Malaria still poses significant risks, especially in India. In addition to averting behaviors, forests may help reduce mosquitoes in rural areas and, thus, the malaria incidence and mortality. However, the evidence is still scarce about the magnitude and value of this ecosystem service. To address this gap, we use a panel dataset for 2013–2015 and evaluate the impact of forest loss on malaria morbidity in India's rural areas. We find that, on average, the loss of 1 km2 of forest resulted in 0.16 additional deaths per 100,000 people. This translates into marginal values of forests for reducing malaria mortality of, at least, $1.26–85.9/ha/year in 2015 US$. Our results suggest that combining forest conservation and traditional anti-malaria policies like indoor spraying and insecticide-treated nets may be an effectual way to mitigate the malarial burden in India and elsewhere and offer insights about the value of potential payments for ecosystem services.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of climate change on state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To do this, we estimate a country-time fixed effects panel data model using the two-way fixed effects estimator over the period 1995 to 2020 for 45 SSA countries. Our results show that climate change increases fragility in SSA; specifically, rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall increase the social, economic, political and security fragility of SSA countries. The study also reveals that gross domestic product, population growth, migrant remittances, foreign direct investment, natural resources, inflation and agricultural price volatility are mechanisms through which climate change exacerbates state fragility. Based on these results, we recommend climate change adaptation measures such as increasing water storage to cope with periods of extreme drought, growing climate-smart crops, and the introduction of environmental public policies.

In this note, we give a new necessary condition for the boundedness of the composition operator on the Dirichlet-type space on the disc, via a two dimensional change of variables formula. With the same formula, we characterize the bounded composition operators on the anisotropic Dirichlet-type spaces $\mathfrak {D}_{\vec {a}}(\mathbb {D}^2)$ induced by holomorphic self maps of the bidisc $\mathbb {D}^2$ of the form $\Phi (z_1,z_2)=(\phi _1(z_1),\phi _2(z_2))$. We also consider the problem of boundedness of composition operators $C_{\Phi }:\mathfrak {D}(\mathbb {D}^2)\to A^2(\mathbb {D}^2)$ for general self maps of the bidisc, applying some recent results about Carleson measures on the Dirichlet space of the bidisc.

We examine bicoset digraphs and their natural properties from the point of view of symmetry. We then consider connected bicoset digraphs that are X-joins with collections of empty graphs, and show that their automorphism groups can be obtained from their natural irreducible quotients. We further show that such digraphs can be recognised from their connection sets.

This research examines whether high temperatures and exposure to childhood rainfall and heat shocks are a cognitive drag on children in Uganda. First, it asks whether students perform worse on a test on hotter days. Second, it examines whether previous longer-term exposure to high temperatures and unusual rainfall influences current test scores and educational outcomes. The analysis shows that high temperatures on test dates harm test performance, especially for girls and children younger than ten, implying additional temperature control considerations for particular demographics. The analysis of childhood climate shocks, which employs within-parish distributions of rainfall and heat, shows that children who experience rain or heat above the $80^{th}$ percentile of the parish distribution from birth until age 4 have worse learning outcomes in math, English, or local language literacy.

This study evaluated the effects of chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA), a farnesoid X receptor (FXR) potential activator, on growth performance, antioxidant capacity, glucose metabolism and inflammation in largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) (initial body weight: 5·45 ± 0·02 g) fed a high-carbohydrate diet. Experimental diets included a positive control (5 % α-starch), a negative control (10 % α-starch) and two diets containing 10 % α-starch supplemented with either 0·05 % or 0·10 % CDCA. After 8 weeks, the high-carbohydrate diet reduced growth performance and increased hepatosomatic and viscerosomatic indexes, which were mitigated by 0·10 % CDCA supplementation. The high-carbohydrate diet also increased hepatic glycogen and crude lipid content, both of which were reduced by 0·10 % CDCA. Furthermore, the high-carbohydrate diet-induced oxidative stress, histopathological changes and reduced liver lysozyme activity, which were ameliorated by CDCA supplementation. Molecular analysis showed that the high-carbohydrate diet suppressed FXR and phosphorylated AKT1 (p-AKT1) protein expression in the liver, downregulated insulin signalling (ira, irs, pi3kr1 and akt1), gluconeogenesis (pepck and g6pc) and glycolysis genes (gk, pk and pfkl). CDCA supplementation upregulated fxr expression, activated shp, enhanced the expression of insulin signalling and glycolytic genes (gk, pk and pfkl) and inhibited gluconeogenesis. Additionally, CDCA reduced inflammatory markers (nf-κb and il-1β) and restored anti-inflammatory mediators (il-10, iκb and tgf-β). In conclusion, 0·10 % CDCA improved carbohydrate metabolism and alleviated liver inflammation in largemouth bass fed a high dietary carbohydrate, partially through FXR activation.

Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers—a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short stories and novels inflect earlier treatments of the journalistic genre while staging a broader critique of the liberalization of the media in Senegal during the 1970s and 1980s. Ka’s works offer a window onto the entangled histories of postcolonial literary production and the emergent popular press in Senegal. Specifically, she updates and expands Ousmane Sembène’s rescripting of the French fait divers in his short story “La Noire de …” (1961/1962) and the landmark film from 1966 by the same title.

The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

This article investigates geosocial patterns of marriage strategies among the leadership of Hasidism, arguably the most prominent socio-religious movement of modern Jewry, known for its unique network of charismatic leaders organized in hereditary dynasties. The article’s core premise is that grasping the network structure of the Hasidic movement’s dynasties, which has been under-researched, is crucial to understanding the movement’s social and cultural dynamics. The study employs social network analysis (SNA) and spatial analysis to examine marital unions among these leaders (2,375 cases), from the early stages of the movement in the eighteenth century until the early twenty-first century. The article explains, for the first time, how Hasidic dynasties expanded, eroded, and negotiated their status within the network of other dynasties. More specifically, we analyze the position of the dynasties within a wider context of social and spatial interconnection patterns, the significance of endogamy, the impact of territorial factors on marriage preferences, and the creation of dynastic clusters. A significant conclusion of this article is that, rather than a set of unrelated dynasties, Hasidic leadership gradually became a web of interconnected families with explicable patterns of organization. These findings can help explain historical processes in Hasidism, such as its persistence through historical crises. It can also illuminate leadership processes in other religions in which, as in Hasidism, the social structure of charismatic leadership is based on clans.

In recent years, the number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts has risen steadily. The arrival of small boats with migrants on board on the Spanish and Italian coasts has received a lot of media attention, and European Governments are investing more than in the past to stop unauthorized arrivals on their shores. Certain narratives from governments and officials of international organizations attribute these deaths to “smugglers” and the dangerous routes they take. However, this article provides evidence that the higher mortality rates are the result of changes in border controls following bilateral agreements between the European Union and Morocco after 2018. By analyzing data from official statistics, microdata, and data provided by NGOs up to 2024, it shows how the increase in the mortality rate of migrants in the Western Mediterranean is the result of changes in the management of sea rescues, the militarization and externalization of the border, and the way in which migrants attempting to cross the sea are taking more dangerous routes than in the past.