Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has been lauded as one of the latest global trends in smart ‘ways to pay’, riding on the wave of digital disruption that has gained traction internationally. At the same time, concerns have been raised over harm to vulnerable consumers becoming mired in unanticipated debt. This article facilitates a deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a bottom-up perspective through an analysis of empirical data comprising a survey of 400 consumers, interviews with consumer advocates and BNPL users, and a survey of Malaysian BNPL providers’ websites. The article explores how digitalisation, payment by instalments, and providers’ advertising strategies can collectively mask risks for unsuspecting consumers. Insights from the analysis are used to inform proposals to strengthen the effectiveness of the emerging Malaysian consumer credit framework. As the first country to introduce consumer credit legislation in the ASEAN region, Malaysia’s burgeoning framework provides a model for other ASEAN Member States. In addition to targeted measures aimed at empowering consumer decision-making, there is an urgent need to address the problem of poverty to avoid unintended consequences. The empirical analysis is valuable for other emerging economies seeking to strengthen protections for credit consumers.

This study examines the phenomenon of word-final /n/ deletion (WFnD) in Central Franconian dialects spoken across parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. The deletion process occurs after schwa and full vowels and manifests itself in different phonological patterns across dialects. The paper presents a comparative analysis based on a selection of local varieties, investigating the effects of the left-hand and right-hand phonological context on WFnD. The theoretical framework of the ‘Life Cycle of Phonological Processes’ serves to reconstruct the diachronic development of WFnD, allowing to trace its progression from systematic phonetic variation to a categorical phonological phenomenon and lexicalized forms. By applying this framework, the study demonstrates how different dialects exhibit WFnD at distinct stages of the life cycle, revealing the systematic nature of its historical unfolding. The findings highlight the role and interplay of prosodic, phonological, morphological and lexical factors conditioning WFnD.

The principle of equality of arms, originating in common law systems, is a fair trial requirement designed to preserve the adversarial nature of criminal proceedings. Its basic guarantees are enshrined in universal human rights documents, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This article examines how Vietnam, as a socialist country, has adopted the principle of equality of arms in its criminal justice system, considering the complex relationship between socialist ideology underlying its legal concepts, and recent procedural reforms. The findings suggest that, despite the inevitable impact of globalisation on legal diffusion processes, the operation of the criminal justice system remains ultimately shaped by its historical and contextual surroundings as it is a system designed by local institutions for local constituencies. With regard to the specific principle of equality of arms, influencing domestic factors include collectivism, a particular crime control model, the substantive truth doctrine, a blurred separation of function among procedural agencies, and the procuracy’s judicial supervisory role. Since there has been little research on the principle of equality of arms in the domestic context, let alone in national socialist criminal justice systems, this article contributes to filling a gap in the broader legal scholarship on both equality of arms and socialist criminal justice systems.

In this paper we argue that performance and the arts invite a deliberate sensorial connection with the body and can support a bodily turn or return, in order to help artists, scholars and communities more broadly, better attune to increasing climate instability, through collaborative, supportive and reflexive storytelling. Drawing on the three “weather” symposia, the paper focusses on the second symposium which featured a keynote presentation by Rachael Swain, co-artistic director of Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous Intercultural Dance and Performance Company. Responses to Marrugeku’s work Cut the Sky are collectively presented to illuminate what Swain argues are, “Dramaturgies of consequence” (2020), that emerge from working and thinking with the choreopolitical platform of Marrugeku’s practice, and how this is felt in the bodies and the actions of audiences. Such a focus on thinking and feeling with and through our bodies, is crucial in preparing to respond and adapt to the myriad evolving political, environmental and social crises we are enmeshed in. By focusing on Cut The Sky we argue that contemporary performance, which foregrounds the body, is an exemplary practice which can ignite visceral and kinaesthetic responses in spectators for activating change through Marrugeku’s choreography of resistance.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a widely recommended, evidence-based modality. Cost-effective interventions such as CBT are particularly valuable in low- and middle-income countries, which typically have considerable resource constraints and service delivery challenges. Despite its benefits, CBT remains under-utilised by clinical psychology practitioners in South Africa, possibly due to poor perceived self-competence of practitioners. We employed a qualitative exploratory design to explore student clinical psychologists’ perceived self-competence in delivering CBT in their first year of masters studies at one university in South Africa, using once-off individual semi-structured interviews (n=5). Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, following an inductive-deductive approach. We identified two over-arching themes: (1) Training experiences shape perceived self-competence in CBT, and (2) Making sense of competence and readiness for practice. The findings suggest that perceived self-competence in CBT is shaped by training experiences, with supportive supervision, practical application, and positive client outcomes enhancing confidence. Limited prior exposure to CBT, rigid teaching approaches, and inconsistent feedback created challenges in developing self-competence which seemed to influence decisions about using CBT in practice. The findings provide important insights regarding the gaps in CBT training in South Africa, which may influence the use and uptake of CBT by future clinical psychologists. These findings highlight the importance of training environments that promote flexibility, experiential learning, expert supervision and constructive feedback in developing competence in evidence-based interventions. Further research is needed to establish whether these issues are shared amongst trainee students at other universities.

