Fieldwork at Kurd Qaburstan (ancient Qabra?) on the Erbil plain of northern Mesopotamia (Kurdistan Region of Iraq) in 2022 acquired a variety of new evidence on the Middle and Late Bronze occupations at the 95-hectare walled urban site. Geophysical survey revealed the existence of a probable palace in the Lower Town East, where excavations exposed a set of baked brick structures that were probably used for institutional storage and food processing. Large-scale Middle Bronze buildings were also explored on the High Mound North Slope (a burned building), the High Mound East, and in the temple on the Lower Town East. The faunal remains of the latter structure were dominated by young sheep/goat, implying ritualized uses of select animals. Late Bronze remains, exposed on the High Mound North and High Mound East, were small-scale domestic or industrial in character. Complementing the excavations, a study of Middle Bronze pottery offers details on pottery production and ceramic change, while zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical analyses supply further insights into the human-animal and human-plant relationships in this ancient urban community.

This article develops an intellectual history of neoliberal climate change denial, bringing together scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas with critical research on climate denialism. Focusing on the writings of Deepak Lal (1940–2020), a prominent late neoliberal thinker, the article reconstructs the key arguments Lal developed to throw climate science into question. After situating Lal in relation to neoliberal thought and think tanks, the article explores his views on four key themes: the scientific legitimacy of climatology, the intellectual corruption of climate researchers, the politics of the environmentalist movement, and the concept of imperialism. The article argues that Lal threaded familiar neoliberal concepts and tropes into climate denial, thus articulating a distinctly neoliberal theory of climate change. This theory quickly became influential within the neoliberal movement, segments of which came to echo Lal’s arguments. The article concludes with a broader reflection on neoliberalism’s relation to climate catastrophe.

Handheld firearms have been little studied in the military history of the Portuguese in Asia. Historians have centered on naval and siege warfare, in which cannons feature extensively. The way artillery was used in ships and sieges has been depicted as an important innovation of European origin, which gave the Portuguese a decisive advantage over their Asian opponents. Yet, this approach has confined harquebuses and muskets to a secondary role. We reconsider this historiographical imbalance using Jeremy Black’s idea that fitness-for-purpose is the best standard to measure military effectiveness. We argue that even if handheld firearms were not used by the Portuguese in a particularly “innovative” way, they were important and effective at the time.

This paper describes and reflects on the imaginaries, knowledge, processes and methods of a new four-year research project called Performing AI (PAI): Governance, Agency and Action – An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “collaborative and interdisciplinary research” program, the project assembles researchers from three Swiss universities (the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts) and Japan (University of Tokyo’s General Systems Science department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). PAI’s goal is to investigate “AI” from epistemic, ontological, aesthetic and ethical angles, neither taking for granted its “uncontroversial ‘thingness’”, nor assuming received disciplinary frames to fit the purpose. Instead, we address how AI is “performed” – that is, enacted and produced – across different discursive and material sites and contexts. PAI asks multiple questions: How is AI enacted in governmental policy? What does artistic practice do to AI, and what does AI do to artistic practice? How is AI reconfigured in interdisciplinary scientific domains such as artificial life (as opposed to computer science)? How is AI taken up, or reconfigured in the public sphere, including schools, museums and festivals focused on the intersections of art, technology and society?

High-frequency mortality data have attracted growing attention, but their use has largely been confined to specific applications rather than general modeling and forecasting. Such data pose new challenges to traditional mortality models due to pronounced seasonal patterns and short-term fluctuations. To address these challenges and produce more accurate forecasts with the high-frequency mortality data, this paper introduces a novel integration of gradient boosting techniques into traditional stochastic mortality models under a multi-population setting. Our key innovation lies in using the Li and Lee model as the weak learner within the gradient boosting framework, replacing conventional decision trees. Empirical studies are conducted using weekly mortality data from 30 countries (Human Mortality Database, 2015–2019). Empirical evidence highlights that the proposed methodology not only enhances model fit by accurately capturing underlying mortality trends and seasonal patterns but also achieves superior forecast accuracy, compared to the benchmark models. We also investigate a key challenge in multi-population mortality modeling: how to select appropriate subpopulations with sufficiently similar mortality experiences. A comprehensive clustering exercise is conducted based on mortality improvement rates and seasonal strength. The empirical results demonstrate that our proposed model maintains strong forecast accuracy across different clustering configurations, thereby reducing the need for extensive data preprocessing.

