We review the conservation status of two small rail species breeding in the Galápagos Islands: the endemic Galápagos Rail Laterallus spilonota and the native Paint-billed Crake Neocrex erythrops, widely distributed on the South American mainland. Using distance sampling with point counts, we estimated population sizes across islands with suitable habitat from 2015 to 2025. In 2022, we reassessed long-term trends for the Galápagos Rail on Santa Cruz Island, following the monitoring protocol used in earlier censuses (1986, 2000, 2007). We estimated the Galápagos Rail population at 32,300 pairs across seven islands, including a small, newly recorded breeding population on Pinzón and Floreana, where we rediscovered the rail in 2025. Additional breeding populations of unknown size exist in the humid zones of the two northern volcanoes of Isabela and on adjacent Fernandina. The largest population, on Santiago (22,400 pairs), has recovered remarkably over 40 years since goats and other herbivores were eradicated. We found the Galápagos Rail predominantly in the humid highlands, although a few pairs were recorded in the mangrove forests of Isabela Island. The species is absent from San Cristóbal Island. On Santa Cruz it showed a clear increase between 2007 and 2022. The Paint-billed Crake breeds on the four inhabited islands (Floreana, Isabela, San Cristóbal, and Santa Cruz), with at least 6,300 pairs. It was mainly found in grasslands and open woodlands within agricultural areas at lower altitude than the Galápagos Rail, resulting in minimal range overlap. Its population and range have expanded, especially on Santa Cruz. The significantly higher recent population estimate for the Galápagos Rail compared with past estimates, along with positive trends on at least three islands, warrants reclassifying the species IUCN Red List status from “Vulnerable” to “Near Threatened”.

This article deals with a well-known crux in Juvenal (6.195). Previous conjectures are discussed before a new emendation is proposed.

This introduction to our special issue on ‘Constitutional Legitimacy and Amendments’ presents a framework for a more nuanced understanding of how constitutional change is contested, moving beyond the conventional notion of ‘unconstitutional’ constitutional amendments. We advocate for a clearer distinction between legality and legitimacy when analysing contestation over constitutional change, arguing that focusing exclusively on legality without addressing legitimacy risks oversimplifying constitutional debates and overlooking questions of broader political and social acceptance. We identify three grounds on which the legitimacy of a constitutional amendment may be challenged: lack of representativeness (an amendment is illegitimate if it is not representative of the will of the people); lack of justice (an amendment is illegitimate if it is unjust in a significant manner); and bad faith (an amendment is illegitimate if it is motivated by ulterior motives). We also outline three ways in which legality and legitimacy intersect: (1) legally valid amendments may still face challenges regarding their legitimacy; (2) formally illegal constitutional changes may still be perceived as legitimate; and (3) even amendments that are both legal and legitimate may still require legitimacy to be established through means other than procedural and substantive commitments to legality. By recognising that challenges to constitutional amendments often involve claims of both legality and legitimacy, our framework expands the analysis of constitutional amendments beyond claims based on constitutional identity or unamendability and contributes to a better understanding of how such amendments are contested.

We are pleased to introduce a themed collection of articles on Indigeneity, labour relations, and work. There has been a lack of Indigenous voices in academic literature on labour and workplace relations. This themed collection of ELRR amplifies Indigenous voices, knowledges, and perspectives, in labour relations and work. Indigenous researchers from across the world were encouraged to contribute to this important collection. A broad range of topics were proposed for this themed collection, which included; Indigenous justice, human rights and labour, Indigenous participation in labour markets, Indigenous labour history, Indigenous economic and employment risks, Indigenous employment equity, labour relations and public policy, Indigenous labour and unions, colonial power and labour relations, economic benefits of Indigenous labour, Indigenous employment policy and practice, discrimination, and Indigenous labour. Whilst this list was not exhaustive, the call produced a plethora of articles which will be explored below.