Key learning aims

1. Readers of this paper will be able to:

   1. (1) Identify factors influencing self-perception of CBT competence.

   2. (2) Understand how CBT training occurs as part of a Master of Clinical Psychology programme in South Africa.

   3. (3) Understand how the perception that CBT is rigid hinders CBT implementation.

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and their ever-expanding use in societal contexts raises questions regarding their design, social acceptance, and regulation. We develop a randomized vignette experiment, detailing six contemporary high-stakes contexts employing algorithmic tools and uncover distinct attitudes toward the source of the AI provisioning (public vs private sector). Participants are drawn from technology and law schools in India, representing key future stakeholders in the AI policy ecosystem in the country. Our main result indicates an overall preference for public sector provisioning of AI tools, with important implications on the social acceptability of public sector expansion of AI systems. Although the Global South has witnessed widespread expansion of AI tools with limited scrutiny, the nascent scholarship on AI attitudes disproportionately emanates from the Global North. Our study fills this gap, as well as the gap in empirical evidence on private vs public provisioning of AI tools in social contexts.

A worker with cancer is dismissed after algorithmic dashboards misread her treatment fatigue as cognitive decline. A stroke prediction model achieves 95 percent accuracy while missing every single stroke case. These are not edge cases – they are structural failures, produced when algorithmic distortions intersect with the cognitive variability of human judgment in the absence of feedback. This article calls that convergence double noise. Drawing on Shannon–Weaver’s communication model, Kahneman and colleagues’ concept of noise, and narratological theory – unreliable narration, focalization, paralepsis, emplotment, and situatedness – the article argues that predictive failures are not only statistical but narrative: computational systems operating under epistemic constraint produce false stories that resist correction. In both cases, the absence of meaningful feedback channels turns local distortions into entrenched misjudgments: the first through algorithmic dashboards that freeze discontinuous behavioral signals into an irrevocable story of cognitive decline; the second through routine design decisions – class balancing, metric selection, and threshold setting – that normalize the erasure of clinically decisive false negatives. By integrating narratological theory with computational methods and epistemic critique, the article positions double noise as a central challenge for clinical AI and advances feedback ethics as a normative orientation, calling for systems that preserve ambiguity, enable contestation, and institutionalize shared judgment in high-risk environments.

A year defined by the judicial reform-overhaul in Israel reached its legal climax when the Government amended a constitutional law to abolish the courts’ ability to make use of the reasonableness doctrine, a common-law doctrine which allows courts to review administrative actions based on their “reasonableness”. Petitions to the Israeli Supreme Court were immediately filed, leading to a revolutionary ruling. For the first time in its history, all fifteen justices of the Supreme Court convened and struck down a constitutional amendment in an eight to seven decision.

While a majority was reached, a deeper inspection of the different opinions uncovers substantial differences in the justices’ theoretical approaches. This Article provides an analysis of the five major theoretical approaches utilized in the reasonableness ruling to justify or reject the existence of a limitation on constituent power in Israel: constitutional data, constitutional self-entrenchment, declarations of independence, natural law, and limitless constituent power.