The prevalence of Palmer amaranth weeds that are resistant to inhibitors of glyphosate and acetolactate synthase has been affecting sugar beet yield in Colorado and Nebraska since 2020. While metamitron applied preemergence has previously been reported to effectively control glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth, the rates evaluated in the literature are likely higher than what is practical for growers to use on their crops. Consequently, identifying an optimal rate will reduce potential herbicide use while still effectively controlling Palmer amaranth. Lower rates of metamitron may be sufficient to allow control of Palmer amaranth through the two true-leaf (2 TL) stage of growth, when herbicides that inhibit very-long-chain fatty acids can be used to layer additional residual herbicides and prevent Palmer amaranth emergence. Multiple dose–response analysis studies were established in Nebraska in 2020 and 2023, and in Colorado in 2023, to determine the necessary rate of metamitron, with and without a tank-mix partner of ethofumesate, to control Palmer amaranth through the 2 TL stage of sugar beet. Metamitron rates ranged from 0 to 6.40 kg ai ha−1, while ethofumesate was included at a fixed rate of 1.68 and 1.86 kg ai ha−1 in 2020 and 2023, respectively. At all locations, maximum Palmer amaranth control was obtained when metamitron (4 kg ai ha−1) was applied alone. Adding ethofumesate as a tank-mix partner reduced the metamitron use rate to about 2.9 kg ai ha−1. Results of these trials provided supporting evidence for the U.S. Environmental Potection Agency to issue an emergency exemption under Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act to use metamitron at a rate of 3.27 kg ai ha−1 in Colorado and Nebraska in 2024, and the subsequent extension to include Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming in 2025.

We investigate how galaxy evolution varies with environment in the nearby Universe by comparing an “average” reference volume in the Southern Galactic Pole (SGP) dataset from Van Kempen et al. (2024) to the Nexus region, a dynamically assembling superstructure centred on the Abell 4038 galaxy cluster. We quantify environmental effects using the quenched fraction (fQ) and the mean and scatter of the specific star formation rate (sSFR) for the star-forming population, measured as functions of stellar mass and improved group-scale halo mass estimates from Van Kempen et al. (2026). One-dimensional binned trends are summarised with logistic fits for fQ and a power-law describes the binned mean log sSFR trends. We also de-couple the stellar–halo mass dependence in both the fQ and mean log sSFR analyses, demonstrating a joint dependence: fQ increases with stellar mass in both field and group environments, while group galaxies show an additional dependence on halo mass. The Nexus exhibits systematic differences relative to the SGP baseline, consistent with increased heterogeneity in accretion histories and pre-processing within a forming superstructure. For star-forming galaxies, the mean log sSFR declines strongly with stellar mass and shows additional environment-linked suppression in group-scale halos, while the scatter in log sSFR varies primarily with stellar mass and shows comparatively weaker dependence on halo mass. However, these differences are generally within the uncertainties, and larger samples of dynamically evolving Nexus-like structures are required to determine whether they reflect genuine environmental effects or cosmic variance. Within the Nexus, splitting the sample into three projected radial zones around Abell 4038 shows that both quenching and the properties of the star-forming population vary systematically with distance from the node and forming supercluster, largely driven by differences in the sampled halo mass function, indicating that environmental regulation is not spatially uniform across the structure. Finally, a projected phase-space (PPS) analysis of Abell 4038 shows higher fQ in regions associated with earlier infall, linking quenching to orbital history within the cluster. However, when grouping infall PPS zones and splitting by stellar mass, this trend is strongly mass dependent, with low-mass galaxies (logMstellar < 10) showing no significant change in fQ. These results demonstrate that the drivers of galaxy evolution depend jointly on stellar mass, the halo mass of the local group environment, and location within the surrounding large-scale structure. This motivates future, larger-statistics, multi-wavelength studies that combine wide-area spectroscopy with tracers of gas, dust, and hot halos to test quenching and star formation regulation mechanisms across the cosmic web.

We investigate the aggregate effects of household debt on a monetary policy easing shock using a smooth transition vector autoregression model. Using generalized impulse response functions, we measure whether the effect of a reduction in interest rate on output is conditioned by different levels of household debt in Australia, Sweden and Norway, three developed economies with high levels of household indebtedness, and in the world’s seven largest economies. Our findings show that the short-term effects of a reduction in interest rates are generally stronger during periods of high household debt. On average, the monetary stimulus (on impact) is 0.06% (percent of GDP) larger in Norway and the United States during periods of high household debt. Our findings also suggest high levels of household debt may diminish the persistence of monetary policy shocks in the medium term (4–8 quarters).