We study a variant of the classical Markovian logistic SIS epidemic model on a complete graph, which has the additional feature that healthy individuals can become infected without contacting an infected member of the population. This additional ‘self-infection’ is used to model situations where there is an unknown source of infection or an external disease reservoir, such as an animal carrier population. In contrast to the classical logistic SIS epidemic model, the version with self-infection has a non-degenerate stationary distribution, and we derive precise asymptotics for the time to converge to stationarity (mixing time) as the population size becomes large. It turns out that the chain exhibits the cutoff phenomenon, which is a sharp transition in time from one to zero of the total variation distance to stationarity. We obtain the exact leading constant for the cutoff time and show that the window size is of constant (optimal) order. While this result is interesting in its own right, an additional contribution of this work is that the proof illustrates a recently formalised methodology of Barbour, Brightwell and Luczak (2022), ‘Long-term concentration of measure and cut-off’, Stochastic Processes and their Applications 152, 378–423, which can be used to show cutoff via a combination of concentration-of-measure inequalities for the trajectory of the chain and coupling techniques.

In this text, I interpret Hegel’s concept of the family within the context of his theory of freedom. I take family life to entail a certain tension between freedom and nature that makes it necessary to reflect on the role of nature in our understanding of the family. For this, I examine two ways of understanding the family’s relation to nature, a conservative and a liberal one, to then offer a third, dialectical way as an alternative. My central argument is that Hegel’s concept of the family can be read as a response to the problem of our entanglement with nature and is thereby an integral part of his theory of ethical life and freedom. For this, I outline the normative principle underlying Hegel’s family concept that I will call ‘the notion of a self-conscious genus-process’ (Gattungsprozess). This notion enables an immanent critique of Hegel’s concept of the family without abandoning his dialectical conception of the relationship between freedom and nature.

Global multi-stakeholder initiatives (global MSIs) have become a cornerstone of modern governance. However, critics disparage MSIs (1) for giving too much power to private actors, specifically corporations, and (2) for allowing organizations from one state to influence another’s affairs. This criticism holds true in particular for the Habermasian approach to political corporate social responsibility (political CSR). By contrast, this paper grounds global MSIs in John Rawls’s theory of justice, arguing that both legitimacy issues can be overcome when all those affected by a global MSI possess a means of contestation able to effectively contest the MSI’s activities. This entails that global MSIs, when affecting states that are unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens, must themselves provide their stakeholders with such means. It is argued that this Rawls-based approach to political CSR can rectify the shortcomings of the Habermasian approach without requiring a change in the composition of MSIs.

This paper focuses on the feature-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) in dynamic illumination environments. While the performance of most existing feature-based VIO methods is degraded by the dynamic illumination, which leads to unstable feature association, we propose a tightly-coupled VIO algorithm termed RAFT-VINS, integrating a Lite-RAFT tracker into the visual inertial navigation system (VINS). The key module of this odometry algorithm is a lightweight optical flow network designed for accurate feature tracking with real-time operation. It guarantees robust feature association in dynamic illumination environments and thereby ensures the performance of the odometry. Besides, to further improve the accuracy of the pose estimation, a moving consistency check strategy is developed in RAFT-VINS to identify and remove the outlier feature points. Meanwhile, a tightly-coupled optimization-based framework is employed to fuse IMU and visual measurements in the sliding window for efficient and accurate pose estimation. Through comprehensive experiments in the public datasets and real-world scenarios, the proposed RAFT-VINS is validated for its capacity to provide trustable pose estimates in challenging dynamic illumination environments. Our codes are open-sourced on https://github.com/USTC-AIS-Lab/RAFT-VINS.

Our essay aims to offer a biography of Elena Sengal (1911–1962), an Italian citizen of Ethiopian origin, whose life offers important elements to better understand both Fascist and postwar Italy. Elena was born into an Italo-Ethiopian family and became an Italian citizen after the naturalisation of her father, Sengal Workneh, a former Italian colonial subject and a lecturer in Amharic and Tigrinya at the Istituto Orientale in Naples. She grew up in Naples where she graduated and later held a teaching position, following in her father’s footsteps. When in 1939 her partner, Guido Cucci, fell in Ethiopia fighting the Ethiopian resistance, Elena found herself alone with a newborn child and struggled to make a living. Her life did not improve with the end of Fascism. Indeed, in postwar Italy it became so unbearable that she relocated to Ethiopia. However, racism and exclusion accompanied her life in the East African country too. This biography is based on archival materials as well as a body of personal letters of Elena Sengal, kindly made available by her granddaughter Maria Elena Cucci.