The Article presents the unique insight that despite the unprecedented outcome of the ruling, none of the justices relied on the ubiquitous distinction between the primary and secondary constituent powers. As such, contradictory to common perception, the Supreme Court of Israel didn’t adopt the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine in the reasonableness ruling. Instead, it adopted a much more radical doctrine according to which the Court may strike down any constitutional law–whether the product of the primary or secondary constituent power–so long as it is convinced that the constituent power’s authority was exceeded.

The quantum duality principle (QDP) by Drinfeld predicts a connection between the quantized universal enveloping algebras and the quantized coordinate algebras, where the underlying classical objects are related by the duality in Poisson geometry. The current paper gives an explicit formulization of the QDP for quantum symmetric pairs.

Let $\mathfrak {g}$ be a complex semi-simple Lie algebra, equipped with the standard Lie bialgebra structure. Let $\theta $ be a Lie algebra involution on $\mathfrak {g}$ and denote by $\mathfrak {k}=\mathfrak {g}^\theta $ the fixed point subalgebra. The quantum symmetric pair $(\mathrm {U},\mathrm {U}^\imath )$ is originally defined to be a quantization of the symmetric pair of the universal enveloping algebras $(U(\mathfrak {g}),U(\mathfrak {k}))$. In this paper, we show that an explicit specialization of $(\mathrm {U},\mathrm {U}^\imath )$ gives rise to the pair of the coordinate algebras $(\mathcal {O}(G^*),\mathcal {O}(K^\perp \backslash G^*))$, where $G^*$ is the dual Poisson-Lie group with the Lie algebra $\mathfrak {g}^*$, and $K^\perp \backslash G^*$ is a $G^*$-Poisson homogeneous space. Here $K^\perp $ is the closed subgroup of $G^*$ associated to the complementary dual of $\mathfrak {k}$. Therefore $(\mathrm {U},\mathrm {U}^\imath )$ can be viewed as a pair of quantized coordinate algebras. This generalizes the result of De Concini–Procesi [14] that the quantum group $\mathrm {U}$ provides a quantization of the coordinate algebra of $G^*$.

An $S_k$-set in a group $\Gamma $ is a set $A\subseteq \Gamma $ such that $\alpha _1\dots \alpha _k=\beta _1\dots \beta _k$ with $\alpha _i,\beta _i\in A$ implies $(\alpha _1,\ldots ,\alpha _k)=(\beta _1,\ldots ,\beta _k)$. An $S_k'$-set is a set such that $\alpha _1\beta _1^{-1}\dots \alpha _k\beta _k^{-1}=1$ implies that there exists i such that $\alpha _i=\beta _i\text { or }\beta _i=\alpha _{i+1}$. We give explicit constructions of large $S_k$-sets in the groups $\mathrm {Sym}(n)$ and $\mathrm {Alt}(n)$ and $S_2$-sets in $\mathrm {Sym}(n)\times \mathrm {Sym}(n)$ and $\mathrm {Alt}(n)\times \mathrm {Alt}(n)$. We give probabilistic constructions which yield large $S_2'$-sets in $\mathrm {Sym}(n)$. We also give upper bounds on the size of $S_k$-sets in certain groups, improving the trivial bound by a constant multiplicative factor. We describe some connections between $S_k$-sets and extremal graph theory. In particular, we determine up to a constant factor the minimum outdegree of a digraph which guarantees even cycles with certain orientations. As applications, we improve the upper bound on Hamilton paths which pairwise create a two-part cycle of given length, and we show that a directed version of the Erdős–Simonovits compactness conjecture is false.

Against a remarkable diffusion of commitments to inclusion, equality and diversity in universities, and cases where these commitments are being contested, this study considers the institutional environments that shape universities’ inclusionary commitments. Historical and sociological institutionalist perspectives are used to make sense of how regulatory and resource conditions of the national higher education (HE) systems that universities inhabit blend with global cultural pressures and supply universities with socially desirable ways of pursuing inclusion. A comparative case study of inclusionary commitments in an English and a Norwegian public research university is provided. Despite substantial differences between HE sectors, both universities portray themselves as deliberate and strategic in their pursuit of inclusion, and the state is a key ‘rationalizer’ of this process through equality legislation. Nevertheless, inclusionary commitments appear more organizationally embedded and cognizant of student needs in the English university. In the Norwegian university, structural measures to foster inclusion become more visible within the comparatively rudimentary organizational structure, with regional cooperation and the needs of personnel being highlighted. The findings show that the spread of inclusionary organizational actorhood is marked by differences in regulation, national service and market orientations between HE systems. They are paving distinct possibilities for how universities may relate to their inclusionary commitments if challenged.

