Since their publication in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 have become a major reference for the application and interpretation of those treaties. The International Committee of the Red Cross, together with a team of renowned experts, is currently updating these Commentaries in order to document developments and provide up-to-date interpretations of the treaty texts. This article provides an introduction to the updated Commentary on Geneva Convention IV (GC IV), published online in 2025. It describes the methodology behind the updated Commentaries before explaining the historical background of bringing civilian protection into the framework of the Geneva Conventions. It then discusses how the structure of GC IV impacts its application and explains GC IV’s personal, geographic and temporal scope of application. The article summarizes key substantive protections provided in the Convention for civilians and their property during armed conflicts, including in situations of occupation, and points to where these are addressed in the updated Commentary.

The Covid-19 pandemic introduced new challenges for the long-term care (LTC) sector and changed how staff provided care to residents and families. For example, in Canada, LTC staff were required to implement social contact restrictions, while also supporting ‘virtual’ resident and family communication, with video conference visits becoming a primary strategy for this. The objective of this study was to explore Canadian LTC staff members’ experiences supporting virtual communication between residents and family members during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of eight LTC staff with experience supporting or coordinating videoconference visits during this time were interviewed about their experiences. Interview data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results revealed an overarching theme of holding it together – working with the imperfect to support resident and family communication – which encompassed four key subthemes: accepting distanced communication as a new normal, tolerating the discomfort of new roles, needing to rely on each other in difficult circumstances, and disconnect between policy and on-the-ground experience. The social contact policies that were introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic had never been tested over such a long duration of time. This study provides insight into the challenges of adapting some of these policies within LTC and may be valuable to ongoing planning for future outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, especially when considered alongside resident and family experiences.

The economic valuation of recreational ecosystem services is challenging due to difficulties in obtaining geo-tagged information of users. The objective of this study is to validate crowdsourced and user-generated content in order to predict visitation patterns to 16 national parks in Spain. The results may serve to encourage its utilization in the study of recreational demand in other countries, particularly developing countries, where on-site visitor information may be limited or expensive to gather. The present article employs a negative binomial regression model to evaluate the validity of two sources of data: Flickr and mobile phones. The accuracy of predictions exhibited variation across the 16 parks, indicating that site-specific characteristics, such as the seasonality of visitation patterns, may be of significance. The utilization of mobile phone data for modelling visitors yielded enhanced predictive capacity, as shown by the goodness of fit of the estimated models.

This article revisits Rayford Logan’s thesis in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877‒1901 to chart how African Americans experienced joy during a racial low point—“the Nadir” of race relations. Using Logan’s claims as a conceptual framework, the article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s position on amusement and everyday Black people’s joyful acts during the post-Reconstruction period to understand “a paradox of pleasure”—feeling jovial during dark times. With the Nadir as a case study, this essay argues that historians may develop Black joy as a historical analytic by asking research questions about Black affect, employing the tools of historical imagination, and concentrating on the small delights of daily life. This essay seeks to inspire curiosity about how exploring Black life from the angle of elation, not sorrow, can produce complex histories of Black subjectivity and feeling. It proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.

Water recreation is valuable to people, and its value can be affected by changes in water quality. This paper presents the results of a revealed preference survey to elicit coastal New England, USA, residents’ values for water recreation and water quality. We combined the survey responses with a comprehensive data set of coastal attributes, including in-water and remotely sensed water quality metrics. Using a travel cost model framework, we found water clarity and the bacterial conditions of coastal waters to be practical water quality inputs to economic analysis, available at appropriate scales, and meaningful to people and their behavior. Changes in clarity and bacterial conditions affected trip values, with a $4.5 change for a meter in clarity in Secchi depth and $0.08 for a one-unit bacteria change in colony-forming units per 100 ml. We demonstrate the large potential value of improving water quality through welfare analysis scenarios for Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA. The paper discusses lessons for improving the policy relevance and applicability of water quality valuation studies through improved water quality data collection, combined with the application of scalable analysis tools for valuation.

Limited studies have evaluated the impact of recreation on successful ageing (SA) for individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) in a longitudinal manner. Most existing SA models emphasise biomedical-based dimensions of physical functioning, which has been criticised as unrealistic and limited, especially for people with disabilities. Various researchers and organisations have proposed that SA needs to be reassessed using more self-perceived, self-reported measurements. Understanding long-term life satisfaction predictors for individuals ageing with SCI is still limited, particularly when including longitudinal recreation participation data. This study, based on Rowe and Kahn's SA model and utilising self-reported measurements, observes the long-term changes in self-reported health status, recreation participation time and social integration levels, and evaluates the long-term impacts of these predictors on life satisfaction among individuals with SCI. The sample comprises individuals with SCI (N = 11,450) who are at least 45 years old at the time of injury or have lived with their injury for over 15 years. Results indicate that when ageing with SCI, life satisfaction increases over time, but their recreation time, social interactions and self-perceived health status decline. Moreover, regular participation in recreational activities, engagement in and maintenance of certain levels of social relationships, and high self-evaluation of health can positively impact life satisfaction during ageing. The study explores the feasibility of using self-perceived measurements to replace biomedical-based variables in Rowe and Kahn's SA model and examines their impacts on life satisfaction among people ageing with disabilities. In the future development of SA models, researchers can incorporate more self-reported, self-evaluated assessment variables to better capture the ageing experience, especially for people with disabilities.

This study aimed to better understand the extent to which older adult centres are a focal point for recreation and social activities for their members. Travel diaries completed by 261 members of 12 older adult centres across Ontario provided comprehensive and real-time (24-hour) data over two consecutive weeks concerning time away from home, trip purposes, and modes of travel. The data showed that nearly one-third of their trips included a stop at their older adult centre. Three-quarters also went to other community venues over the study period, possibly to access amenities (e.g., pools) not available at their centre. Notwithstanding, their local older adult centre was still a focal point in out-of-home travel, particularly for potentially more vulnerable older adults, including those who were non-drivers, had less education, and felt lonelier. The diaries also substantiated the importance of time spent socializing with peers and staff at the centre, apart from formal program participation.

This article explores the All-Day Neighborhood Schools (ADNS) program, operated as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and local philanthropists from 1936 to 1971. Designed to expand the resources available to children and parents, the program included after-school activities, additional teachers, professional development, social workers, and parent engagement at fourteen public elementary schools across the city. Through a study of two program sites, I examine how this public-private partnership functioned, and trace changes in the motivations of its leadership, from a focus on recreation and democracy during World War II, to juvenile delinquency prevention, to compensatory education. I argue that ADNS's ability to transform public schooling in New York City was limited by its separation from the rest of the school system, which came about through its dependance on outside philanthropy and its consistent formulation as a supplemental program rather than as a fundamental part of children's education.

The Authors apologise for two errors within their published Article. These appear on pages 391 and 416.

Since their publication in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 have become a major reference for the application and interpretation of those treaties. The International Committee of the Red Cross, together with a team of renowned experts, is currently updating these Commentaries in order to document developments and provide up-to-date interpretations of the treaty texts. This article highlights key points of interest covered in the updated Commentary on the Third Geneva Convention. It explains the fundamentals of the Convention: the historical background, the personal scope of application of the Convention and the fundamental protections that apply to all prisoners of war (PoWs). It then looks at the timing under which certain obligations are triggered, those prior to holding PoWs, those triggered by the taking of PoWs and during their captivity, and those at the end of a PoW's captivity. Finally, the article summarizes key substantive protections provided in the Third Convention.