In 2024, while Switzerland was no longer grappling with immediate crises, the lingering effects of an overlapping crisis remained evident. Public dissatisfaction grew, driven by perceptions that state interventions disproportionately favoured banks and large corporations, while the needs of ordinary citizens amid a cost-of-living crisis were sidelined. This contributed to a broader crisis of representation. This article examines how direct democracy functions as a channel for expressing such discontent, focusing on the historic approval of a popular initiative to increase public welfare spending despite a strained federal budget. It concludes with a discussion of three key political issues: the landmark European Court of Human Rights ruling in KlimaSeniorinnen and Others v. Switzerland, the domestic debate about austerity measures and the conclusion of negotiations on a new EU–Switzerland deal.

The article examines the fundamental international legal standards on guarantees and state protection of the legal profession of an attorney, analysing the essential content of the relevant provisions, the specifics of the current criminal law regulation in Ukraine, and also the prospects and trends for its further reform. The comparative analysis focused on the positive experience of foreign legislation, in particular, the criminal codes of Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Spain, the United States, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and the United Kingdom, in terms of determining the direct object of an offence in crimes against justice. This allows the identification of certain regularities in the approaches to defining the grounds for criminal liability and the elements of criminal offences against the legitimate legal activities of a defence counsel (primarily, an attorney) or another person providing legal aid. The article also addresses the criminal law mechanisms for protecting the rights and interests of individuals and legal entities from the unlawful actions of attorneys and representatives, including their violation of fundamental principles of law enforcement and legal requirements.

This article investigates the history of displaying nuclear energy from the 1980s to the present by tracing the cultural biography of a scale model of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, which operated in Lithuania between 1983 and 2009. By reconstructing the model’s trajectory, from its initial role as a promotional exhibit in Soviet-era industry showcasing to its contemporary status as an artifact of nuclear cultural heritage, the study highlights a shift in the politics and practices of exhibiting the atom, as well as evolving theoretical frameworks and cultural discourses surrounding nuclear energy. The author argues that the model’s movement through industrial, technological, artistic, and heritage domains, along with its diverse functions, has rendered it a techno-political actor that, alongside human and institutional agents, plays a significant role in shaping the dynamics of nuclear culture.

This study developed and evaluated an online English speaking training approach that integrates corpora and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The training integrated a self-developed spoken corpus, generative AI tools, and text-to-speech AI tools. Pre- and post-test results identified improvements in participants’ speaking performances. Participants attempted to use more positive linguistic features (e.g. producing complex sentences more frequently) and avoid using negative linguistic features (e.g. reducing the number of vowel errors) after receiving the training. Participants showed positive attitudes towards this corpus-based and AI-integrated English oral ability learning approach and affirmed the importance of integrating both tools. The corpus helped raise participants’ awareness of features that influence speaking performance and offered prompt engineering and feedback-checking functions, while the generative AI tools provided useful feedback and tailor-made sample responses. Additionally, text-to-speech AI tools offered learners with tailor-made native speaker samples for imitation and helped learners learn pausing. Results also revealed that this approach helped create an interactive oral ability learning environment, and the combination of corpora and AI tools provided more accurate feedback for each subskill of speaking.

We report a new relative sea level curve from Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland, to investigate the transition from maximum to minimum loading across Nares Strait. We sampled marine bivalves and terrestrial macrofossils for radiocarbon dating from raised marine terraces in Rensselaer Valley, Inglefield Land (78.58°N, 70.71°W) to constrain relative sea level through the Holocene. The oldest terrestrial macrofossil of 9010–8650 cal yr BP provides a minimum-limiting constraint for the deglaciation. Sea level fell rapidly from the marine limit at 85 ± 4 m to 37.5 ± 4 m above sea level (m asl) between 9010–8650 and 7970–7790 cal yr BP at a rate of 49 m/ka. The rate of sea -level fall decreased to 11 m/ka between 7970–7790 and 5320–5060 cal yr BP, when it fell from 37.5 ± 4 to 9 ± 4 m asl. After 5,320–5,060 cal yr BP, we estimate sea level fell at a lower rate of 2 m/ka to modern sea level. The period of fastest emergence in Inglefield Land is earlier in time than in Hall Land, reflecting earlier deglaciation, and is steeper than in Hall Land and Washington Land. This sea-level history captures the transition from the style of emergence from Pituffik to Hall Land.

