This article examines recent developments relating to the use of third-party findings of fact at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). A proliferation of fact-finding mechanisms creates more opportunities for litigants to ask the ICJ to rely on third-party facts. This demands renewed attention to how the ICJ responds to this type of evidence, especially given the rise of public interest litigation that may depend especially heavily on such materials. The analysis focuses on the ICJ’s approach in recent requests for the indication of provisional measures and asks whether the Court’s approach to third-party evidence differs depending on the phase of litigation, using the 2024 judgment in Ukraine v. Russia as a case study. Ultimately, recent decisions suggest that the ICJ’s efforts to distinguish evidence generated through an adversarial, court-like process from findings of fact based on investigation and fieldwork are often blurred in practice. Moreover, while the Court’s liberal approach to third-party evidence at the provisional measures phase may be justifiable, the quest for coherence in how the Court approaches third-party evidence, especially on the merits, remains a work in progress. To that end, the article suggests ways in which the Court could engage more closely with third-party fact-finding reports in the fulfillment of its adjudicatory function.

What does it mean to care for culture? How does an individual, a community, a government, a nongovernmental organization, or an international agency care for objects entangled in the legal and illegal antiquities trade, held in contentious museum collections, or at risk due to cultural or natural disasters? How do the various stewards of the past work across the unpredictable boundaries of private, public, and community ownership? Caring for culture involves a range of activities and commitments aimed at safeguarding tangible and intangible cultural representations and ensuring that they remain accessible to present and future generations while honoring the traditions, beliefs, and identities of the contemporary communities. This editorial introduction to this thematic issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice begins with an analysis of the duty of care for the Neo-Assyrian reliefs at the Virginia Theological Seminary, asking whether the decision to sell one of their fragments was caring for culture or a commodification of the past. The remaining contributions to this issue share the theme of caring for culture, acknowledging and building on the enduring scholarship of Neil J. Brodie and Patty Gerstenblith.

Pakistan and India were born of conflict and have endured over seventy-five years of rivalry since their birth in 1947. This has led to South Asia being one of the least integrated regions in the world, constraining its economic potential and human development. Yet the relationship has not been one of unending conflict; there have been periods of calm and even hope. Cricket, a common heritage and passion for both, has often delivered episodes of optimism, providing glimpses of what India-Pakistan cooperation could achieve were a conducive environment provided. On several occasions cricket has succeeded in uniting people of the estranged nations, allowing the nascent cultural ties that have existed for centuries to flourish. This article looks at how periods of connectivity and rupture between India and Pakistan have been reflected in the cricketing ties between the two nations and how these ties have been impacted by the wider political environment.

This paper explores whether public reason liberals have an obligation to justify the factual claims that underpin coercive norms. Traditionally, liberal theorists have focused on justifying moral principles, assuming that empirical facts are either (1) not as deeply relevant to people’s lives as moral beliefs or (2) can be easily resolved through expert consensus. However, increasing public disputes over scientific facts and recent findings in cognitive psychology challenge these assumptions. I contest this view by presenting three counterarguments. The Inseparability Argument states that factual and moral claims are deeply intertwined, and many empirical beliefs are rooted in broader worldviews that shape personal identities; the Equivalence of Public Reasons Argument maintains that, insofar as factual claims play a decisive role in shaping coercive policies, they must be subjected to the same justificatory standards as moral claims; finally, the Argument from Epistemic Pluralism claims that liberal societies are not only morally but also epistemically diverse, with citizens holding competing views on what counts as reliable knowledge. Together, these arguments support the existence of a Liberal Duty of Factual Justification (LDFJ), asserting that public reason liberals must engage in the justification of factual premises, as they do with moral principles, to maintain democratic legitimacy.

We prove the central limit theorem (CLT), the first-order Edgeworth expansion and a mixing local central limit theorem (MLCLT) for Birkhoff sums of a class of unbounded heavily oscillating observables over a family of full-branch piecewise $C^2$ expanding maps of the interval. As a corollary, we obtain the corresponding results for Boolean-type transformations on $\mathbb {R}$. The class of observables in the CLT and the MLCLT on $\mathbb {R}$ include the real part, the imaginary part and the absolute value of the Riemann zeta function. Thus obtained CLT and MLCLT for the Riemann zeta function are in the spirit of the results of Lifschitz & Weber [Sampling the Lindelöf hypothesis with the Cauchy random walk. Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 98 (2009), 241–270] and Steuding [Sampling the Lindelöf hypothesis with an ergodic transformation. RIMS Kôkyûroku Bessatsu B34 (2012), 361–381] who have proven the strong law of large numbers for sampling the Lindelöf hypothesis.