While the movement toward open science (OS) has gained substantial traction among quantitative inquiries, qualitative research, particularly in second language (L2) contexts, remains underrepresented. L2 qualitative research is characterized by complex, multimodal, multilayered, and contextually situated linguistic and non-linguistic data; yet existing openness debates underplay the ethical and relational dimensions essential to this inquiry. In response, this paper introduces guidelines on conducting L2 ethical and accountable research in qualitative contexts (CLEAR-Qual), the first practitioner-informed, phase-by-phase framework designed to operationalize openness for L2 qualitative work as an ethical, reflexive, and collaborative stance rather than an all-or-nothing technical fix.

Developed using the Delphi method, CLEAR-Qual distinguishes openness on research (i.e., outward reporting) from openness with research (i.e., processual, participant-centered practices) and aligns OS principles with the contextual, emergent nature of qualitative second language research. The framework articulates core and advisory practices across five phases (pre-study, data collection, analysis, reporting, and post-study). Key recommendations include preregistration, tiered consent acquisition, rigorous anonymization, reflexive documentation, knowledge co-creation, secure data management, and ethical data-use agreements for secondary access. By situating accountability at the center of the research process, CLEAR-Qual provides actionable guidelines for researchers, reviewers, and editors committed to transparent, ethically robust qualitative research in L2 contexts.

The human rights situation of gender and sexual minorities in South Korea has been particularly troubling when compared to the recent advancements in other liberal democracies. Strategic obstructions by conservative Christian groups, combined with the passive and deferential attitudes of the legislative and executive branches, have constituted major obstacles to civil society’s persistent efforts to secure and advance these minorities’ rights. In contrast, the judiciary − especially the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and lower courts − has made meaningful progress in recent years by adopting more principled, human-rights-oriented interpretations of the law. Significant developments include the relaxation of conditions for transgender persons’ legal gender recognition, challenges to the constitutional validity of the military sodomy law, the initiation of legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, and the protection of the freedoms of assembly and association. A close examination of key cases reveals a contrast between the majoritarian tendencies of the legislative and executive branches, on the one hand, and the more rights-protective stance of the judiciary, on the other. This disparity underscores the crucial role of courts in safeguarding equal rights and dignity for marginalised groups, while also highlighting the need for the adoption of a comprehensive anti-discrimination law in South Korea.

This qualitative study investigates social participation and recognition through volunteering for people with disabilities in Thailand. Using data from 65 participants across five provinces, and employing Social Role Valorization (SRV) as the framework, this study examines how volunteering can transform people with disabilities from recipients of aid into valued social contributors. The results revealed that volunteering can enhance self-esteem, skills development, and community connections. However, significant barriers impede access to valued roles, including societal attitudes, physical environment limitations, and a lack of support. Despite these challenges, many volunteers with disabilities exhibited leadership by participating in volunteering activities and successfully shifting society’s perceptions about their abilities. Nonetheless, acceptance in the broader society remains limited due to insufficient promotion of their social contributions in the media. In conclusion, inclusive volunteering supported by both the private and government sectors is crucial for promoting the valuable social contributions that people with disabilities can provide.

We study how resolution regimes affect investment in banking groups with subsidiaries of varying financial strength. Centralized regimes that preserve the group’s structure enable ex post support for weaker units but may constrain ex ante investment. Decentralized regimes that resolve units separately may enhance ex ante investment but limit risk-sharing ex post. The relative efficiency of each approach depends on the group’s risk profile and profitability. Allowing both regimes to coexist improves efficiency relative to imposing a uniform regime across all groups. However, a decentralized regime may not be credible if the regulator cannot commit to limit ex post risk-sharing.