The success (or failure) of ‘borrowed’ or ‘transplanted’ laws is largely attributed to the extent of compatibility between them and the contexts of their host countries. This paper draws upon legal philosophy, legal transplant, and new institutional economics literature to argue that while compatibility is both relevant and important, legitimacy is equally – if not more –critical for shaping the extent, quality and direction of enforcement of legal transplants in their adoptive contexts. This is especially true for the more technical economic transplants that are often considered to be context independent. To establish this argument, the paper explores the concept of legitimacy and its relevance for legal transplants; why it may be mistaken for compatibility; and why it is distinct from it. It also compares the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi experience of transplanting modern competition laws to demonstrate how the legitimacy quotient of these economic transplants has impacted their subsequent enforcement.

Notating electroacoustic music can be challenging due to the uniqueness of the instruments employed. Electronic instruments can include generative components that can manipulate sound at different time levels, in which parameter variations can correlate non-linearly to changes in the instrument’s timbre. The way compositions for electronic instruments are notated depends on their interfaces and the parameter controls available to performers, which determine the state of their sound-generating system. In this article, we propose a notation system for generative synthesis based on a projection from its parameter space to a timbre space, allowing to organise synthesiser states based on their timbral characteristics. To investigate this approach, we introduce the Meta-Benjolin, a state-based notation system for chaotic sound synthesis employing a three-dimensional, navigable timbre space and a composition timeline. The Meta-Benjolin was developed as a control structure for the Benjolin, a chaotic synthesiser. Framing chaotic synthesis as a specific instance of generative synthesis, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the state- and timbre-based representation we designed based on the thematic analysis of an interview study with 19 musicians, who composed a piece using the Meta-Benjolin notational interface.

Cet article retrace l’évolution des pratiques d’écriture documentaire à l’abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés et montre combien leur rôle fut central dans la défense des droits de l’institution. Dès le xie siècle, les moines utilisent des outils variés (historiographie, forgeries, interpolations) pour protéger leur patrimoine face aux contestations, notamment celles émanant des évêques de Paris. Le cartulaire des Trois Croix, élaboré au xiie siècle, constitue un premier socle documentaire, combinant diplomatique et historiographie pour affirmer la libertas du monastère. À partir du xiiie siècle, le contexte économique et institutionnel change. La gestion des terres passe d’un système en faire-valoir direct à une économie centrée sur les rentes. Dans ce cadre, les cartulaires AB et G1 introduisent un classement topographique des actes qui permettent d’optimiser la gestion des possessions et renforcent les droits monastiques face aux tensions croissantes avec les autorités royales et épiscopales. Ces cartulaires traduisent une spécialisation des outils documentaires, avec une attention accrue portée aux dépendances locales, au détriment d’une vision globale du patrimoine. L’article met en lumière l’adaptation des pratiques documentaires aux mutations économiques et politiques, tout en soulignant leur rôle dans la construction de l’identité institutionnelle du monastère. Enfin, il analyse l’effacement progressif de cette riche tradition documentaire à l’époque moderne au profit d’un retour quasi-systématique à son passé carolingien ou à l’érudition mauriste.

We investigated radiocarbon dates of human bone samples from several medieval sites in Trondheim, central Norway. Stable isotope data was used to estimate marine correction for the radiocarbon dates, which is necessary to correct the radiocarbon ages and establish age models for the archaeological layers. We observed that a marine correction without ΔR does not lead to a well-defined model for all sites. Allowing a variable ΔR improves the model, which indicates that food sources and trade routes have changed over time, influencing the mobility of food resources as well as of people. However, this does not work for all sites, indicating that variation of reservoir ages could also be the result of individual preferences for the food and that fish with different ΔR, and thus different geographical origin, was consumed during the same periods. Many radiocarbon and stable isotope (δ13C, δ15N) measurements have been carried out for the project. We calculated %marine consumption from the isotope values and found that it varies greatly, between 7% and 51%, and apparently independent of period, social status, churchyard location or other factors. Based on these data, we determined average reservoir ages for the marine food consumed in Trondheim during different phases, varying between ΔR = –150 and 280 years.