This article examines whether formal and informal workers in Argentina and Chile hold different attitudes toward labor unions. Engaging debates on labor-market dualism and union revitalization, we assess the representation gap hypothesis—which expects weaker union support among outsiders—against the class solidarity hypothesis, which anticipates broadly similar orientations across labor-market positions. Using original 2025 survey data from both countries, we find limited evidence of a systematic insider–outsider divide. Although informal self-employed workers sometimes express more skeptical views, most attitudes among informal workers are statistically indistinguishable from—and in some cases more favorable than—those of formal workers. Cross-nationally, Argentine workers tend to assign greater importance to unions, while Chilean workers report higher willingness to unionize. Taken together, these findings suggest that the representation gap thesis may not fully capture workers’ orientations and point to the potential relevance of solidaristic dynamics shaped by national institutional and political contexts.

Essays appearing in this issue, authored by scholars who gathered at the University of Coimbra in 2021-22, display a range of approaches to historicizing the emergence of the global Portuguese empire in the passage from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The present introduction contextualizes their contributions by tracing a shift in the Portuguese and international historiography over the last half century. By and large, scholars have moved away from narratives of exceptionalism concentrated on elite figures such as King Manuel I of Portugal, and gravitated instead to grappling with how the early modern Portuguese empire was co-created with the wider world through vectors of violence, exchange, and reciprocity. These new scholarly imperatives prompt an adoption of novel spatial and disciplinary frameworks for tracing critical transformations in early modern global history.

Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU’s efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU’s strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU–Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU–Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU’s actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU’s involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

In 1961–2, when a three-year international moratorium on nuclear testing was broken by the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States agreed to resume testing in partnership: Britain would test underground at the American site in Nevada and the US would use the British site at Christmas Island for a new series of atmospheric tests. This article uses archival evidence to examine the British government’s position, showing that there was a great reluctance to resume testing and that, contrary to stereotypes, there was no strong lobbying for tests from the military or atomic scientists. While it was convenient to express the need for nuclear testing as a technical necessity, the requirement was fundamentally political: to support the United States. Meanwhile, Britain’s atomic scientists were working hard not only to test nuclear weapons but to ban testing, and the article also introduces the extensive scientific work done in support of nuclear test detection and arms-control verification. Although histories today emphasize the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, at the height of the Berlin crisis it was the nuclear arms race that worried politicians and scientists above all.

Given a smooth variety X over $\mathbb {C}$, a smooth divisor $i:Y\hookrightarrow X$ and a global function f on X which vanishes on Y and on its critical locus, we compute the map induced on Hochschild homology by the pushforward functor $i_{\ast }:D^b(Y)\to D^{abs}(MF(X,f))$ in terms of the Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg isomorphisms.

Political actors, scholars, and citizens have long worried that the United States Supreme Court poses a “countermajoritarian difficulty”: the concern that policy making by unelected judges undermines democratic governance. In political science, a prominent response has come from a school of thought known as “regime theory,” which contends that this concern is misplaced because the court acts in alignment with a dominant governing coalition in the elected branches. In this article, we revisit regime theory and argue that it relies on unstated scope conditions. Specifically, it best explains periods characterized by low levels of interparty competition and intraparty cohesion. Since the 1970s, however, both these conditions have gradually eroded. We develop a revised theory of court–party relations to account for changing party dynamics. Under contemporary conditions of high interparty competition and high intraparty cohesion, the court is aligned with one of two competitive party coalitions rather than a dominant governing coalition. In this context, the court can support its aligned coalition in distinct ways that are indeed countermajoritarian. To illustrate our theory, we trace the functions of Supreme Court decision making for its aligned coalition over three periods (1930s–60s, 1970s–90s, and 2000s–present) and show why normative concerns about judicial power as a threat to democratic governance are well founded in the contemporary period.

This Article argues that the classic “what is law” question deserves more attention in EU legal studies. First, it shows that questions about the nature and concept of law are of great practical relevance for EU law. Second, the Article endorses a distinctively realist outlook on EU law. This analysis concludes that a realist(ic) concept of EU law cannot be distilled from legal realism as a theory of adjudication. What is needed instead is a theory of law that can account for the social reality of EU law by weaving together law’s ideational and material dimensions. From the realist perspective, EU law is neither autonomous nor singular. This inquiry into the nature of EU law illustrates why different variants of legal and constitutional pluralism and inter-legality provide insufficient tools for theorizing EU law. Moreover, it challenges the EU’s current “politics of legality” and problematizes the law-power relationship in EU law, depicting the concept of law as key to the EU’s prolonged authority crisis.