During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers of Italian origin were drafted into the US military and sent to fight overseas against the Axis powers. For many, this was an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the country and remove suspicions raised by Italian communities’ ties with the Fascist regime. The prospect of fighting in their homeland aroused mixed feelings among those who were sent to Italy from June 1943. On the one hand, the presence of cultural and family ties stimulated the establishment of supportive relations with Italians and was seen by Washington as a useful tool for promoting ‘good occupation’ policies in Italy. However, the ethnic background of these soldiers did not always act as a socialisation factor with Italians, but sometimes gave rise to contradictory and even hostile attitudes that were linked to harsh judgements about Italians’ responsibilities for Fascism and their predisposition, or otherwise, to democracy. This article reconstructs the contribution made by these ethnic personnel to the liberation of the peninsula and the particular views they held of Italy and Italians between war and liberation.

This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilises domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponising this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.

This article explores Leo Strauss’s thoughts on Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1954 “Natural Right” course transcript. One of the significant features of this transcript is that it contains an original interpretation and tentative critique of Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Although Strauss considered Tocqueville to be an indispensable observer of modern liberal democracy, he saw significant limits to Tocqueville’s thought. By comparing him with Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, Strauss criticizes Tocqueville’s understanding of justice, history, and democracy. Strauss concludes that Nietzsche offers a more profound critique of liberal democracy, but one that leads to right-wing extremism. Strauss urges his students to be satisfied with Tocqueville’s more moderate and humane criticisms. Although Strauss’s tentative critique is illuminating and worth careful consideration, I challenge his interpretation and offer a Tocquevillian response to his overly intellectualized conception of social and political change.

The article deals with isometric dilation and commutant lifting for a class of n-tuples $(n\ge 3)$ of commuting contractions. We show that operator tuples in the class dilate to tuples of commuting isometries of BCL type. As a consequence of such an explicit dilation, we show that their von Neumann inequality holds on a one-dimensional variety of the closed unit polydisc. On the basis of such a dilation, we prove a commutant lifting theorem of Sarason’s type by establishing that every commutant can be lifted to the dilation space in a commuting and norm-preserving manner. This further leads us to find yet another class of n-tuples $(n\ge 3)$ of commuting contractions each of which possesses isometric dilation.

In this article, a qualitative work has been carried out based on airborne pulsed Doppler (PD) RF sensor consist of its operational requirements in terms of phase noise modeling and associated contributing factors. Precise and efficient theoretical modeling of phase noise requirement for airborne-PD radar or long-range RF sensor is presented. This work also emphasis on the limitation of conventional phase noise modeling practices used for PD RF sensor. An improved equation has been derived for accurate phase noise estimation considering the range correlation effect and inline flicker contribution on residual phase noise requirement. Random vibrations causes increase in phase noise level around low frequency offsets region in local oscillator. The proposed phase noise model is efficient enough to counter phase noise degradation at lower frequency offsets. The proposed model is also experimentally validated. Improved modeling offers benefit in reducing the stringent RF sensor phase noise specifications at close-in frequency offsets using range correlation effect and precise inclusion of inline flicker contribution. Present work can be used to mitigate random vibration effects at close-in phase noise offsets, which avoids complex stabilization practices and stringent oscillator design phase noise specification.

Previous observational studies have suggested an association between natural hair color and the risk of endometriosis; however, the causal relationship remains unclear. Here, we conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study to evaluate the potential causal link between natural hair color and endometriosis using 428 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as genetic instruments derived from a genomewide meta-analysis comprising over 4511 cases and 227,260 controls of European ancestry. Our findings indicate that dark brown hair is associated with a decreased risk of developing endometriosis (dark brown IVW OR: 0.844, 95% CI [0.725, 0.984], p < .05). Conversely, dark hair color and lighter hair colors (red, blonde, and light brown) did not demonstrate a significant association with endometriosis risk (dark IVW OR: 0.568, 95% CI [0.280, 1.15], p = .117; red IVW OR: 1.058, 95% CI [0.719, 1.558], p = .77; blonde IVW OR: 1.158, 95% CI [0.886, 1.514], p = .28; light brown IVW OR: 1.306, 95% CI [0.978, 1.743], p = .07). These results provide compelling MR evidence supporting a causal association between natural hair color and endometriosis risk. Our findings underscore the need for larger scale studies and randomized controlled trials to delineate the biological mechanisms driving the association between hair color and endometriosis.

