Two states can have several bilateral agreements between them, some of which are legally binding and others are not. Is there a discernible pattern to how states structure the chronological sequence of binding and non-binding agreements governing a specific issue area? For example, do states prioritise a framework treaty to establish the foundation of their cooperation and let bureaucrats iron out details in non-binding instruments? Or do they first experiment with low-commitment agreements before eventually settling on a more permanent treaty? This paper explores these questions using the example of space governance, which is characterised by a high number of bilateral agreements. Examining space agreements between 287 state dyads, it argues that a combination of power asymmetry and trust levels influences the likelihood of certain types of sequences of binding and non-binding agreements. These findings are particularly relevant to the literature on informal governance, regime complexes, and space politics.

Recent experimental research suggests that when women stand as political candidates, they often enjoy more support amongst voters than men. However, women remain under-represented in politics worldwide, and observational research suggests sexism is prevalent and consequential for voter behaviour. Here, we attempt to bridge these contradictory findings and offer observational evidence of approximately 26,000 voters and 5,346 candidates in Australia, Canada, Britain, and the USA. American voters are slightly more likely to vote for a woman than a man, but we find no evidence of gender preference in the other countries. Interestingly, although sexism is prevalent in all four countries, we find no evidence for an effect of voter sexism on support for women candidates. We do find evidence that abstention, at least in the USA, is an important electoral choice for sexist partisans faced with a woman co-partisan candidate.

I champion a deliberative right to constitutional silence. It entitles individuals to reflect upon the arguments and reasons in favour or against changing or re-interpreting constitutional content under proper conditions. After reflecting on the place of silence in intellectual history and its features and virtues, I define the right to constitutional silence. It has four components: salience, time, reflection and publicness. Next, I discuss its grounds. I argue that it is an institutional legal right that citizens have in a deliberative constitutional democracy. This entails that, while there is a moral case for the right to silence, I here circumscribe my argument to the province of legality and constitutionalism. I finish discussing matters of institutionalisation. I offer three suggestions: two proposals about content and one about procedure. First, the right to silence applies primarily to deliberations about ‘thin’ constitutional matters found in preambles and introductory sections of constitutions. Second, it warrants public intervention in matters of public discourse of constitutional import, to avoid private power from interfering with the people’s sphere of constitutional reflection. Third, I adapt a proposal made elsewhere and suggest that a non-decisional interpretive mini-public could be a place to implement the right to silence.

The shift to telework and hybrid arrangements has prompted organizations to reevaluate leadership competencies specific to remote environments. Therefore, we developed the Leadership Competencies for Telework (LCT) scale, designed for telework settings and addressing new challenges such as telework-life balance and virtual distance. The validation process included two studies: (1) Two content validity panels with 27 experts, and (2) validation of the 67-item scale through a survey of 543 Spanish teleworkers. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a five-factor structure: Digital Communication, Digital Trust-Building, Remote Goal Management, Remote Relationships Development, and Telework-Life Balance Support. The scale demonstrated high reliability (α < 0.90 for all factors) and validity, correlating with key outcomes such as job satisfaction, professional isolation, telework-life conflict, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The LCT scale provides organizations with a validated tool for assessing and developing effective telework leadership. Future research could validate the scale through longitudinal studies, exploring its predictive power over time.

Governments all over the world are struggling to control the spiralling costs of healthcare – the UK government is no exception. Its long-term strategy includes a much greater focus on prevention: to keep people as healthy and productive as possible for longer. This paper asks whether a greater focus on prevention is a possible lifeline for the National Health Service (NHS) as is often claimed, but it also examines other benefits to society. After considering various examples of prevention and the metrics used to measure their effectiveness, we use tobacco consumption as a case study to evaluate the costs to the public purse and to wider society. We give further examples, including obesity, but in less depth. We find that whilst there are significant benefits to public expenditure, including the NHS, in both cases, these are dwarfed by wider benefits to society both in terms of tangible economic benefits and improved well-being. We offer several suggestions for improving our understanding of the effectiveness of prevention policies in general and how the Actuarial profession can contribute to this debate.

Anningite-(Ce) ideally (Ca0.5Ce4+0.5)(VO4), was found within a phosphate coprolite from the sand-dominated sediments of the Gara Samani Formation, Algeria. As a tetragonal anhydrous vanadate, this mineral is classified in the xenotime group. It occurs in rock cavities and forms small (typically up to 100 μm in length) sheaf-like aggregates composed of crystals 30–40 μm in length and ∼7 μm in diameter. Anningite-(Ce) crystals are green with a vitreous lustre. No cleavage is observed and the fracture is uneven or conchoidal. Its empirical formula, calculated on the basis of 4 oxygen atoms, can be written as (Ca0.52Ce4+0.47Y3+0.01)Σ1.00[(VO4)0.88(PO4)0.05(SO4)0.06(SiO4)0.01]Σ1.00. The calculated density is 3.887 g/cm3. Anningite-(Ce) is tetragonal with space group I41/amd and unit-cell parameters a = 7.1500(4) Å, c = 6.3343(7) Å, and V = 323.82(5) Å3. Anningite-(Ce) is isostructural with wakefieldite-(Ce).

The recent wave of executive orders and other actions at the federal level has received a great deal of attention in recent months. Receiving relatively less attention, however, has been ongoing efforts at the state level over the past couple of years to exercise more control over higher education. The present brief reviews recent state legislation impacting higher education with a particular focus on the recently enacted Ohio Senate Bill 1, as an illustrative example. We suggest that these state legislative efforts pose a threat to academic freedom through attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), curricular control, tenure, and faculty unionization. We provide an overview of these state legislative efforts and implications for I-O psychologists, particularly those in academia.

