A contemporary and innovative feature of post-mining land use (‘PMLU’) planning is the repurposing of sites such as mine-voids to alternative purposes such as pumped hydro, irrigated agriculture, renewable energy, or recreation and tourism. Repurposing can facilitate the transition of the region’s economy post-mining and contribute to rehabilitation for sites that cannot be returned to the pre-mining land use. A key issue inhibiting a third-party engaging in repurposing projects is the underlying tenure and the attached liability for residual and unforeseen risks. This article scopes out the tenure issue and considers whether introducing a new form of tenure in Western Australia could facilitate PMLU transitions and mitigate the frequent problem of sites languishing under care and maintenance.

Moldova’s geopolitical position, caught between Russia and the West, presents a critical, yet often oversimplified, lens through which to understand its post-Soviet development. This article problematizes the assumption, arguing that Moldovan party politics demonstrates a more fluid and contested landscape than commonly portrayed. Through a qualitative analysis of 31 party electoral programmes between 2001 and 2024, we map the evolution of ‘geopolitical codes’ – how parties articulate foreign policy – and examine their impact on consensus-building and strategic choices. The findings reveal nuanced ideological distinctions within both pro-Russian and pro-European factions, and adaptive codes shaped by both domestic competition and transnational pressures. Crucially, we demonstrate how inter-party dynamics – beyond simple geopolitical alignment – mediate external influences and shape Moldova’s foreign policy. This research contributes to the literature by moving beyond deterministic geopolitical frameworks, highlighting the agency of domestic actors in peripheral states, and offering a deepened understanding of how party competition shapes geopolitical orientation and consensus formation.

Review systems, including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences, are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e., unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. Overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while the scores predicted by reviewers’ written feedback remain constant. This difference is consistent across both expert and non-expert reviewers. Online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms’ goal of providing a representative quality assessment.

In modern jurisprudence, it is recognized that courts will engage in arbitration, often under the rubric of Alternative Dispute Resolution.1 Recourse to arbitration further back in the English past has often been perceived as extra-legal, taking place outside the system of courts, and sometimes intended specifically to avoid those courts. This research has concentrated on the avoidance of secular courts, in particular the king’s courts and common law (see below). By contrast, arbitration in ecclesiastical courts has received less detailed investigation, although many salient aspects have been approached (as indicated below).

This article re-examines the literature on the evidential uses of French tenses, and evaluates what distinguishes French from languages that are said to possess fully grammaticalized evidential systems. Based on corpus analyses, semantic testing, and crosslinguistic comparisons, this study argues that the French passé composé and imparfait do not carry any inherent evidential meaning, unlike the futur and conditionnel. The evidential interpretations of the former two tenses are simply conveyed by the context, while those of the latter two are indeed due to their intrinsic semantic make-up. We conclude that although French encodes evidentiality with verbal inflections only infrequently, it is no different from languages usually cited to illustrate advanced evidential paradigms from a formal and semantic standpoint.

Mammalian species richness is commonly highest at mid- to high elevations, but the accumulation of sediment that might bury and preserve skeletal remains generally occurs at lower elevations, leading to concerns that fossil assemblages are biased toward low-elevation taxa. Here, I use extant mammals as an analogue to test the basin-scale spatial overlap between species ranges and sediment sinks where burial and fossilization would be possible. Sediment sinks are estimated within five topographically complex regions in western North America by identifying areas with both a low slope and a high contributing area of runoff and are compared with point occurrences of mammals compiled from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). I find that, among the test areas, 82–96% of all species have occurrences that overlap with a sediment sink, despite common offsets in the elevations of maximum sink area and maximum species richness: summed across all test areas, 83% of species and 87% of total sediment sink area are found in the lowest 1000 m of the test areas. Although many other factors can act against the fossilization of terrestrial mammals, these results indicate that the spatial distribution of mammal species with respect to sediment sinks should not in itself impose a major bias at the basin scale.

This article reconceptualizes the “rural problematique” in Canada through the contemporary “problem” of the rural migrant. Utilizing critical historical institutional theory, we argue that the challenges newcomers face in rural spaces not only reveal the stagnation of settlement policies but also demonstrate the long-lasting, integrative and harmful impacts of policy inertia. While newcomers experience the implications of inadequate and exclusionary social policies particularly acutely, the obstacles they face cannot be solved through changes to migration policy alone. Rather, we show how these barriers are the result of the historical, specific role that rural Canada plays within the political economy of the country, which relies upon the delineation between rural and urban, and the persistence of the rural as problematic. Thus, an analysis of the contemporary “problem” of the rural migrant demonstrates how the context can change, but the outcomes, which are consistent with the broader rural dynamic, remain the same.

Democratic backsliding occurs incrementally, but the empirical study of how citizens respond to undemocratic politicians has been predominantly static. I formulate and test predictions about how different sequences of backsliding shape accountability. Using a novel preregistered experiment ($N = 4,234$) capturing the reality that democratic transgressions are committed by elected officials step by step, I find that a majority of American respondents – against the backdrop of partisan and policy interests – are willing to electorally remove the incumbent as episodes of democratic backsliding unfold. Moreover, incumbents who incrementally decrease the severity of democratic transgressions are held accountable more promptly than incumbents who incrementally increase or sporadically vary the severity. By establishing a new experimental framework to study democratic backsliding, my dynamic approach not only paints a more nuanced picture of Americans’ willingness to defend democracy, but also demonstrates that sequence matters in shaping voter behavior amid incremental transgressions of democracy.

A complete classification of unimodular valuations on the set of lattice polygons with values in the spaces of polynomials and formal power series, respectively, is established. The valuations are classified in terms of their behavior with respect to dilation using extensions to unbounded polyhedra and basic invariant theory.