Fundamentally, this paper is an intervention on the crucial importance of the geophysical when situating and defining the space of the Maghrib.1 Considering the age-old question, “Where is the Maghrib?,” to borrow the title of an introduction to a recent special issue of Arab Studies Journal, requires attending to the Maghrib’s unique liminality, its “interstitial position between different continents and transnational cultural formations, a variety of linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, aesthetic, and other cultural elements [that] constitute the Maghrib. This position as a space-between-spaces makes the Maghrib a hub for human hybridization, literary creolization, artistic miscegenation, and cultural cross-pollination.”2 Although these cultural and identity-based narratives are crucial, I argue that framing the Maghrib’s liminality in terms of “space-between-spaces” concurrently requires accounting for the region’s geophysical dimension—its topography, morphology, volume, geological density, and material agency, among other markers.

This article revisits the levels of temporary employment in Franco’s Spain from an international perspective. Using a wide range of unexploited or novel data, I shed light for the first time on the incidence of temporary employment during the late Franco dictatorship, 1959–1975. The results show that fixed-term contracts reached 20–30 percent during this period and were not only concentrated in unstable employment branches such as agriculture, tourism, and construction. The analysis suggests that temporary employment was widespread in many service and industrial branches. Furthermore, external numerical flexibility was not confined to fixed-term contracts. Outsourcing, self-employment, family work, and the underground economy, particularly home work, played an essential role in many branches of the economy. In this context, women’s work constituted a key source of flexible employment for many branches of the Spanish economy. As a result, Spain was already an anomaly in the international context in terms of the prevalence of temporary work and labor regulation of temporary employment. This evidence suggests a reframing of debate on labor market functioning during the Francoist period and its legacy.

In the Afro-Brazilian music-movement form capoeira, call and response saturates all interactions in live performance events (rodas). In addition to call-and-response song structures, music calls bodies into movement, bodies call to one another, and movements invoke responses from instrumentalists. Yet call and response does more than organize the roda. Demonstrating how antiphony organizes group sociality, the article argues that the music and movement also summon members to assume a range of responsibilities within the group and their lives. These include showing up for trainings and rodas, maintaining instruments, preparing for annual events, and teaching capoeira to younger generations in Bahia's underserved communities. Practitioners frame their ethical commitments to capoeira as compromisso, a concept that implies broad, long-term dedication. Grounding the study in my ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, I bridge Black music scholarship with ethical Africana philosophy to argue that capoeira practitioners use knowledge generated in their music-movement practice to conceive an ethics of compromisso. While the literature on Black musics across the Americas widely acknowledges call and response as a foundational musical mechanism, few ethnographic studies have delved more deeply into the social, ethical, and political potentials of antiphony. The article thus contributes to understandings of how Black music-dance practices generate ethical knowledge and practice through their sounds and movements. As capoeira's antiphony transcends the roda's space-time, it calls practitioners to assume an unending compromisso, making commitments that span generations to continually leverage capoeira's lessons to improve lives in Black communities of backland Bahia.

Across the Arabian Gulf, oil rich countries are increasingly turning to space exploration as a way to diversify their economies and assert their global influence. In 2020, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman committed over $2 billion to a national space program. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman have launched their first satellites, and Oman recently announced plans to establish the region’s first space port alongside a research center for simulated Mars missions. Yet none of these initiatives rivals the ambitions of the United Arab Emirates, which in 2017 announced plans to establish a self-sufficient colony on Mars within a hundred years. Why have the UAE and other Gulf countries turned their gaze to human space exploration, particularly around the planet Mars?

We show that there exists some $\delta > 0$ such that, for any set of integers B with $|B\cap[1,Y]|\gg Y^{1-\delta}$ for all $Y \gg 1$, there are infinitely many primes of the form $a^2+b^2$ with $b\in B$. We prove a quasi-explicit formula for the number of primes of the form $a^2+b^2 \leq X$ with $b \in B$ for any $|B|=X^{1/2-\delta}$ with $\delta < 1/10$ and $B \subseteq [\eta X^{1/2},(1-\eta)X^{1/2}] \cap {\mathbb{Z}}$, in terms of zeros of Hecke L-functions on ${\mathbb{Q}}(i)$. We obtain the expected asymptotic formula for the number of such primes provided that the set B does not have a large subset which consists of multiples of a fixed large integer. In particular, we get an asymptotic formula if B is a sparse subset of primes. For an arbitrary B we obtain a lower bound for the number of primes with a weaker range for $\delta$, by bounding the contribution from potential exceptional characters.

On April 9, 2024, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) seated in Strasbourg released its judgment in the Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland case, which marks the first occasion where the Court found a violation of several rights of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Convention) in a climate change litigation case.

The scientific manuscript review process can often seem daunting and mysterious to authors. Frequently, medical journals do not describe the peer-review process in detail, which can further lead to frustration for authors, peer reviewers, and readers. This editorial describes the updated manuscript review process for Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. It is hoped that this editorial will lead to increased clarity and transparency in the review process.