This article compares the historical trajectories of democratic innovations across space and time in the UK by analysing the development and impact of collaborative governance, participatory budgeting, referendums, and mini-publics. This is an interesting country for longer-term analysis. First, the UK has been considered an inhospitable environment for democratic innovation. Second, it has experienced asymmetrical decentralisation of legislative and executive powers from national to subnational institutions. Third, these changes have taken place during a period of democratic backsliding. We analyse how these dynamics are interrelated by charting the trajectory of four types of democratic innovations in four different countries of the UK (space) from the 1970s to the present (time). We find that, after years of limited democratic innovation there has been rapid, although geographically asymmetrical, development in recent decades. We argue that the importance of these differences should not be overstated in relation to democratic deepening. We conclude that, to advance democratic innovations in the UK, a constitutional convention is required.

This short essay describes the nature and far-reaching impact of a large-format undergraduate course on U.S. legal history that legal historian Stanley N. Katz taught at Princeton University for almost ten years, starting in 1978. The course had a complex origin story, rooted in curricular innovations of the 1960s. It was unusual in its demand that students pursue sustained immersion in primary sources, debate their meaning, and take interpretive positions. Katz taught the course socratically, eschewing lectures. Because Princeton faculty often precepted for fellow faculty—attending Katz’s large-format sessions and leading their own small weekly discussion sections—Katz’s approach persuaded some colleagues to change their own teaching approaches. At a time when legal history was expanding as a research and teaching field, the course, along with its extensive reading materials that were not available in published form, was transplanted to other campuses by Katz’s students and associates.

As the first foreign policy issue Nigeria debated, the controversy around France’s nuclear tests, conducted in Algeria during the War of Independence there, allowed Lagos to rehearse its envisioned African role even before formal independence in October 1960. Nigerian opposition to France eventually culminated in the expulsion of the French ambassador on 5 January 1961, after the third French atomic test in the Algerian Sahara. This seemingly straightforward anti-colonial and anti-nuclear act was in fact largely driven by inter-African dynamics, particularly Nigeria’s complicated relationship with Ghana. By reconstructing this episode, the article demonstrates how international affairs uniquely crystallized interactions between domestic and regional politics in decolonizing states. This in turn encourages us to look beyond the paradigms of the Cold War and decolonization when writing the Global South into world history.

This systematic review evaluated studies published between 1980 and 2025 on the chemical control of smut grass [Sporobolus indicus (L.) R. Br.] in the Americas, with a focus on pastures. After screening 446 publications, 13 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. Most studies were conducted in the subtropical United States, particularly in Florida, on bahiagrass (Paspalum notatum Fluggé) pastures, with only one study carried out in Brazil. The most frequently reported herbicide was hexazinone, present in over 80% of the studies, applied either alone or in combination with mechanical methods or fertilization. Consistent results indicated control efficacy above 85%, especially at doses ≥ 0.84 kg ha⁻¹ and when applied during summer. Selectivity for use in P. notatum was considered satisfactory, despite temporary phytotoxic symptoms. Integrated strategies, such as herbicide applications combined with nitrogen fertilization, showed potential to restore forage dominance and reduce reinfestation. Other herbicides, such as glyphosate, indaziflam, imazapic, mesotrione, and triazines, were less frequently investigated. Indaziflam, applied pre-emergence, caused a significant reduction in the seedbank, showing promise for preventive management, given the high dormancy and longevity of S. indicus seeds. The integration of chemical and mechanical control produced variable outcomes: in some cases, mowing prior to application reduced efficacy, whereas in others, when associated with strategies to remove growing points and subsequent herbicide application, it enhanced control. The scarcity of studies under Brazilian and other tropical or subtropical conditions limits the understanding of species adaptation and the efficiency of management methods across different edaphoclimatic contexts. Expanding research in these regions is crucial for developing effective and sustainable management strategies.

Understanding the local to regional history of extreme events such as debris flows and floods provides context to plan for and mitigate these hazards to life, property, and infrastructure. The Klamath Mountains of northwestern California have experienced both debris flows and devastating wildfires. Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (WHIS) is at the heart of this range and has a wealth of debris flow–related landforms. Gaining an understanding of prehistoric flows and their relationship with fire or other potential triggers can help mitigate future problems. Optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon analyses from sediment and entrained organics in undisturbed facies, including beneath partially buried boulders, establishes a chronology of paleo-events in WHIS. The levee deposits indicate a repetition of debris flows during the latest Holocene, every 125–150 years, since 850 yr. Larger flows occurred, with a record elucidated from debris-flow deposits along Clear Creek, with Middle Holocene ages, ca. 2600 to 5500 yr, most of which have sufficient concentrations of charcoal to indicate origins as postfire debris flows. Deposits at higher elevations show events from the latest Pleistocene ca. 13,000 yr. This geochronology indicates that these are not singular events but are relatively common and inherent to the geomorphic processes shaping this landscape.

