Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.

We show that each local field $\mathbb{F}_q(\!(t)\!)$ of characteristic $p > 0$ is characterised up to isomorphism within the class of all fields of imperfect exponent at most 1 by (certain small quotients of) its absolute Galois group together with natural axioms concerning the p-torsion of its Brauer group. This complements previous work by Efrat and Fesenko, who analysed fields whose absolute Galois group is isomorphic to that of a local field of characteristic p.

For network meta-analysis (NMA), we usually assume that the treatment arms are independent within each included trial. This assumption is justified for parallel design trials and leads to a property we call consistency of variances for both multi-arm trials and NMA estimates. However, the assumption is violated for trials with correlated arms, for example, split-body trials. For multi-arm trials with correlated arms, the variance of a contrast is not the sum of the arm-based variances, but comes with a correlation term. This may lead to violations of variance consistency, and the inconsistency of variances may even propagate to the NMA estimates. We explain this using a geometric analogy where three-arm trials correspond to triangles and four-arm trials correspond to tetrahedrons. We also investigate which information has to be extracted for a multi-arm trial with correlated arms and provide an algorithm to analyze NMAs including such trials.

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.

In this study, we argue that uncovering losses from public collections and making efforts to recover them is of fundamental importance concerning the responsible management of state assets and the maintenance of the cultural public interest. In recent times, the perception of museums has been in a constant state of flux, with international expectations associated with them sometimes appearing to be contradictory. While much attention has been paid to the diligence of care, museums must exercise in areas such as acquisition, deaccessioning policies, repatriation, and decolonization, an equally important function – but one less discussed in the international literature – which is the duty of public collections to safeguard and manage state-owned assets. In 2023, the Hungarian National Museum implemented a new initiative aimed at recovering cultural property that had disappeared from public collections under unknown circumstances. This procedure has already generated numerous insights that the current study analyzes, ranging from the difficulty of shedding light on decades-long ownership chains to the challenges of acquisition and the effectiveness of dispute resolution. The Hungarian initiative represents an additional approach to the protection of cultural property, addressing a significant gap in the Hungarian heritage protection system that has received less attention.

“It is commonly accepted in Europe, and widely known here, that the originators of minimalism are Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Phil Glass,” begins a column published in the Village Voice in July 1982, by the composer and music critic Tom Johnson.1 Johnson was a crucial presence in the New York experimental music scene—and perhaps the central voice in identifying the nascent aesthetic of musical minimalism—but was dissatisfied with how narrowly this movement of drone- and repetition-based musics had come to be defined. Though Johnson expressed sympathy with the tendency to “reduce music history to a rather short list of Great Men,” he also interrogated the notion of list-making, and the problematic framework of “original minimalist,” providing 27 names that might better elucidate the category—knowing also that, as he put it, “more accurate lists get too long and bulky.”

In the last two decades, the adoption of exoskeletal devices for the reduction of the biomechanical overload of workers has hugely increased. They allow relief of the biomechanical load of the operator and ensure the operator’s contact with the object without binding its interaction. In this work, the biomechanical and physiological effects on the user wearing upper limb passive exoskeletons have been evaluated to highlight the benefits and possible drawbacks introduced by their use in typical manufacturing tasks. MATE and PAEXO Shoulder passive exoskeletons have been assessed during the execution of different working gestures among static, dynamic, and quasi-static tasks on 16 healthy volunteers. The obtained results confirm that the adoption of such systems significantly impacts the users by reducing the muscular load, increasing endurance, and reducing the perceived effort. Moreover, this analysis pointed out the specific benefits introduced by one exoskeleton with respect to the other according to the specific task. The MATE has the potential to reduce muscle load during the execution of static tasks. Conversely, the PAEXO Shoulder positively impacts the users’ biomechanical performances in dynamic tasks.

Presented here is a novel formulation of the mean-field dynamo as a modulational instability of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. This formulation, termed mean-field wave kinetics (MFWK), is based on the Weyl symbol calculus and allows describing the interaction between the mean fields (magnetic field and fluid velocity) and turbulence without requiring scale separation that is commonly assumed in the literature. The turbulence is described by the Wigner–Moyal equation for the spectrum of the two-point correlation matrix (Wigner matrix) of magnetic-field and velocity fluctuations and depicts the turbulence as an effective plasma of quantum-like particles that interact via the mean fields. Eddy–eddy interactions, which serve as ‘collisions’ in this effective plasma, are modelled within the standard minimal tau approximation to aid comparison with existing theories. Using MFWK, the non-local electromotive force is calculated for generic turbulence from first principles, modulo the limitations of MFWK. This result is then used to study, both analytically and numerically, the modulational modes of MHD turbulence, which appear as linear instabilities of the said effective quantum-like plasma of fluctuations. The standard $\alpha ^2$-dynamo and other known results are reproduced as special cases. A new dynamo effect is predicted that is driven by correlations between the turbulent flow velocity and the turbulent current.

