This article explores the perspectives of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) on international labour unity during the 1980s and 1990s, a subject largely neglected in previous historical studies. With a focus on high-ranking WFTU officials, it investigates the political and ideological motivations behind the communist federation’s approach to international cooperation, as well as internal debates regarding rapprochement with its Western-oriented counterpart, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). It also examines the polycentric nature of the WFTU, revealing divergent regional perspectives from Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and the varying degrees of support for East–West engagement. The article argues that competing visions of international labour unity within the WFTU intensified internal divisions after 1989 between European and non-European trade unionists.

The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 caused well over fifty million deaths. The epicentre undoubtedly was China, where gene mixing of different virus strains occurred amongst aquatic, migrant birds. But where and when did the virus first infect (or spill over to) a human being? We take, as our starting point, a paper demonstrating that an infection causing the same symptoms as the influenza virus was widespread in New York during the winter of 1917–1918. The authors of that paper went on to suggest that the virus had probably reached North America from Europe, in the context of troop movement during World War I. Our own researches have focussed on this point. We show that outbreaks of serious respiratory disease, local in nature but causing unusual patterns of mortality, were indeed reported by scientists and doctors in army hospitals in England and in France, well before the first wave of the pandemic had arrived. We use the records of these hospitals, now held in the National Archives, to trace the progress of this disease amongst the individuals who fell ill. We examine contemporary reactions to this minor epidemic – an epidemic, we suggest, which acted as a herald wave of the pandemic yet to come. The latter part of our paper addresses the second question, as to how troop movement across the North Atlantic, once the United States had entered into war, may well have enabled the virus to spread from Europe to North America.

This article reconsiders three of the most iconic mushroom catalogues of classical China, which underscored the culinary value of local fungi, in light of indebtedness to medical and self-cultivation literature. Through this re-examination of mycological sources and the imbrication of discourses that they exhibit, mushrooms emerge as richer, more complex, objects of gastronomic interest.

We focus on the dynamics of colexification, a process whereby different meanings are expressed by the same word, and its opposite, de-colexification, in language and culture contact. In multilingual environments, colexification of reference to two celestial entities – ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ – enhances intertranslatability and ease of communication between coexisting languages. The terms for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ in two extant dialects of Tariana, the only North Arawak language in the multilingual Vaupés River Basin Linguistic Area, are a case in point. Under the influence of neighbouring majority East Tukanoan languages, the terms for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ underwent colexification in one Tariana dialect. The recent nature of contact-induced colexification is evidenced in the ways the colexified term – which goes back to the Proto-Arawak ‘moon’ – preserves the original meaning ‘moon’ in various expressions. ‘Moon’ and not ‘sun’ is the target of colexification due to its magic powers and the frequency of its mentions, as a driving force in language change. Speakers of the other extant dialect of Tariana demonstrate the opposite process of de-colexification of ‘sun’ and ‘moon’, resulting from intensive contact with the closely related Baniwa of Içana. Communicative necessity to express matching concepts drives colexification and its demise.

This paper investigates the extent to which clitic resumption in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) of accusative and dative objects is compulsory in two varieties of Spanish, namely, Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish. We report the findings of an acceptability judgment task that compares sentences with dislocated direct and indirect objects with and without resumption. The study is motivated by two observations in cases without dislocation. First, in Peninsular Spanish, clitic doubling with dative objects is optional but doubling of accusative objects is very marginal. Second, in Rioplatense Spanish, doubling of accusatives is available under specific conditions. Although the results confirm that resumption in CLLD structures is strongly preferred across varieties and object types, differences between dative vs. accusative clitics are reflected to some extent in CLLD structures in Peninsular Spanish. Concerning cross-dialectal differences between Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish, we propose an account that relies on the availability of null accusative clitics in Rioplatense in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

This article examines the relationship between military organization and regional governance in the Western Zhou 西周 state (ca. 1045–771 BCE), focusing on the role that regional military bases directly administered by the Zhou royal court played in reinforcing the geopolitical cohesion of the Zhou realm. By analyzing inscriptional and archaeological evidence, it argues that Qi shi 齊師 was one such regional Zhou garrison in northern Shandong. In the decentralized political structure of the Western Zhou state, political and military power were shared between the Zhou king and the regional nobility, rendering the participation of regional auxiliaries essential for Zhou military operations. Within this framework, regional Zhou military bases served as enclaves of royal power that extended the range of central reach in regional governance and facilitated the coordination of the dispersed military resources in the Zhou realm for common defense, thereby fostering the geopolitical integration of the Western Zhou state.

Legal and ethical frameworks remain dominated by a broadly binary conception of moral status as the primary organising idea: entities are typically treated either as persons, with extensive rights, or as things, with at best limited protections. While many jurisdictions now recognise animal welfare and anti-cruelty duties, these measures generally stop short of acknowledging independent full moral status. This landscape is ill-suited to the diversity of entities whose capacities challenge existing categories, from nonhuman animals to unprecedented beings. This article proposes a pragmatic spectrum of moral status, conceptualised as a continuous gradient on which entities can be located according to their morally relevant capacities. Grounded in a triangulation of established ethical theories, the framework is structured by three anchor thresholds—sentience, consciousness, and sapience—allowing graduated protections to “kick in” at different points. The spectrum is applied using a multimodal approach to measurement, demonstrating how it can guide governance where current law leaves a vacuum. By moving beyond the person/thing distinction with a capacity-based continuum, this approach offers a flexible, anticipatory tool for recognising and responding to the moral claims of diverse entities while avoiding both overreach and neglect.

The ethically reflective assessment of life reveals a paradox. On the one hand, many people regard life as one of the highest values and celebrate each new life. On the other hand, every sentient life is inevitably exposed to suffering. Why, then, do we usually consider sentient life worth starting, despite the fact that, apart from a relatively small group of antinatalists, this judgment is rarely questioned? In this article, I argue that sentience is not an advantage but a disadvantage because its central negative consequence is unavoidable suffering for every sentient being. I further argue that bioethics and healthcare ethics should take antinatalist intuitions more seriously in order to challenge pronatalist assumptions that normalize procreation and, in doing so, magnify eradicable suffering.

This paper investigates how a Brazilian judge in Barra Mansa, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, adjudicated cases in the early 20th century. It focuses on how Judge Torres made decisions and engaged with legal writings, judicial precedents, and laws. The study seeks to uncover the interrelated lines he drew between the legal framework governing adjudication and the normative rules he applied in concrete cases. Since jury trials were an exception in the Brazilian legal system and none occurred in Barra Mansa during the research period, Torres’s rulings played a central role in shaping local concepts of justice. Analyzing judicial decision-making in a specific town and time frame sheds light on the broader dynamics of legal practice in early 20th-century Brazil.

I argue that evaluative uncertainty gives rational agents instrumental reasons to abstract from some of their salient preferences when bargaining about social institutions. Because agents cannot assume stability in their future evaluative outlook, it is rational to favour rules that preserve options that may become salient. Building on Kreps (1979), I show how flexibility-driven abstraction expands the bargaining set, enabling convergence on rules while preserving motivational continuity. Since options are endogenous, bargainers also have reason to deliberate about option-generating and option-filtering meta-rules that structure the emergence, appraisal and revision of options over time.