Seed chemical composition and oxidation after long-term storage may affect seed longevity, seed germination and seedling normality after planting. By screening the entire USDA cultivated peanut germplasm collection for fatty acid composition, we identified the -01 inventory of accession PI 268941 with the following characteristics: (a) two distinct seed fatty acid profiles (high oleate 78.9% and normal oleate 48.19%); (b) two FAD2B genotypes (with and without a functional point mutation of 435DelT within the FAD2B gene); and (c) uniform plant morphology and seed-coat color. This inventory had been stored at −18°C within the same sealed aluminum bag for 30 years and was acquired to investigate the relationship between seed chemical composition and seed performance after planting using individual seed analysis. Our results indicated that (1) the spontaneous point-functional mutation 435T deletion of FAD2B within the accession led to the high and normal oleate seeds; (2) additional unidentified compounds observed during analysis may be due to a higher oxidation rate in normal oleate seeds than in high oleate seeds; (3) the high oleate seeds had significantly higher rates of seed germination and seedling normality than the normal oleate seeds; and (4) the seedling performance highly and significantly correlated with fatty acid composition and extra peaks. Our results suggest that high oleic acid significantly extends the viability of long-term stored peanut seeds. The information revealed in this study will be useful for germplasm preservation as well as the selection of seeds for planting and agricultural production based on seed fatty acid composition and storage length.

The tension between John Neville Figgis’s pluralist political theory and his defence of the truth claims of Christianity in the public square makes it difficult to assess the social implications of his personalism. This article considers Figgis’s theories of classical pluralism and corporate personhood and how they relate to his theological anthropology. God makes humans for membership in group persons, paradigmatically the Church, and also other associations that should be free to pursue their corporate ends and govern themselves. The just state coordinates and ensures peace between group and individual persons and allows them to freely play as they pursue the good. This perspective on the modern state and free associations offers an alternative to the modern tendency towards state centralization and individual atomism. But Figgis’s conceptions of freedom, love, corporate personhood and the state introduce a challenge for the contemporary reader. He implies that the state should be a neutral arbiter among individuals and groups. Joseph Ratzinger argues for the good of Christians living and enacting laws and policies that reflect their Christian consciences. Figgis’s Christian personalism informs and challenges Ratzinger’s social theory.

We define a notion of tracial $\mathcal {Z}$-absorption for simple not necessarily unital C*-algebras, study it systematically and prove its permanence properties. This extends the notion defined by Hirshberg and Orovitz for unital C*-algebras. The Razak-Jacelon algebra, simple nonelementary C*-algebras with tracial rank zero, and simple purely infinite C*-algebras are tracially $\mathcal {Z}$-absorbing. We obtain the first purely infinite examples of tracially $\mathcal {Z}$-absorbing C*-algebras which are not $\mathcal {Z}$-absorbing. We use techniques from reduced free products of von Neumann algebras to construct these examples. A stably finite example was given by Z. Niu and Q. Wang in 2021. We study the Cuntz semigroup of a simple tracially $\mathcal {Z}$-absorbing C*-algebra and prove that it is almost unperforated and the algebra is weakly almost divisible.

This meta-analysis of 79 studies evaluates the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) for the development of second language (L2) speech perception and explores learner-related and methodological variables that influence training effects. The overall medium-to-large effects of HVPT on L2 speech perception support the effectiveness of HVPT, for both pretest-posttest comparison (g = 0.92, k = 96) and treatment-control comparison (g = 0.67, k = 32), confirm long-term retention of perception gains, and, to some extent, indicate generalization of learning to novel stimuli. Training effects are influenced by several key variables (length of L2 learning, response labels, type of training task, type of testing task, total training time, target phones, and number of talkers). The findings provide compelling evidence to support the efficacy of HVPT for L2 perceptual learning and suggest circumstances under which training effects are optimized.