The Japanese Supreme Court's fall 2007 ruling in favor of Korean hibakusha medical compensation rights represents an important, though only partial, victory. The decision denied these Korean atomic victims, who were forced laborers at Mitsubishi's Hiroshima Shipyard, compensation for unpaid wages. Resolving outstanding forced labor cases, as well as fully recognizing, apologizing and compensating all hibakusha, requires a broader international solution of “mutual apology and mutual compensation” by both Japan and the United States.

The Japanese government's refusal to recognize the presence of Korean and Chinese forced laborers during World War II at Nagasaki's Hashima Island coal mine, popularly known as Gunkanjima (“Battleship Island”) continues since the abandoned mine was World Heritage inscribed in 2015. Hashima is one of a number of locations approved under the title “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Hashima has become a major tourist draw, but lacks any meaningful historical information at or near the site, while excluding any mention of Korean and Chinese forced laborers. The site also is in serious decay and appears to lack any conservation plan in line with World Heritage “Operational Guidelines.” The South Korean and Japanese governments agreed to acknowledge the presence of Koreans who “were forced to work” at the mine, but the Japanese government has subsequently refused to implement the agreement. Use of Hashima as an “urban ruins tourist attraction” instead raises questions as to whether the Japanese government has complied with requirements for World Heritage listing. This policy of neglect continues the Abe government's refusal to acknowledge full responsibility for Japan's injustice toward Korean forced laborers during World War II.

David Palmer's timely opinion piece in The Melbourne Age on 6 August 2015 draws attention to the little remembered history of scores of Australian and other allied POWs who were held as slave labourers in Japanese war industries in Nagasaki before and at the time of the atom bombing. Aspects of this neglected history also form a major component of my recent multi-screen, hyper-visualisation exhibition “Fading Lights: Australian POW and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945-52”, co-curated with Stuart Bender (Curtin University).

Mitsui's Miike Coal Mine is World Heritage listed by UNESCO as one of Japan's “Sites of the Industrial Revolution.” The Japanese government, however, has failed to tell the full story of this mine, instead promoting bland tourism. In World War II, Miike was Japan's largest coal mine, but also the location of the largest Allied POW camp in Japan. Korean and Chinese forced laborers also were used by Mitsui in the mine. The use of prisoners was nothing new, as Mitsui and other Japanese companies used Japanese convicts as workers in the early decades of the Meiji era. The role of Australian POWs in particular reveals that there was resistance inside Miike even at the height of abuse by Japanese wartime authorities. Japan has a responsibility under its UNESCO World Heritage agreement to tell the full history of this and other “Meiji Industrial Revolution” sites.

We synthesize sea-level science developments, priorities and practitioner needs at the end of the 10-year World Climate Research Program Grand Challenge ’Regional Sea-Level Change and Coastal Impacts’. Sea-level science and associated climate services have progressed but are unevenly distributed. There remains deep uncertainty concerning high-end and long-term sea-level projections due to indeterminate emissions, the ice sheet response and other climate tipping points. These are priorities for sea-level science. At the same time practitioners need climate services that provide localized information including median and curated high-end sea-level projections for long-term planning, together with information to address near-term pressures, including extreme sea level-related hazards and land subsidence, which can greatly exceed current rates of climate-induced sea-level rise in some populous coastal settlements. To maximise the impact of scientific knowledge, ongoing co-production between science and practitioner communities is essential. Here we report on recent progress and ways forward for the next decade.

Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past 20 years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale, and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. The effects of the BRI are both manifold and diffuse, and all of them expose situations of infrastructural complexity. We see the BRI as an infrastructural layer that comes into contact, competition, and collision with pre-existing infrastructural formations. It is an infrastructural vortex that causes once shared resources and public or common goods to become infrastructuralized in ways that bring about the (re)negotiation of meaning and value. These processes are acutely felt in South and Southeast Asia, where sedimented patterns of religion and belief shape the ways in which the BRI is engaged with and understood. Surprisingly, the sacred dimensions of these infrastructural commons remain unstudied, despite there being evidence to suggest that it is the transformative power of the sacred, rather than of secular modernity, that shapes and structures everyday lives. In this vein, the articles that constitute this special issue explore the sacred dimensions of the BRI’s infrastructural commons through a series of case studies from South and Southeast Asia.

The ‘commons’ has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetual transformation, invested by different flows and communities of humans. In this article, we will consider the positioning of the Lanten Yao (Mun) ethnic group within the Luang Namtha region in northern Laos. In the twentieth century, the Lanten Yao lived through the transformation of the commons into the territorialization and infrastructural building of colonial empires and nation-states, and negotiated the routes and boundaries between Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. Today, the land is once again being transformed through the Belt and Road Initiative, with the construction of Special Economic Zones, two ‘smart cities’, a high-speed railway, and a new speedway only a short distance from the Lanten villages. These new infrastructures are once again leading the Lanten to transform their relationships to their land, other peoples close and far, and distant states and administrations. In this article, we will explore how these shifting relationships to the commons are expressed in the rituals, sacred memories, and changing religious configurations among the Lanten Yao.