The ability to manage money is essential for independent functioning but highly sensitive to cognitive decline. Managing money involves more than deploying skills rationally; it is influenced by a range of emotional and psychosocial factors. There is relatively little knowledge about how older adults, families and care professionals working with older people navigate and experience potential challenges of declining mental capacity to manage money. This article draws on a UK-based study involving 13 older people and/or family members and 28 social sector professionals, and their experiences of supporting older people with cognitive decline to manage money, triangulated with public information resources from major national organisations across the health, care, consumer and charity sectors. It focuses on the emotive and personal nature of cognitive decline and money management. Declining mental capacity to manage money can strike at the core of people’s sense of who they are, leading to strong tensions and difficulties in discussing support. Support to manage money is often framed in discussions as ‘there if we need it’; this can be reassuring for people, but may be challenged if there are subsequent disagreements and changes in perspectives about the detail and timing of support. These nuances are not well reflected in public information resources, which largely emphasise administrative procedure. Financial organisations may lack empathy that declining mental capacity to manage money is extremely challenging. The article highlights a greater need for recognition of the emotional and psychosocial complexities presented by declining mental capacity to manage money in later life.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are involved in many physiological and pathophysiological processes. Conventional pharmacological models categorize the typology of pharmacologic ligands as agonists or antagonists. Biased agonism is a relatively newer pharmacodynamic characteristic that has potential to optimize therapeutic efficacy while minimizing adverse effects in psychiatric and neurological treatments. We conducted a narrative literature review of articles obtained from PubMed, Embase, and MEDLINE from inception to April 2025, focusing on pharmacologic antagonism (i.e., competitive, noncompetitive, uncompetitive) and agonism (i.e., full, partial, inverse, superagonism, biased). Primary and secondary articles defining these concepts were included, provided they addressed pharmacologic (rather than chemical) antagonism and agonism. Distinct mechanisms of antagonism and agonism were identified, each contributing nuanced receptor modulation beyond the conventional models. Notably, biased agonism facilitates targeted intracellular signaling (e.g., G protein- versus β-arrestin–mediated). Use cases demonstrate relatively greater efficacy (e.g., incretin receptor agonist, tirzepatide) and improved safety (e.g., serotonergic psychedelics, opioids). Biased agonism provides a potential avenue for future drug development, with emerging preclinical evidence suggesting potential to differentially activate intracellular pathways and thereby improve efficacy and safety profiles of psychopharmacologic agents—pending clinical validation. Future research vistas should aim to rigorously assess the long-term outcomes of biased agonism, explicitly addressing individual variability in receptor signaling and therapeutic response.

Within the broad context of design research, joint attention within co-creation represents a critical component, linking cognitive actors through dynamic interactions. This study introduces a novel approach employing deep learning algorithms to objectively quantify joint attention, offering a significant advancement over traditional subjective methods. We developed an optimized deep learning algorithm, YOLO-TP, to identify participants’ engagement in design workshops accurately. Our research methodology involved video recording of design workshops and subsequent analysis using the YOLO-TP algorithm to track and measure joint attention instances. Key findings demonstrate that the algorithm effectively quantifies joint attention with high reliability and correlates well with known measures of intersubjectivity and co-creation effectiveness. This approach not only provides a more objective measure of joint attention but also allows for the real-time analysis of collaborative interactions. The implications of this study are profound, suggesting that the integration of automated human activity recognition in co-creation can significantly enhance the understanding and facilitation of collaborative design processes, potentially leading to more effective design outcomes.

This article explores the formation of public perceptions and the evolving historical reputation of Eleftherios Venizelos, arguably the most prominent Greek statesman of the twentieth century. While Venizelos actively cultivated his legacy during his lifetime, the article argues that it was the interplay of posthumous socio-political developments, cross-partisan commemorations and deliberate memory work that gradually solidified his image as a national figure. Focusing on the period from his death in 1936 until the imposition of the military dictatorship in 1967, the article shows how the overlap between Greece’s two major twentieth-century divides – the National Schism and the Civil War – shaped the trajectories of his memory. Tracing these shifts across political uses, historiographical portrayals and public commemorations, the article also engages broader debates on charismatic leadership, political myth and the making of national heroic figures, situating the Greek case within a wider comparative framework.

In a close replication study of Darcy et al., (2016), Huensch (2024) reported a lack of clear relationships between inhibitory control (IC) and phonological processing, contrary to the initial findings. Given the general unreliability of response-time differences, which are often the basis of IC measures and could potentially mask small effects, we performed secondary analyses on Huensch’s (2024) open data set to investigate (a) the extent to which the reliability of IC measures could be improved using model-based approaches (Hui & Wu, 2024), (b) the correlations between the different IC tasks, and (c) their predictive power for phonological processing, based on the more reliable indices. Results showed that model-based approaches generally improved reliability, and particularly for the Stroop and Simon tasks to acceptable levels. Yet, correlations between IC tasks remained low, and partial correlation and hierarchical regression still failed to reveal significant relationships between IC and phonological processing, further confirming Huensch’s (2024) findings.