Grammaticalization is the process whereby lexical items change into grammatical items. This phenomenon is widely attested, while the change from grammatical to lexical is far less common. We ran two experiments to test whether this unidirectional tendency originates with a preference for extending lexical meanings to grammatical ones rather than vice versa. We focus on body parts and spatial relations. In Experiment 1, participants were told the meaning of an artificial word then rated how likely it is that that word can also be used to refer to a second meaning – one meaning was a body part and one a preposition. We expected higher ratings when extending from body parts to prepositions than vice versa but found no difference. In Experiment 2, participants performed semantic extension in communication. We varied whether they extended words for body parts to prepositions or vice versa. Again, we found no asymmetry. Finally, we used a model of Experiment 2 to show that asymmetrical extension follows straightforwardly if there is an asymmetry in the number of words available relative to the number of meanings to express, indicating that having a larger number of lexical items than grammatical concepts could be an alternative source of unidirectionality.

We study certain categories associated to symmetric quivers with potential, called quasi-Bogomol’nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (BPS) categories. We construct semiorthogonal decompositions of the categories of matrix factorizations for moduli stacks of representations of (framed or unframed) symmetric quivers with potential, where the summands are categorical Hall products of quasi-BPS categories. These results generalize our previous results about the three-loop quiver. We prove several properties of quasi-BPS categories: wall-crossing equivalence, strong generation, and a categorical support lemma in the case of tripled quivers with potential. We also introduce reduced quasi-BPS categories for preprojective algebras, which have trivial relative Serre functor and are indecomposable when the weight is coprime with the total dimension. In this case, we regard the reduced quasi-BPS categories as noncommutative local hyperkähler varieties and as (twisted) categorical versions of crepant resolutions of singularities of good moduli spaces of representations of preprojective algebras. The studied categories include the local models of quasi-BPS categories of K3 surfaces. In a follow-up paper, we establish analogous properties for quasi-BPS categories of K3 surfaces.

Florence Anselmo is Head of the Central Tracing Agency and Protection Division at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Between September 2016 and June 2025, she was in charge of the Central Tracing Agency (CTA), leading and coordinating efforts to prevent disappearance, reconnect separated families, bring answers and support to families of missing persons and promote the protection of the dead. For this purpose, she convened on CTA matters across the ICRC and beyond and has overseen the development of a new strategy for Restoring Family Links for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. She is also in charge of the management of protection data.

Florence worked for the ICRC from 2001 until 2007, first as Field Delegate in Colombia, then as Head of Sub-Delegation in Burundi and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. From 2007 until 2016 she worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jerusalem as protection coordinator, setting up and developing UNRWA’s protection strategy and activities in the West Bank. She holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in political sciences from the University of Lausanne.

Dr Pierre Guyomarc’h is Head of Forensics at the ICRC. A forensic anthropologist trained at the University of Bordeaux (MSc 2008, PhD 2011), his research has focused on human identification, medical imaging and craniofacial analysis. He previously worked at the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, contributing to the identification of missing service members while advancing innovative forensic methods. Since joining the ICRC in 2014, Pierre has led forensic operations in contexts such as Ukraine, Lebanon and Georgia, and he has overseen programmes from headquarters since 2017. Today, he directs a global team of around 100 experts implementing humanitarian forensic action in conflict and crisis-affected settings worldwide.

We investigate the primitive recursive content of linear orders. We prove that the punctual degrees of rigid linear orders, the order of the integers $\mathbb {Z}$, and the order of the rationals $\mathbb {Q}$ embed the diamond (preserving supremum and infimum). In the cases of rigid orders and the order $\mathbb {Z}$, we further extend the result to embed the atomless Boolean algebra; we leave the case of $\mathbb {Q}$ as an open problem. We also show that our results for the rigid orders, in fact, work for orders having a computable infinite invariant rigid sub-order.