It is well known that the amount of damage caused by lightning strikes to protected composite airframe structures depends on the paint characteristics, often applied on the surface of composite structures to protect from environmental effects and to personalise a product. In this work, physically based models of the mechanical loads induced by lightning strikes are employed in the generation of the mechanical overpressure fields due to a simulated lightning strike, while accounting for the paint thickness. These fields are then implemented into a three-dimensional finite element framework and combined with a damage model to predict the effect of paint thickness on the mechanical damage in composite structures subjected to this type of events. These models accurately predict the increase of damage extent with the increase of paint thickness, which is corroborated by experimental observations from industry and by the experimentally observed trends reported in literature.

Partial difference operators for a large class of functors between presheaf categories are introduced, extending our previous work on the difference operator to the multivariable case. These combine into the Jacobian profunctor that provides the setting for a lax chain rule. We introduce a functorial version of multivariable Newton series whose aim is to recover a functor from its iterated differences. Not all functors are recovered; however, we get a best approximation in the form of a left adjoint, and the induced comonad is idempotent. Its fixed points are what we call soft analytic functors, a generalization of the well-studied multivariable analytic functors.

In public healthcare systems, effectiveness is a central requirement for determining which services should be offered and reimbursed. Yet, due to its technical nature and to the need for specification through specialised bodies, the nature of this principle remains underexplored. This article bridges the gap by conducting a comparative analysis of effectiveness’ operation in three distinct healthcare systems: Germany, France, and England. We argue that effectiveness can be recognised as a foundational legal principle governing reimbursement decisions, revealing a substantive and a formal dimension. Substantively, effectiveness requires a consideration of an intervention’s ability to bring about a clinical benefit, accounting both for its desired outcomes and its risks. The applied evidentiary standard calls for a careful scrutiny of the available scientific evidence, as well as the state of medical knowledge. The exceptions to this standard are extremely limited and do not undermine the validity of the wider principle. Formally, the article emphasises the central role that administrative authorities conducting Health Technology Assessment (HTA) play, with delegated decisions ranging from the definition of the applicable evidentiary standards to the issuing of binding guidelines. It is argued that mechanisms must be put in place to ensure these bodies’ expertise, independence, and transparency.

How should we understand 1970s Kenya, with its combination of inequality and relative political stability? This article offers a new perspective on that by following the early history of the Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society—the most prominent of many such societies that grew in those years. The rise and crisis of this co-operative provides evidence of mismanagement and the pursuit of personal advantage—but also suggests that civil servants saw the importance of enabling wider accumulation. As a result, the lowest-paid employees of government could see through Harambee—and other co-operatives—a possible, if precarious, route to a future as property-owners. That possibility helps explain both the institutional strength of Kenya’s provincial administration (whose employees were the members of Harambee Co-operative) and how a substantial number of Kenyans could develop a sense of themselves as citizens with a stake in the political system.

I argue for a hybrid analysis of English numeratives that (i) treats the extended basic numeratives (0–99) as lexemes but (ii) analyzes larger expressions as syntactic phrases or coordinations with magnitudes (hundred, thousand, million, …) as heads and factors (two hundred, forty-two million, …) as (obligatory) modifiers. A number of independent diagnostics – including ordinal/fractional morphology, prosodic phrasing and ellipsis/coordination – converge on the existence of a constituent containing all preceding material up to the rightmost base; this directly contradicts the cascading NumP + NP-deletion architecture of Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) when applied to English. The analysis preserves the category assignments of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language – cardinals as determinatives and nouns, ordinals as adjectives, fractionals as nouns – and refines the functional picture: (i) multiplicative factors (one hundred) function as modifiers, never as determiners or complements, and (ii) additions (one hundred and two) are coordinates in a coordination. The resulting determinative category is a small closed list, not an open-ended stock of ‘numeral lexemes’. Cardinal nouns split in two: proper when they name, common when they count – a division borne out by distributional diagnostics. The result is a more complete, empirically tighter, morphosyntax-sensitive account of English numeratives that explains why English is lexical below 100 but demands overt syntax above it.

