Against a backdrop of rapidly expanding health artificial intelligence (AI) development, this paper examines how the European Union’s (EU) stringent digital regulations may incentivise the outsourcing of personal health data collection to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), fuelling a new form of AI ethics dumping. Drawing on parallels with the historical offshoring of clinical trials, we argue that current EU instruments, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and Medical Devices Regulation, impose robust internal safeguards but do not prevent the use of health data collected unethically beyond EU borders. This regulatory gap enables data colonialism, whereby commercial actors exploit weaker legal environments abroad without equitable benefit-sharing. Building on earlier EU responses to ethics dumping in clinical trials, we propose legal and policy pathways to prevent similar harms in the context of AI.

This article explores the enactment of the Civil Wrongs Ordinance in Mandate Palestine in order to question the utility of “Anglicization” as a historical lens, and to suggest that it tends to crowd out more helpful framings, in particular those involving distributive or class motivations and effects. The Ordinance has been portrayed primarily as an instance of the codification of the common law of torts and its import to Palestine. Without denying the Englishness of the Ordinance, this article demonstrates that it did not codify the common law of tort but went considerably beyond it in reforming Palestine’s liability regime. It further argues that the “Anglicization” framing obscures more than it illuminates, missing the massive redistribution of risk, costs, liability, and welfare that resulted from the change in Palestine’s tort law. The study also complicates the commonly accepted chronology of the development of compensation for injuries in the common law world. In Palestine, English-style tort law was the product of progressive reform, designed to overcome the shortcomings of the preceding regime of workers’ compensation schemes. The significance of Anglicized tort law in this jurisdiction was thus very different, in some ways the polar opposite, of that in other, better-known contexts.

This article presents an analysis of two sheet gold ornaments of the Mycenaean post-palatial period (twelfth–eleventh centuries bc) found in two cemeteries on the island of Kefalonia. These unusual ornaments bear solar symbols of Nordic and central European type, the closest parallels being those on the contemporary gold discs from votive deposits on the Italian peninsula. The study considers the technological, morphological, and iconographic particularities of the Kefalonian ornaments and how they differ from each other and from other finds. The ornaments’ use in a funerary context is examined against Aegean practices, burial rites, and ideology. The examination of their iconographic and conceptual antecedents in the Aegean cultural sphere reveals that the exogenous input in their creation—linked to transcultural exchange within the Adriatic—was matched by indigenous engagement with aspects of cosmology.

The Arctic, once a climate victim, is now becoming a climate stressor. The melting ice has brought us closer to climate tipping points and, simultaneously, has made oil reserves in the Arctic more accessible. As a result, a clash has emerged between scientific warnings and climate change obstruction (CCO) discourses that prioritise economic ambitions over climate concerns. This study investigates whether, despite scientific warnings, Norway defends further oil extraction in the Arctic, thus aligning with CCO discourses by prioritising economic interests over climate urgency. Based on a qualitative inductive approach, we analyse four official White Papers from the Norwegian government, identify their discursive patterns and contrast them with CCO discourses found in the literature. We found that the Norwegian government exhibits an affinity with six CCO discourses: 1) Non-Transformative Discourse, 2) Responsibility Deflection Discourse, 3) Discourse of the Common Good, 4) Discourse of Higher Priorities or Loyalties, 5) The Legal Discourse, and 6) The Discourse of Good Intentions. We conclude that the Norwegian government has constructed a narrative where the recognition of climate urgency does not mean the renouncement of its long-term petroleum interests and further oil extraction in the Arctic. This narrative, named here as the “green oil” narrative, uses renewable energies to electrify the oil industry, thus presenting renewables as an ally of oil expansion rather than a step toward a fossil fuel phase-out. Overall, Norway’s current narrative fails to address oil dependency, defending and justifying oil extraction in the Arctic.

With the Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, the European Union strives to address the negative externalities of companies that arise in the global economy. The new Directive follows the example of national lawmakers by requiring large companies operating in their own jurisdiction to manage adverse impacts on human rights and the environment. These due diligence laws affect companies beyond European borders by cascading due diligence standards down transnational ownership ties and value chains. They are shifting gears in the complex engine of the global economy and have considerable impacts on stakeholders in third countries. These extraterritorial implications raise the question of what limits international law places on relevant unilateral legislation. This article assesses the Directive against the law of jurisdiction and international comity arguing that unilateral due diligence laws are an appropriate way to address transnational sustainability challenges, provided lawmakers take adequate precautions.

For a plant as renowned and beloved in China as the plum blossom (meihua 梅花), there is conspicuously little written in English about eating it. However, without understanding the historical affection for consuming plum blossoms, our comprehension of it as a cultural icon misses an important dimension. This article explores the intriguing discourse surrounding plum blossom consumption in three sections. The first section introduces the key concept of qing 清 (“purity”) and its relation to the “poet’s spleen” (shiren pi 詩人脾), which provides a theoretical framework for a relationship between eating it and writing poetry. The second section examines Song-dynasty poems on this eating practice, particularly those by Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1206) and the Rivers and Lakes poets (jianghu shiren 江湖詩人). Their poetry was closely tied to new developments in the notion of qi 氣 and “poetic spleen” (shipi 詩脾). The third section turns to culinary recipes, primarily from the Rivers and Lakes poet Lin Hong 林洪 (fl. 1224–1263), who promotes qing aesthetics in plum blossom dishes. I argue that the discovery of culinary value in a flower long regarded as more symbolic than edible marks a significant development in Song-dynasty (960–1279) literati culture, aesthetics, intellectual history, and medicine.