Understanding the developmental and occupational histories of Ancestral Maya settlements is crucial for interpreting their roles in broader social, political, and economic dynamics. This article presents 62 new accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C dates from residential groups in the outlying settlement zone at Alabama, a major inland Ancestral Maya center in East-Central Belize. Alabama is a rare example of a “boomtown” in the Maya lowlands, experiencing rapid development primarily during the 8th and 9th century CE, corresponding to the Late to Terminal Classic periods. Using Bayesian stratigraphic sequence models, we construct detailed developmental and occupational histories for the townsite, clarifying the timing of its development, occupation, and abandonment. Our analysis reveals complex residential histories, confirming a rapid tempo of Late and Terminal Classic settlement growth and indicating continuities in occupation into the 10th century CE and beyond. Furthermore, we identify two separate periods of occupation during the Early Classic (cal AD 345–545) and the Late Postclassic (cal AD 1325–1475), demonstrating that parts of the settlement were inhabited at different intervals over many centuries. These results offer the first detailed deep-history perspective for the East-Central Belize region, establishing a framework that addresses challenges in chronology-building posed by poor pottery preservation and the complexities of earthen-core architecture at the site and enabling future chronological modeling in this lesser-known frontier of the eastern Maya lowlands.

India’s 1947 independence and the violent birth of Pakistan had a major and still unexplored impact in West Africa. Despite existing studies assessing Gandhi’s intellectual impact on African leaders, little scholarship has examined African perceptions of events in India and Pakistan. Examining the case of Nigeria, this article moves from a brief history of Nigerians’ interest in South Asian politics during the 1940s to identify two key elements of Nigerians’ responses. First, it demonstrates how Nigerian politicians, journalists and religious leaders advanced ambiguous and nuanced critiques of Indian politics on the eve of independence. The possibility of a ‘Nigerian Gandhi’ particularly preoccupied observers, who made comparisons between the Indian leader and local nationalists. Second, the article argues that the formation of Pakistan had a largely unrecognized impact on Nigerian political culture in the late 1940s. In a crisis about separatism and ‘Pakistanism’, Nigerian commentators engaged substantively with the ideals represented by this new state and the violence of Partition itself. The article argues that reactions to Asia were differentiated by region, and Northern Nigerian intellectuals developed separate critiques of South Asian affairs. Rather than understanding South Asia’s impact on West Africa simply in terms of ‘influence’, this article reveals how Africans drew on South Asia to map their own futures.

Follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) must be applied at 12-h intervals over 4–5 days in the traditional cattle superovulation protocol, which still needs to be improved. This research paper evaluated the superovulation results obtained by a traditional protocol or by a single administration of FSH dissolved in MontanideTM ISA-206 VG (MonISA-206). Control cows were superovulated with 10 mL of FSH (500 µg pFSH + 100 µg pLH) from day 7 to day 10 (for 4 days, twice daily i.m. injections, decreasing doses). Cows in the EG10 and EG7.5 groups were injected i.m. with 20 mL (100%, 10 mL + 10 mL) or 15 mL (75%, 7.5 mL + 7.5 mL) of the FSH and MonISA-206 mixture at once on day 7. All cows were inseminated 12 and 24 h after oestrus onset. The cows presented no pathology at the injection sites. Plasma FSH levels differed between the groups, but the interaction between hour and group × time was not different. Superstimulation and embryo quality results were similar between the groups. A single injection of FSH (both 100% and 75% doses) dissolved in MonISA-206 led to adequate plasma FSH levels and similar superovulation results to traditional FSH treatment, and caused no pathology at the injection sites.

This article traces the origins of “big” tobacco, that is, international, multinational companies, in Cyprus during the British colonial period. It explores how the tobacco and cigarette industries developed from the 1920s until the end of colonial rule in 1960, and how “big” tobacco companies united and came to control these industries. The article shows that from the 1920s, and especially from the 1940s, the prevalence of smoking in Cyprus was exceedingly high. This corresponded to the large-scale importing of foreign-made cigarettes and the manufacture of cigarettes by local companies, before the first international company began to manufacture cigarettes in the island in 1951. The article explores how the British colonial governments and civil society did little to make the Cypriot people aware of the dangers of cigarette smoking, despite medical research linking cigarette smoking to the increase in lung cancer in 1950 and the debates and warnings in the UK. Ultimately, the origins and evolution of “big tobacco” companies in Cyprus had a profound impact on the local industry and the prevalence of cigarette smoking in Cyprus.