The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume claims that causes must temporally precede their effects. However, his main argument for this claim has long puzzled commentators. Indeed, most commentators have dismissed this argument as confused, but beyond this dismissal, the argument has provoked relatively little critical attention. My aim in this paper is to rectify this situation. In what follows, I (i) clarify the argument’s interpretive challenges, (ii) critique two existing interpretations of it, and (iii) offer my own improved interpretation. More generally, I hope to throw new light on this puzzling aspect of Hume’s philosophy.

The IntCal family of radiocarbon (14C) calibration curves is based on research spanning more than three decades. The IntCal group have collated the 14C and calendar age data (mostly derived from primary publications with other types of data and meta-data) and, since 2010, made them available for other sorts of analysis through an open-access database. This has ensured transparency in terms of the data used in the construction of the ratified calibration curves. As the IntCal database expands, work is underway to facilitate best practice for new data submissions, make more of the associated metadata available in a structured form, and help those wishing to process the data with programming languages such as R, Python, and MATLAB. The data and metadata are complex because of the range of different types of archives. A restructured interface, based on the “IntChron” open-access data model, includes tools which allow the data to be plotted and compared without the need for export. The intention is to include complementary information which can be used alongside the main 14C series to provide new insights into the global carbon cycle, as well as facilitating access to the data for other research applications. Overall, this work aims to streamline the generation of new calibration curves.

Current national and international guidelines for the ethical design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics emphasize ethical theory. Various governing and advisory bodies have generated sets of broad ethical principles, which institutional decisionmakers are encouraged to apply to particular practical decisions. Although much of this literature examines the ethics of designing and developing AI and robotics, medical institutions typically must make purchase and deployment decisions about technologies that have already been designed and developed. The primary problem facing medical institutions is not one of ethical design but of ethical deployment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical model by which medical institutions may make ethical deployment decisions about ready-made advanced technologies. Our slogan is “more process, less principles.” Ethically sound decisionmaking requires that the process by which medical institutions make such decisions include participatory, deliberative, and conservative elements. We argue that our model preserves the strengths of existing frameworks, avoids their shortcomings, and delivers its own moral, practical, and epistemic advantages.

Allocating resources is a central function of government, and the distributive politics literature provides considerable evidence of leaders around the world directing resources to co-partisan voters and officials. In the United States, studies of ‘presidential particularism’ have recently demonstrated strategic targeting by the federal executive branch. This letter extends the inquiry to states using an unusually rich case in which all governors simultaneously faced decisions about allocating a constrained resource – tax advantaged status for economic development – from an exogenously generated list of geographic possibilities. This study tests whether governors rewarded their supporters' and allies' areas alongside two alternatives: (1) spreading the wealth by geographic subunits and (2) policy need. It finds no evidence of gubernatorial particularism. Instead, Republicans and Democratic governors prioritized allocating opportunity zones geographically and made efforts to designate at least one in each county. They were also responsive to policy need.

In October 2019, public health surveillance systems in Scotland identified an increase in the number of reported infections of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O26:H11 involving bloody diarrhoea. Ultimately, across the United Kingdom (UK) 32 cases of STEC O26:H11 stx1a were identified, with the median age of 27 years and 64% were male; six cases were hospitalised. Among food exposures there was an association with consuming pre-packed sandwiches purchased at outlets belonging to a national food chain franchise (food outlet A) [odds ratio (OR) = 183.89, P < 0.001]. The common ingredient identified as a component of the majority of the sandwiches sold at food outlet A was a mixed salad of Apollo and Iceberg lettuce and spinach leaves. Microbiological testing of food and environmental samples were negative for STEC O26:H11, although STEC O36:H19 was isolated from a mixed salad sample taken from premises owned by food outlet A. Contamination of fresh produce is often due to a transient event and detection of the aetiological agent in food that has a short-shelf life is challenging. Robust, statistically significant epidemiological analysis should be sufficient evidence to direct timely and targeted on-farm investigations. A shift in focus from testing the microbiological quality of the produce to investigating the processes and practices through the supply chain and sampling the farm environment is recommended.

In August 2019, public health surveillance systems in Scotland and England identified seven, geographically dispersed cases infected with the same strain (defined as isolates that fell within the same five single nucleotide polymorphism single linage cluster) of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7. Epidemiological analysis of enhanced surveillance questionnaire data identified handling raw beef and shopping from the same national retailer (retailer A) as the common exposure. Concurrently, a microbiological survey of minced beef at retail identified the same strain in a sample of minced beef sold by retailer A, providing microbiological evidence of the link. Between September and November 2019, a further four primary and two secondary cases infected with the same strain were identified; two cases developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome. None of the four primary cases reported consumption of beef from retailer A and the transmission route of these subsequent cases was not identified, although all four primary cases visited the same petting farm. Generally, outbreaks of STEC O157:H7 in the UK appear to be distinct, short-lived events; however, on-going transmission linked to contaminated food, animals or environmental exposures and person-to-person contact do occur. Although outbreaks of STEC caused by contaminated fresh produce are increasingly common, undercooked meat products remain a risk of infection.