This introduction to the Agora outlines the issues raised by and arguments in Itamar Mann’s article, ‘From survival cannibalism to climate politics: Rethinking Regina vs Dudley and Stephens’, and the four commentaries thereon.

Richard Simon has long presented an enigma for historians, as his status as a pathbreaking textual critic and the opposition his work engendered from contemporary ecclesiastical authorities has sat uncomfortably alongside his consistent advocacy of his Catholic credentials. This article approaches this problem via an analysis of two hitherto understudied parts of his scholarly corpus. It first elucidates Simon’s distinctive plan for a new polyglot Bible in the mid-1680s before shifting attention some fifteen years to consider his work in French vernacular biblical translation, bringing out how the confessionally inflected content of his work in that field contrasted with his earlier critical scholarship. By revealing how Simon negotiated the relationship between scholarship and religion during his working life, the article foregrounds the continued import of confessionalized erudition at the turn of the eighteenth century while also interrogating the limits of its explanatory power as a historical category.

This study examines Taiwanese netizens’ metapragmatic debates on tonal variation in Taiwan Mandarin, focusing on the pronunciation of 企業 qìyè ‘company/enterprise’ by two government officials during a nationally broadcast press conference. It investigates how the non-standard variant qǐyè, a relic feature historically present in Taiwan, becomes enregistered as a linguistic emblem of imported Chinese influence through the processes of clasping and semiotic differentiation. The study highlights the ideological stakes in linguistic boundary-making and explores how tonal variation functions as a site for negotiating national identity. It further connects this linguistic debate to broader ideological projects such as democratization, Taiwanization, and shifting Taiwan-China relations. By integrating variationist and metapragmatic approaches, this study contributes to discussions on the indexical field and the role of explicit metapragmatic commentary in shaping linguistic change. (Indexicality, language ideology, tonal variation, enregisterment, language policing, metapragmatics, Taiwan)

We argue that cross-ownership increases the amount of private information in stock prices, enhancing the ability of stock prices to provide feedback to managers. Consistent with this argument, we find greater cross-ownership heightens a firm’s investment-q sensitivity. This effect is stronger for firms with a lower propensity for voluntary disclosure and for firms whose managers hold less private information. Furthermore, we find that cross-ownership is negatively associated with the sensitivity of a firm’s investment to its peers’ stock prices. Additionally, cross-ownership has a stronger impact on the investment-q sensitivity when measured among investors who trade more actively in the firm’s shares. By using financial institution mergers as an identification strategy, we strengthen the causal inference. Overall, our results suggest that cross-ownership helps increase revelatory price efficiency (RPE), potentially leading to more efficient corporate decisions.

The commodity frontiers framework describes well the movement of sugar cultivation across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. But it is less effective when explaining the evolution of sugar in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu. In Tamil Nadu, the high costs of cultivation discouraged many peasants and landowners from planting sugar cane. As a consequence, despite British pressure to plant more cane, there was little increase in the crop before the twentieth century. In Tamil Nadu, sugar made from palmyra juice was a viable and popular substitute for cane sugar and this further discouraged the expansion of cane cultivation. The jaggery made from palm juice satisfied the demand for sweetener from most consumers in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century, palm jaggery was the raw material for making white sugar and distilling arrack in the sugar mills that were built in the region. Regional conditions shaped the development of sugar cultivation and manufacturing in Tamil Nadu. It is not a story of interaction between the local and the global as is found in the commodity frontiers framework. The region is a scale of activity that possesses great explanatory power, as the case of nineteenth-century South India shows.

The Caribbean islands represent some of the most biologically diverse places on Earth, but much of that diversity is now at risk due to human impact. Larger islands in the Caribbean host more native species, but small islands still hold together a significant portion of the regional biota. Although our knowledge of extinct and extirpated taxa continues to improve, there are hundreds of islands, each with their own unique faunal histories from where there is little information about their ancient diversity. Sombrero is a very small island (0.38 km2) located within the limits between the Greater and Lesser Antilles and is largely barren of vegetation and freshwater. The island was extensively mined for bird guano in the 1800s, which profoundly altered its topography and fauna. Here, we describe a collection of microvertebrates recovered in 1964 from Sombrero, which documents an unexpectedly high number of colonization events and high extinction rate for this territory. The late Quaternary deposits from the island contain remains of five types of lizards, a snake, a tortoise, and an anuran that colonized the island once it became aerially exposed in the early Pleistocene. The ability for such a small, remote island to have eight colonizing taxa in < 2.5 Ma, provides support for the role that island hopping played in regional biodiversity in the Cenozoic (e.g., GAARlandia), even across small, barren islands. Furthermore, these fossils further show that large scale defaunation also affected vertebrate communities on very small islands in the Caribbean.