This brief piece addresses the dispute sparked by Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to two classes of people traditionally included under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A primary goal is to provide a historical perspective on arguments made by both sides that are too frequently neglected in media coverage of the dispute. The piece does not predict how SCOTUS might rule, but it does make a case for the nation’s responsibility to children who have violated no law. Through textual and historical analysis, it also refutes two law professors who propose an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that supports Trump’s effort to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on works of literature, this article hopes to clarify the consequences of the complicated legal issues involved, including the bigoted history of previous efforts to restrict birthright citizenship.

Employer attitudes towards maternity leave are often framed as a tension between opposition based on costs or ideal worker norms, versus normative or ethical support. How do employers combine and prioritise these justifications in practice? Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven British managers, this article develops a typology of employers – risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven – distinguishing the nature of support and underlying blends of economic, normative, and moral justifications. It shows how moral reasoning – often assumed to align only with a supportive stance – is also mobilised to justify exclusionary attitudes and even overt discrimination against maternity leave-takers. Further, against assumptions that shifting cultural norms and expanding rights foster greater employer support, discomfort with these changes can reinforce resistance. Relational dynamics also shape attitudes, with positive affective–personal ties between managers and staff prompting greater support. These findings offer a new lens on how family leave rights are interpreted in everyday managerial practice.

Fiber-based structured light including cylindrical vector beams (CVBs) and orbital angular momentum (OAM) has gained significant interest for its unique properties. In this work, we propose the concept of a programmable linearly polarized (LP)-mode synthesizer for general structured light generation, in which an LP-mode pool supporting independent and selectable LP-mode output is first established, and then different CVB/OAM modes could be generated in a general way through polarization and phase control. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept LP-mode synthesizer based on a fiber ring laser characterized by a partial five-LP mode weakly coupled few-mode fiber (FMF) cavity and an arbitrary LP-mode switch array. Various CVB/OAM beams including TE01, TM01, OAM±1 and OAM±2 modes are successfully generated. This approach provides new insights into mode manipulation methods, potentially enhancing the performance of optical quantum communications, optical fiber sensing and optical trapping applications.

This article surveys the recent literature on the politics of memory. It sets out the nature of research in this area over the last 25 years and distils its main trends and areas of focus. Investigating monographs and edited volumes published since the year 2000, it gives an overview of a rich and evolving area of study. It demonstrates the extent to which the increasing politicization and securitization of memory has started to underpin new strategies for political conflict with different groups on different levels using collective memory to assert identities. While the boundaries between the national and the transnational in studying the politics of memory are often blurred, the article broadly distinguishes between studying political conflict within and between states.

This paper draws upon the theoretical literature on migration policy and health, and empirical data on three European states with differing welfare models – Sweden (social democrat), France (conservative), and the United Kingdom (liberal) – during Covid-19, to highlight the often hidden and contradictory politics through which refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants were forced to navigate during the most uncertain period of the pandemic. Although migrants’ treatment during Covid-19 was generally better in Sweden with a social democrat welfare tradition, we see migration management priorities greatly undermining the extent to which welfare systems function overall for the benefit of population health. Furthermore, Sweden’s recent political shift to the right exacerbates those negative tendencies. As the paper shows, there was considerable effort by civil society and local government to fill the gap where national governments failed to protect this group, stepping in to provide health information, and support.

Many archaeologists recognize a need for a more proactive archaeology, one that is responsive to the goals of communities and so one that carries the potential to advance restorative justice and reclamation. But this work requires shifts in time and resources. Such high-investment community archaeology comes with unfolding developments, or cascade effects. We frame positive ones as including finding, honoring, elevating, and protecting cultural heritage and suggest these may offer those grappling with accommodating such shifts practical examples of the benefits. Our example comes from the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS) focused on colonial New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok (ca. AD 1600–1780). With years of community engagement in place, a landowner had heard of GBAS and stopped development when he noticed large stones. Here, we found an early colonial homestead site, the Meserve Garrison, and our attendant research traced out a trajectory of colonial expansion from Indigenous homelands transformed into English property, property into intergenerational wealth. With rising wealth came the dispossession of labor; GBAS found enslaved (freed) Africans lived in this rural northern New England frontier, a place not typically associated with chattel slavery. We are working to protect the site and publicly commemorate and restore an accurate, inclusive, colonial history.

Climate change and other anthropogenic stressors are reshaping Earth’s biodiversity, motivating efforts to monitor changing faunal diversity. Canada is home to 80 documented species of mosquitoes, 38 of which are reported in New Brunswick. Using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention miniature CO2 light traps, three adult mosquito collection surveys were performed to encompass 43 trapping sites across New Brunswick, Canada. Study one took place from 21 July 2022 to 9 September 2022, study two took place from 29 May 2023 to 24 October 2023, and study three took place from 15 May 2024 to 19 September 2024. Among the specimens collected, a total of 18 Uranotaenia sapphirina (Osten Sacken) (Diptera: Culicidae) were identified from five separate trapping sites. This species, previously documented only in Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba, is considered rare in Canada and is known for its specialisation in feeding on annelids rather than vertebrates. Our detection of Ur. sapphirina in New Brunswick, where it has been absent in earlier surveys, suggests a recent range expansion, possibly driven by climate change. This observation highlights the need for ongoing surveillance to monitor the impacts of environmental changes on mosquito distribution.