In this paper, I explore the millennium-long presence of the chickpea in premodern China by highlighting three key historical moments. The legume had its first rise to prominence as a cosmopolitan “Muslim Bean” in the Mongol Yuan (1271–1368) imperial diet. It then experienced a phase of obscurity, as the most renowned Chinese herbalist, Li Shizhen 李時珍 (1518–1593), conflated it with the pea. A disparate identity of the legume emerged around the same time, as the bean garnered attention from famine relief specialists, consequently transforming into a source of sustenance. The multiple lives of the chickpea were characterized with a common emphasis on its foreignness, drawing connections to various Eurasian cultures beyond China. The plant’s enduring presence, coupled with ongoing allusions to its alienness, makes it a perpetual foreigner in the broad expanse of the Chinese empire.

This article explores how psychiatrists conceptualised the role of family relations and emotional atmospheres in the context of schizophrenia research in the second half of the twentieth century. It traces how families became the primary site to be mined and measured to explain schizophrenia’s onset, course and outcome, and zooms in on global psychiatric investigations of expressed emotion in families of schizophrenic patients, which aimed to offer a theoretical framework for understanding one of the most intriguing and influential findings of transcultural psychiatry: that schizophrenia appeared to have a shorter course and favourable recovery rates outside the Western world. The article engages with a wealth of research materials from schizophrenia and expressed emotion studies, and a variety of voices – clinicians, patients, families – which shaped these investigations. It also draws a comparison between this discussion of ‘traditional’ families as a beneficial environment for schizophrenia, and critical psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses from the middle decades of the century which focused on the reportedly extreme psychopathological potential of ‘schizophrenogenic’ family relations in the Western world. Analyzed through this prism, expressed emotion research constructed the Global South as a preferable, even romanticized, alternative to the Western model of family interaction. On closer inspection, however, this idealization of the traditional family involved a variety of essentializing and romanticizing ideas which reinforced the ever-present binary of the modern West versus backward Global South, and perpetuated the belief in the decolonising and developing world’s cultural and intellectual simplicity.

Theodicies aim at explaining why an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God might enable the existence of evil and the suffering it causes. I draw on an idea from eighteenth-century Italian Jewish philosopher and kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to develop a ‘world-building theodicy’. The main idea is that God wanted his creatures to participate in the creation of the world and manifest themselves as godlike mini creators. Therefore, God created an unfinished world full of natural dangers and evil-doing people, leaving creatures to develop the world into a utopia through their own hard work. This theodicy is designed to account for all types of worldly evil and any finite amount, all without controversial doctrines about free will.

This article revisits the diachrony of the genitive alternation, the alternation between ’s and prepositional phrases headed by of in Present-Day English. It is usually assumed to have developed around 1400 CE. For Old English (c. 650–1000 CE), a different alternation between pre-modifying and post-modifying genitive-case-marked noun phrases is suggested to be the genitive alternation. Building on descriptions of competition between genitive-case-marked noun phrases (gen) and prepositional phrases with of (of) in Old English, and unpicking some of the preconceptions about the alternation in Old English, we propose a bottom-up method for systematically identifying possible alternation between of and gen in the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). Our findings indicate that there is plausibly an alternation in Old English that stands in continuity with Present-Day English and suggest a more complex diachrony for the alternation characterized by continuity and discontinuity in the alternants and the envelope of variation.

The inter-war period was a time of mobilisation against syphilis in France and its colonial empire. The spread of the disease was perceived as a threat to the economic development of its colonies, particularly because of the labour shortages it might cause. In 1916, a new player appeared on the scene of the French efforts to control the disease: the Institut Prophylactique, founded by Arthur Vernes. Its project was nothing less than to eradicate the disease, and its activities in the colonies expanded significantly during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the Institut Prophylactique has been largely forgotten in the history of medicine. Although the project was a failure, this article shows that it played an important role in controlling syphilis, both in France and in its colonies. This historical study thus emphasises the importance of considering alternative and failed projects as part of the complex picture of health history.

Standard presentations of the fine-tuning argument for theism require that we have a priori insight, on the basis of moral considerations, into what God is likely to do. Standard versions of the sceptical theist response to the evidential problem of evil deny that we have such insight (at least to any significant extent). These facts call into question whether sceptical theists can consistently endorse the fine-tuning argument. In this paper, I present a version of the fine-tuning argument that sceptical theists may consistently endorse, as it does not rely on our ability to make a priori judgements concerning divine intentions.

This article has a two objectives. The first objective is to investigate the history of identity politics in Bangladesh from the British and Pakistani periods to the post-independence era. It argues that the syncretic culture that flourished during the Muslim rule was deliberately disrupted by the British divide-and-rule policy of partitioning Bengal in 1905 along religious lines, fomenting such communal hatred between Hindus and Muslims that resulted in the partition of 1947, with East Bengal joining Pakistan. This also sowed the seeds of identity politics and a “pendulum syndrome” in future Bangladeshi politics, marked by a perpetual strife between advocates of ethnolinguistic nationalism on one side and religious nationalism on the other, which has become a perennial source of violence and volatility for the nation, hindering its growth and progress. The second objective is to explore how Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore has been drawn into this strife, facing accusations of being an Islamophobe and a Hindu chauvinist, and why there have been recurrent attempts to replace his song as the country’s national anthem. The article concludes with a rebuttal to such accusations based on evidence highlighting the song’s historical contributions to the nation despite the ongoing campaigns against it.