This essay highlights the centrality of ‘the demonic’ in human experience, both collective and personal. It argues in favour of the possibility of explaining it; it dismisses its personification into a demon or several demons; it then proceeds towards a definition and a phenomenology of it; it examines its effects; and it portrays a final feature, namely resentment and revenge, as well as a religious response.

In this research paper we introduce and validate an enhanced method for the detection of sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate in milk. Sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate are widely employed as preservatives in the food industry; however, their use to restrict microbial growth in milk is prohibited. Our novel method achieved performance indicators in accordance with the criteria outlined by the International Conference on Harmonization. The extraction process involved sample dilution in acetonitrile (1:1 v/v), followed by subsequent centrifugation, filtration and injection into a high-performance liquid chromatography system with a photodiode array detector. The detection and quantification limits for sodium benzoate were determined to be 0.204 and 0.618 mg/l, respectively, while for potassium sorbate, these values were 0.108 and 0.328 mg/l, respectively. The accuracy ranged from 92.67 to 99.53%, with pH 4.0 selected as the optimal condition to ensure adequate resolution of the preservatives. The proposed method stands out due to its simplicity and speed, using a single reagent in modest quantities during sample preparation. This approach reduces toxicity and minimizes the production of pollutants during disposal. Furthermore, the novel method requires less raw material and energy consumption, aligning with the principles of green chemistry. Its lower quantitation limits render it more sensitive when compared to the official analysis. The preparation, separation, and simultaneous detection of these preservatives in a short period of time make this method suitable for integration into industrial workflows.

Why do organised criminal groups (OCGs) resort to dismemberment – a costly and resource-intensive practice – rather than simpler targeted killings? This article challenges the notion that such brutal violence is solely a byproduct of inter-criminal rivalries or efforts to conceal violence. Instead, we argue that dismemberments serve to entrench criminal governance regimes. By publicising these acts and/or the reasons behind them, criminal groups are demarcating the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and reinforcing their system of norms and punishments. Dismemberments serve as communicative violence targeting three audiences: rivals, group members and civilians. We demonstrate the logic of this argument through an original qualitative dataset of dismemberment cases in Barranquilla, Colombia, and multiple interviews gathered during over five years of fieldwork. This article contributes to understanding the mechanisms of extra-lethal violence that sustain criminal governance in Latin American cities.

In 2018, the AOC Archaeology Group unearthed a unique Roman figurine in Sandy, Bedfordshire, likely an offering in a domestic shrine or lararium. The figurine features a distinctive Gallic cloak, similar to those found on copper-alloy figurines in Trier and Cambridgeshire and on numerous relief sculptures. It may be related to the hooded garment known as the birrus mentioned in Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices of a.d. 301, including the expensive Birrus Britannicus.

Compared with algebraic varieties the local monodromy of Drinfeld modules appears to be hopelessly complex: the image of the wild inertia subgroup under Tate module representations is infinite save for the case of potential good reduction. Nonetheless, we show that Tate modules of Drinfeld modules are ramified in a limited way: the image of a sufficiently deep ramification subgroup is trivial. This leads to a new invariant, the local conductor of a Drinfeld module. We establish an upper bound on the conductor in terms of the volume of the period lattice. As an intermediate step we develop a theory of normed lattices in function field arithmetic including the notion of volume. We relate normed lattices to vector bundles on projective curves. With the aid of Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity this implies a volume bound on norms of lattice generators, and the conductor inequality follows. Last but not least we describe the image of inertia for Drinfeld modules with period lattices of rank $1$. Just as in the theory of local $\ell$-adic Galois representations this image is commensurable with a commutative unipotent algebraic subgroup. However, in the case of Drinfeld modules such a subgroup can be a product of several copies of $\mathbf {G}_a$.

Human osteoarchaeology, the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological contexts, has a long history in Greece. This review paper examines the developments that have occurred in the field over the past decade using case studies published from 2015 onwards. These studies have been selected to demonstrate the wealth of osteoarchaeological research, geographically and temporally, and are organized based on the themes of mobility, diet, palaeopathology, activity patterns, and funerary archaeology. The final part of the paper discusses some of the key challenges that human osteoarchaeology in Greece faces. Most prominent among these challenges is the limited financial support for the humanities, the few national-level training opportunities in human osteoarchaeology in higher education, the lack of a national association within the field that could promote standardized practices and collaboration, and the fact that most osteoarchaeological material has come to light through rescue excavations. In association with these challenges, the future prospects of osteoarchaeology in Greece are briefly discussed.

This paper analyses Italian party positions on the EU's response to the Russo-Ukrainian war, singling out the adoption of sanctions against Russia, the provision of military support to Kiev, enlargement to Ukraine and the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees into the Union's territory as the four main dimension of such a response. The paper draws on the literatures on cleavage politics, the inverted U curve and the differentiated forms of politicisation, thereby testing theory-driven research hypotheses through a qualitative content analysis of Italian parties' Facebook posts in the three months following the outbreak of the conflict, combining an inductive and a deductive approach. The findings show that party families are a good explanatory factor behind Italian party positions vis-à-vis the EU's response to the war outbreak as parties belonging to the same family shared a similar stance on the four dimensions of such a response. On the contrary, the Europeanism/Euroscepticism divide does not explain Italian party positions on the EU's reaction to the Ukrainian conflict as Europeanist parties split over the EU's provision of weapons to Ukraine about as much as Eurosceptic partis split over the adoption of sanctions against Moscow. Finally, the paper shows that policy issues in the EU's response to the war (such as sanctions and arms delivery) were much more salient for and contested by Italian political parties than constitutive issues (such as enlargement and asylum).

Questions about authorship have plagued the corpus of Demosthenic orations since antiquity. In particular, scholars often assign certain speeches (usually 46, 49, 50, 52, 53 and 59; sometimes also 47 and 51) to Apollodorus, son of Pasion. We apply an innovative approach to the problem, using morphosyntactic information from dependency treebanks. From the treebank annotation we create input data for various well-established computational approaches to authorship attribution. The usefulness of the input data is first tested with clustering algorithms. We then make finer distinction with a logistic regression classifier. All steps are explained in detail for the benefit of those unfamiliar with computational stylometry. In broadest terms, our results are remarkably consistent with the common opinion about the orations, identifying 49, 50, 52 and 53 as written by a single author, who was not Demosthenes (presumably Apollodorus). We also discuss syntactic traits that are peculiarly ‘Apollodoran’ or ‘Demosthenic’. However, we demonstrate that the data point away from both authors for Dem. 46 and 51, while conclusions about 47 and 59 are ambiguous.

Sociolinguistics has recently turned its attention to the production of hope in language. Although hope is dismissed in several everyday and academic discourses as escapism or cruel optimism, if investigated ethnographically, the affect and practice of hope emerge contextually as both practical reason and semiotic ideology with important political implications. The articles in this special issue variously engage with hope as situated action whereby individuals and communities struggle for material resources, reorient temporality, recalibrate registers, create alliances, and reflexively engage with social practice to build forms of life that in many ways resist despair and paralysis. While the collection of articles gathered here does not share a single view of hope, a common thread is that hope in different ways coheres with the Brazilian Portuguese esperançar—that is, hope not as sheer or passive waiting but as pragmatic and reflexive action. (Sociolinguistics of hope, affect, practical reason, language ideology, ethnography)