When Vietnamese refugees came to the Gulf Coast they were attracted to the region, in part, because of the fishing industry. But their entry into the fishery created friction with white fishers who had fished those waters for years. This friction would result in violence. This article anchors this history in the marine environment of coastal Texas. Many white fishers objected to Vietnamese resettlement because of how the Vietnamese fished. Local fishers had, for years, worried about the fisheries given decades of overfishing and pollution. In this context, white fishers weaponized these very real anxieties to argue that the Vietnamese were a threat to the coastal ecosystem. This threat the Vietnamese supposedly posed to these waters, along with the racism and xenophobia of white fishers, accounted for the depth of division and the degree of violence along the coast of Texas during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Since 2023, the armed conflict in Sudan has displaced nearly 900 000 people into eastern Chad, adding to pre-existing refugee populations and placing immense strain on already fragile health and social systems. Sudanese refugees experience high levels of psychological distress, yet Chad’s mental health services remain rudimentary, characterised by severe shortages of trained professionals and fragmented service provision. Despite underfunding, humanitarian agencies have explicitly prioritised mental health within their response framework, integrating mental health support into primary care and community-led initiatives. Cultural idioms of distress, stigma and language barriers continue to complicate care delivery, while simultaneously underscoring the importance of locally grounded approaches. Sustainable progress will require closer integration between humanitarian and development efforts, the strengthening of national systems and the expansion of community capacity. Innovative partnerships such as the Greentree Acceleration Plan offer pathways for scalable, culturally relevant interventions that may ultimately strengthen mental health systems for both refugees and host populations in Chad.

Studies have linked lower birth weight to development of radiographic osteoarthritis (OA). We examined early life factors in relation to subsequent knee pain among individuals with radiographic OA. 143 participants from the UK Hertfordshire Cohort study were included. Birth weight and weight at one year (WA1) were ascertained from health ledgers and used to derive conditional infant weight gain (CIWG). At baseline and follow-up, heath questionnaires (including knee pain) and knee radiographs were collected. Only those with radiographic knee OA at baseline were analysed. Logistic regression was used to examine early life factors in relation to pain. Pain at follow-up was common (men 41.3%, women 50%). Greater WA1 and greater CIWG were related to reduced risk of knee pain at follow-up after adjustment for sex and follow-up time. CIWG was protective against knee pain at follow-up, with this association attenuated after adjustment for follow-up osteophyte score. Validation in larger studies is required.

A basic premise of research on welfare state spending is that electoral incentives matter, with voters backing programme expansion and opposing retrenchment. However, the evidence supporting this premise is mixed. Departing from previous studies, we argue that these apparent null effects arise from an emphasis on the generosity of social benefits rather than their distribution. Shifting attention to the latter, we argue that individual preferences over the allocation of welfare spending depend on their relationship to economic vulnerability. Individuals in secure economic situations support schemes with benefits proportional to contributions, while those in more vulnerable positions favour systems based on recipient need. These heterogeneous preferences translate into public evaluations of policymaker performance, providing a pathway for the electoral connection. We test this argument in two stages. First, we use data from the European Social Survey to examine how individual precarity shapes preferences for needs-based versus contributory pensions. Second, we use the Executive Approval Database to assess how the composition of pension expenditures and perceptions of debt affect government support across eleven European welfare states from 1986 to 2019. Study findings provide evidence consistent with our theoretical expectations. Results highlight the micro-level foundations of policymakers’ electoral incentives and provide a path forward for specifying connections between the allocation of social policy spending and mass politics.

This article delves into the Republic of Colombia’s emigration policies and émigrés’ petitions to return to the new republican regime in the early 1820s. During the Spanish American Revolutions, thousands abandoned their homelands with the hope of eventually coming back. However, returning was not an easy endeavour. The influx of returnees sparked many questions for the nascent government. Consequently, émigrés and their relatives employed various strategies to facilitate the return of the former to Colombia. This article argues that the constant back-and-forth movements experienced by émigrés during the war allowed them to highlight the temporary condition of emigration and, therefore, to embrace or reject the status of émigrés strategically. Concerned by the doubts about their return, expatriates, many times, rejected the epithet of “émigré.” Aware of the politicization of the term, they emphasised that they did not abandon the country out of political loyalty but out of fear. Furthermore, they appealed to ideas of belonging to the republic, family reunification, and national reconciliation to advocate for their return and formal recognition as Colombian citizens. In doing so, expatriates left the label of “émigré” behind, challenging the Colombian government’s prior perception of emigration and promoting wider conceptions of republican citizenship.