We gather evidence on a new local-global conjecture of Moretó and Rizo on values of irreducible characters of finite groups. For this we study subnormalisers and picky elements in finite groups of Lie type and determine them in many cases, for unipotent elements as well as for semisimple elements of prime power order. We also discuss subnormalisers of unipotent and semisimple elements in connected as well as in disconnected reductive linear algebraic groups.

This essay, by revisiting the capitalism and slavery debate, explores the material relations between the Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Black slavery in the British Empire from the perspectives of critical theory and global history. After suggesting that the debate has made capital invisible as a category of historical analysis, I argue that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a process of widening trade circuits around the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific within which the abolition debate should be understood. These new global circuits of trade became a powerful material mediation between the crisis of slavery in the West Indies; the rise of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil; and the advancement of New Imperialism in the East.

We present a potential test of the origin of the $\gamma$-ray Galactic Centre Excess (GCE). We demonstrate how gravitational microlensing by stellar mass objects along the line of sight to the Galactic Bulge can distinguish between the possibility of extensive emission due to dark matter self-annihilation from more prosaic astrophysical sources, namely millisecond pulsars. Such an astrophysical origin would result in emission from a population of small, currently unresolved point-like sources – in contrast to the expected smoother emission resulting from dark matter annihilation. Given that the scale of gravitational microlensing, that is, the Einstein radius for stellar mass lenses, and hence, the degree of induced magnification, is sensitive to the size of the emitting region, such microlensing will induce time variability in the emission of astrophysical sources, whereas $\gamma$-ray emission from dark matter annihilation will effectively be immune to such influences. However, we find that detecting microlensing-induced variability requires significantly greater sensitivity than that of current or planned $\gamma$-ray detectors. For a small population of bright GCE sources, more than an order-of-magnitude increase in effective area over Fermi-LAT would be required, with events remaining extremely rare. For a large population of faint sources, events would occur multiple times a year, but would only be detectable with a four-order-of-magnitude improvement. Whilst microlensing might not be a definitive test of the origin of the GCE, in future observations, it may prove useful in determining the properties of any point-like source population.

It has been a long time since political scientists have taken measure of our political engagement in the United States. Drawing on data collected from political scientists in Summer 2024, this article assesses the extent and type of political engagement, finding three alliterative dimensions into which we tend to fall: partisans (who engage in partisan politics), public scholars (who share political science logic and findings), and pedagogues (who engage through teaching and event sponsorship). This effort may represent the first time we have tried to measure individual beliefs about how personal participation should intersect with professional responsibilities. Our dimensions of engagement tend not to differ substantially by demography, institution, or rank. However, we do have different beliefs about the propriety and the likely effects of different types of engagement with politics that give structure to our presence in the public sphere.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.