This case comment explores the relationship between two intertwined objectives – ensuring security of electricity supply and environmental protection – in the context of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Inter-Environnement Wallonie ASBL and Bond Beter Leefmilieu Vlaanderen ASBL v. Conseil des ministres. The analysis focuses on the application of the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive and the Habitats Directive to the facts of the case, which concerns the extension by a ten-year period of the operation of two Belgian nuclear power stations (Doel 1 and Doel 2) as part of a national energy policy strategy to ensure the security of Belgium's electricity supply. The case comment also considers the legal and practical implications that arise as a result of employing the ‘security of electricity supply’ exemption to enable derogation from the requirements of the aforementioned Directives in circumstances where a Member State considers the security of its electricity supply to be under threat.

This article applies Paul Tillich's existentialist analysis of the human predicament, particularly what it means to exist and to be fallen, to social media. I argue that social media heightens feelings of alienation and estrangement, supporting this claim with evidence from empirical research in psychiatry and communication studies. Thus, I offer an application of a Tillichian approach to an area of culture previously unexamined in this way. I identify three primary ways in which social media exacerbates existentialist emotional states: (1) social media allows us to construct artificial versions of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software; (2) it provides the means to quantify social approval in groups the size of which the human brain has not evolved for; (3) it extends the size of our social networks but decreases the quality of interactions. Social media is yet to receive significant philosophical or theological engagement despite its prevalence, particularly within younger generations. I argue that this is a mistake – philosophy has a duty to engage with such a ubiquitous feature of modern life.

RIPM (Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive resource offering electronic access to music periodicals from the early Romantic era to the twentieth century. Founded in 1980 by H. Robert Cohen, RIPM is the youngest of the so-called ‘4 R's of International Music Research’; its partner initiatives include RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), and RIdIM (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale). Cohen's ambitious project was notably visionary in its use of technology: not only did it use computing from the start (beginning with DOS-based indexing systems), but it was also the first of the 4 R's to explore full text searching. RIPM seeks to address ‘two main problems that have prevented these [historic music] journals from being systematically collected and examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source’. The project has thus focused on collection building, curation, indexing and accessibility. This international cooperative's accomplishments are impressive: as of July 2020, the database contains 527 music periodicals, 430 available in full text complete runs, totalling 996,000 annotated records and 1.47 million full-text pages of music periodicals.

Drawing on the history of the Bank of Naples, this article sheds new light on the power struggle between the central government and the Southern elites in Risorgimento Italy. Since unification, the Bank has been portrayed as the archetypal victim of a predatory (Northern) Italian government. This article, by deconstructing the myth surrounding the Bank, shows how this characterisation was carefully crafted by its Neapolitan management. Exploiting to the fullest the new political and economic role they had acquired under the aegis of a constitutional government, the Bank's governors appropriated and invested with new meanings Risorgimento ideals to further the Bank's cause as well as their own. Constantly shifting the focus from finance to politics, they posed as champions of those municipal, regional or even national liberties the government was either unable or unwilling to defend. This narrative provided an ideological smokescreen obscuring the economic and partly private nature of the confrontation between the central government and the Bank, and reinforced the view of a South victimised by the new Italian state still in currency today.

From 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

On 25 May 1849 Vincenzo Bellini's opera Norma was premiered at the Teatro de la Victoria in Buenos Aires. It was performed four years before the downfall of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of Buenos Aires for more than 20 years, in what it has been considered in Argentine historiography as a ‘terror regime’. The success of the opera combined with the political situation enables the understanding of Norma in political terms. A year prior to the premiere of the opera, the story of the elopement of a young, aristocratic, federal girl, Camila O'Gorman with the priest Uladislao Gutiérrez, had shocked local society. It was followed by another shocking event when, once the couple was found, Rosas decided to have them executed. I argue that the inadvertent similarity between the plot of Norma and the events in relation to Camila O'Gorman's death led to possible interpretations of the opera performance as a justification of Rosas's decision to execute Camila and her lover, whilst also providing a moral lesson to young aristocratic women. In this article, I therefore explore the plausible political overtones hidden in the performance of Norma by comparing librettos and analysing the opera's reception between 1849 and 1851 in the periodicals of the time. In this way, I cast light on a heretofore overlooked, but undeniably rich, period of operatic life in Buenos Aires.

According to Childe, the Bronze Age in Europe is thought to be the first ‘golden age’ in European history. The development of metallurgy, clearly associated with the production of weapons, and the expansion of exchange networks covering all types of goods are considered essential in the process of consolidation of social elites, and, by extension, of social inequalities. The significance of textile production has, however, been undervalued as a specialized craft and as a manufacturing process that creates cultural differences and signals social inequalities. Being associated with domestic contexts rather than with specialized workshops, textile production in the eastern Iberian Peninsula has been underestimated; it is addressed here, as is its potential importance in societies immersed in a process of social stratification.

In 2017, during the archaeological excavations of room N24 of the Palace of Dedoplis Gora (Caucasian Iberia, Georgia), built in the 2nd–1st c. BCE, fragments of a small statuette carved from bone were discovered. The statuette is a miniature sphinx with a human head and may have been an element of furniture. The male head is adorned with the nemes, a headdress worn by pharaohs. In this article, I suggest that the head of the sphinx may portray Ptolemy I Soter, the first king of Ptolemaic Egypt. Some scholars believe that artifacts containing Ptolemaic portraits came to Georgia among diplomatic gifts sent by Mark Antony to Pharnabazos II, for it was he who had close relationships with the Ptolemaic court. In my opinion the bone sphinx with the head of Ptolemy I appeared in Caucasian Iberia together with these items.

Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city's roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China's largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP's modernist worldview.