrate this striking dichotomy, in the final section, we include accurate numerical evaluations of the solution profile, as well as estimates of its box-counting dimension for two canonical choices of irrational time.

Alisha Sijapati and Erin Thompson’s article “Making a market for ‘The Art of Nepal’: Tracing the flow of Nepali cultural property into the United States” makes a series of unsubstantiated claims about the nature and scope of the Nepali antiquities market in the 1950s and 1960s based on the authors’ research of a single 1964 exhibition of Nepali antiquities in the United States. This critical response will contest these claims by examining the broader Nepali antiquities market as it existed prior to 1970, particularly within Nepal and in South Asia, while also locating the authors and their claims in the context of the recent repatriation campaign by Nepali activists. Finally, the response will conclude that if there is to be an ethical turn in voluntary repatriation, there must be greater consideration of contexts beyond the West and a refocusing of provenance research beyond Western collectors and institutions.

The current case study was completed as part of the routine psychological therapy delivered in a Critical Care Psychology Service in the United Kingdom. For families of critically ill patients, an admission to the intensive care unit (ICU) can be a distressing and potentially traumatic experience. Relatives of ICU patients may, therefore, face ongoing psychological difficulties after their loved one’s discharge from hospital, an experience recognised as Post-Intensive Care Syndrome - Family (PICS-F). Psychological morbidity associated with PICS-F includes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite high rates of PTSD within this population, there are currently no published guidelines available for the treatment of PTSD in relatives following an ICU admission. Clinicians working in this field are consequently required to adapt existing psychological models and protocols recommended for treating PTSD, for application to ICU-related traumatic stressors. This case study describes how cognitive therapy for PTSD (CT-PTSD) was tailored to treat a 60-year-old female experiencing PTSD following her husband’s admission to the ICU. It also illustrates how critical illness can be conceptualised as an intangible loss that triggers a grief experience for relatives of ICU patients, causing PTSD symptoms to persist. The client attended 14 weekly sessions of CT-PTSD. Treatment included cognitive strategies for panic, imaginal re-living and a site visit, as well as consideration of the role of non-death loss and disenfranchised grief in the client’s experiences. At the end of treatment, the client no longer presented with clinically significant symptoms of PTSD, as assessed on the Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R).

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) result in substantial patient harm and avoidable costs. Pay-for-performance programs (PFP) through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have resulted in reductions of HAIs like central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia, through robust infection prevention programs and practices. Hospital Onset Bacteremia and Fungemia (HOB) is proposed as an alternative quality measure for public reporting and PFP, and was endorsed by the National Quality Forum in 2022. This broad measure is designed as an electronic quality measure that avoids manual abstraction and excludes risk adjustment. HOB would substantially expand the scope of focus of existing bloodstream infection measurement, and is currently being considered for voluntary reporting in 2025. In this article, we provide arguments for and against adopting HOB as a PFP measure linked to CMS payments.