During embryogenesis in Danio rerio (zebrafish), the earliest morphological patterning events are dependent on the precise temporal translation and/or localization of specific maternal mRNAs/proteins. Dorsoventral patterning in particular requires the translocation of maternal factors that are present in the Balbiani Body from the vegetal region of the unfertilized egg to the future dorsal side of the embryo (Fuentes et al., 2020), leading to the localized activation of the β-catenin pathway in the cells in that region. Since zebrafish are chordates, this dorsoventral patterning then leads to the formation of neural tissue on the dorsal side of the embryo. What is not yet clear is the identity of all maternal and zygotic factors that first establish dorsoventral patterning, and which factors lead to the establishment of neural versus non-neural tissue. Taking an evolutionary approach to this question, we investigated a gene in zebrafish, zsquidlike-A (hnrnpaba), that is homologous to a key dorsoventral patterning gene in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) called squid (Kelley, 1993). While dorsoventral patterning in flies and fish looks quite different both morphologically and at the molecular level, we demonstrate that not only has a key dorsoventral patterning gene in flies been conserved in fish, maternal fish zsquidlike-A protein is synthesized precisely as dorsoventral patterning is unfolding in fish embryos, and in its absence, dorsoventral patterning is severely disrupted.

A central question in Arithmetic geometry is to determine for which polynomials $f \in \mathbb {Z}[t]$ and which number fields K the Hasse principle holds for the affine equation $f(t) = \mathbf {N}_{K/\mathbb {Q}}(\mathbf {x}) \neq 0$. Whilst extensively studied in the literature, current results are largely limited to polynomials and number fields of low degree. In this paper, we establish the Hasse principle for a wide family of polynomials and number fields, including polynomials that are products of arbitrarily many linear, quadratic or cubic factors. The proof generalises an argument of Irving [27], which makes use of the beta sieve of Rosser and Iwaniec. As a further application of our sieve results, we prove new cases of a conjecture of Harpaz and Wittenberg on locally split values of polynomials over number fields, and discuss consequences for rational points in fibrations.

Paid sick leave, or the ability to remain home from work in the event of illness and receive compensation, has risen in prominence after the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the OECD countries, all but two, the United States and South Korea, have national paid sick leave (PSL) policies. Yet despite federal inaction in the United States, states have been adopting PSL, with 15 plus the District of Columbia having done so by the end of 2020. In the absence of federal policy, what drives states to adopt PSL mandates? In this article, we investigate two possible explanations – women in politics and jurisdictional competition. In the former, we suggest that increases in female representation in state-level governance make it more likely that a state will adopt a PSL policy. In the latter explanation, we suggest that jurisdictional competition in the form of cities or counties adopting municipal PSL policies creates pressure on the state-level government to enact statewide policies to harmonize policy, in a process of “bottom-up” federalism. To evaluate our hypotheses, we create a dataset of all state and municipal PSL policies in the United States. We find strong support for the gender representation argument, but not for the jurisdictional competition argument.

The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests dramatically increased the salience of police reform, yet the US Congress failed to pass any reforms. In contrast, state governments have passed hundreds of police-related bills since 2020. I summarize the plethora of state reforms passed over this period by grouping them into 18 key areas, including 14 I classify as pro-reform and four I classify as anti-reform. Next, I describe how party control and public opinion relate to state reforms. I find that state party control is a robust predictor of enacting pro-police reform policies, and that reforms are more likely in states with more Democratic and more pro-reform publics. While police reforms are responsive to public opinion, they are also typically incongruent.