Water is essential to life, dignity and recovery in armed conflict. Increasingly targeted, manipulated or incidentally damaged, it has become both a casualty and a weapon of war, with impacts that are often undocumented or unattributed. While there are multiple protections for water under international humanitarian law (IHL), legal indeterminacies, operational constraints and weak implementation undermine their effectiveness. This article examines patterns, drivers and types of harm relating to water in armed conflict, including reverberating effects and cumulative impacts, alongside the relevant legal frameworks. It advocates a protective interpretation of IHL and proposes measures including the establishment of a collaborative inter-agency mechanism to link field realities with the law, strengthening civilian protection where survival is at stake.

Radiocarbon (14C) dating is a powerful tool for establishing reliable chronologies for proxy records recovered from environmental archives, including lacustrine sediments. However, lacustrine sediments are often limited with respect to availability of material such as terrestrial macrofossils that are traditionally targeted for 14C dating. Flow cytometry, in combination with physicochemical preprocessing, is an emerging technique for the isolation of pollen from terrestrial sediments, holding the promise of pollen recovery of sufficient purity and efficiency for routine 14C analysis. Here, we examine the performance of this approach by undertaking a comprehensive blank assessment for a new pollen isolation protocol and comparing pollen-14C data against established chronologies for two lake records. Our procedure yields consistent values for constant contamination with extraneous carbon of 1.34±0.40 µg C and an F14C of 0.85±0.04, rendering our method suitable for microscale 14C analysis. The pollen-14C data are largely in agreement with age estimates for the same layers of the lake sediment cores based on macrofossil-14C analysis and tephrochronology. However, we also observe that our pollen samples appear to be, on average, slightly older than their macrofossil counterparts. We hypothesize this to be the result of sedimentary and translocation processes that retard pollen transport and lacustrine deposition.

This article discusses the Impressed Ware (IW) ceramic class from the early Late Chalcolithic 2 period (4200–4000 B.C.), which is considered fundamental for understanding chronological and socio-economic issues related to production and craft specialization in the Northern Mesopotamian region. The unpublished materials from the proto-historic site of Asingeran (Kurdistan region of Iraq) are examined through stylistic and decorative analysis and compared with specimens from contemporary sites across a broad territory, including the north-eastern Altinova plain, the south-eastern Erbil area, the south-western Khabur valley, and the Upper Eastern Tigris Basin. This paper aims to provide an overview of all IW ceramics found in Northern Mesopotamia, highlighting how the presence of this type, despite its diverse versions, serves as a significant means of identifying shared social practices among different communities within a specific ceramic region.

We report new AMS radiocarbon dates of 16 samples from the Holocene deposits of the Vistula Spit, a large coastal barrier landform on the Southern Baltic coast. Collection of the samples was conducted directly from the sedimentary succession excavated during 2020–2022 construction of the Vistula Spit shipping canal. The dated material represents several paleosol horizons and peat lenses buried in the dune deposits, as well as their substrate – beach and shallow marine deposits.

Adam Smith seeks to explain in the Wealth of Nations and Lectures on Jurisprudence the persistence of slavery as an institution. In order to accomplish this, he also draws on arguments he had developed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The result is a sophisticated explanation that bridges economic, psychological, and moral considerations. After presenting Smith’s explanation, I will consider a discussion of the moral wrong of slavery in the work of Ottobah Cugoano, author of the incisive criticism of the slave trade Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. I will suggest that Cugoano’s account of what is morally wrong in slavery shows an important lacuna in Smith’s views.