This article examines the role of illustrated lantern lectures in promoting Belgian cities and towns during the early twentieth century. Drawing on two original databases of lantern slides and a database of lantern lectures, it demonstrates how these lectures served not only tourism, but also broader social, political and cultural agendas. The projection lantern functioned as a powerful medium within an emerging circuit of education and entertainment, offering audiences an immersive experience. While previous scholarship has largely focused on colonial or exotic representations, this article highlights how familiar, domestic places in Belgium were also visually constructed and promoted. Through an analysis of content, context and the actors involved, the article reveals how lantern lectures contributed to shaping urban imagery, fostering civic pride and constructing local, regional and national identities. In doing so, it repositions the lantern as a key medium in the history of place representation and visual communication.

The E(xtended) P(rojection) P(rinciple) (specifically, in its guise as a movement-triggering feature in designated syntactic heads), has been a thorn in the Minimalist side since the mid-1990s. Recently, in the context of attempts to reduce syntactic mechanisms to their minimal expression, the generative operation Merge has been defined as unordered set formation (“Simplest Merge”), and the EPP has been pronounced dead in favour of conditions over labelling which force phrasal movement in order to dissolve ‘symmetry points’. This article compares several theoretical analyses and shows that very simple cases of {XP, YP} copular constructions in Spanish satisfy all requirements for labelling without the need to resort to Internal Merge (IM). Therefore, if there is IM of a DP it must be motivated by reasons other than labelling. Once such a reason exists, the elimination of EPP on labelling grounds becomes dubious.

Provisional measures have increasingly played a key role in protecting individual and collective rights in the African human rights system. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Court) have exhibited a proactive stance in indicating provisional measures in cases relating to the protection of the right to life, social and economic rights, and political rights, including electoral participation. The far-reaching measures of the Court, however, along with the general proactivity of the Court in finding human rights violations, have sparked a backlash, leading Rwanda, Tanzania (where the seat of the Court is located), Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and, more recently, Tunisia to withdraw their declarations allowing individuals and non-governmental organisations to petition the Court directly.

This article analyses the role of provisional measures in the African human rights system and explores the implications of this proactive approach in the context of the ongoing crisis within the African Union. It argues that the Court should show resilience vis-à-vis State reactions, asserting its role as a human rights guarantor in the region. Providing more clarity and guidance to applicants requesting emergency protection, as well as making the measures as specific as possible, could be beneficial in this respect. This would allow petitioners to gain more confidence in their pursuit of the protection of this mechanism.

Cross-border remittances from South Africa have played a central role in the food availability and well-being of migrant labour households in semi-arid Zimbabwe. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures introduced by both the South African and Zimbabwean governments hampered the cross-border remittance system and the movement of goods. This paper explores the food provisioning and availability impacts of the changes brought by the cocktail of policy measures on migrant sending households, and whether these households were able to find alternative food sources locally. The study highlights a precarious situation for affected households, which saw their main source of food provisioning curtailed. It argues that the situation was further aggravated by the risk associated with alternative remittance channels, and the non-availability of local alternatives for these households, which were excluded from accessing food parcels/aid by the criteria used to determine beneficiaries. The paper demonstrates the vulnerability of migrant labour households to economic and labour market changes.

The role of morphology in complex word acquisition was examined in Chinese (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals. Participants learned words consisting of two novel constituents, by pairing them with pictures. Items either belonged to large (torbnel, torbilm, torbla, torbiph) or small morphological families (torbilm, torbla). After training, participants completed recognition and spelling tasks with novel words that either included or excluded a trained morpheme. Results revealed robust stem-training effects, showing that items including a trained constituent were harder to reject and easier to spell than items including two untrained constituents. There was also a significant effect of morphological family size, with greater training effects for items belonging to large than small families. Effect sizes were overall smaller in L2 than in L1. These findings point to the important role of morphological structure in L2 word acquisition and suggest that large morphological family-clusters lead to better learning outcomes.

In a longue durée study of the European context from 1918 to the present day, this article critically assesses alternative modalities of self-determination proposed by two non-state, transnational actors – the Congress of European Nationalities (1925–1942) and the Federal Union of European Nationalities (established 1949). Situating the activism of these organizations within an international system that has prioritized state determination over the self-determination of peoples, the study charts their attempts to renegotiate dominant statist paradigms of minority protection and human rights, using ideals and frameworks of European integration as a guide. The analysis shows that although the rise of the European Union after 1945 created an environment far more propitious than the one that existed between the two World Wars, transnational activism has faced consistent limitations on its effectiveness, arising not just from the external machinations of states but also from internal divisions within the organizations concerned. In this respect, the study also sheds light on an enduring tension between collective and individual concepts of self-determination within contemporary Europe, demonstrated most recently by the Federal Union of European Nationalities’ failed European Citizens’ Initiative on a “Minority Safepack” during 2013–2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified food insecurity (FI) and stress for many pregnant individuals, which may have contributed to adverse fetal developmental programming. This study aimed to identify key social determinants of health associated with pandemic-related FI and stress, and their association with gestational weight gain (GWG) and newborn birth weight in a Canadian pregnant cohort. Data were collected retrospectively from 273 pregnant individuals who delivered infants in Canada during the pandemic (March 2020–March 2023). Validated questionnaires were used to assess FI and pandemic-related stress, and GWG and infant birth weight were self-reported. FI was experienced by 55.7% of the participants, while 33.7% and 19.7% reported heightened stress related to COVID-19 infection and pregnancy preparedness, respectively. Participants from food-secure and food-insecure households differed significantly in parental structure, age, sexual orientation, housing status, household income, number of children in the household and pregnancy planning (all p values < 0.01). Heightened stress for both pregnancy preparedness and COVID-19 infection was also significantly associated with these same factors (all p values < 0.05) but not for age and housing status. FI and heightened stress were not associated with GWG outside the recommended range. However, significantly higher likelihood of birth weight extremes was observed with heightened COVID-19 infection-related stress (OR, 95% CI 1.50, 1.05–2.12, p = 0.02) and pregnancy preparedness-related stress (1.60, 1.10–2.31, p = 0.01), but not with FI. These findings underscore the influence of psychosocial factors on FI and stress during pregnancy, which may negatively impact infant health outcomes during the pandemic.

This study investigates whether the second language (L2) development of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/DHH) learners in comparison to the L2 development of hearing learners, based on the processability theory (PT) developed by Pienemann (1998, 2005) in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Thirty-eight d/DHH and 32 hearing secondary school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) completed a series of speaking tasks designed to elicit specific morphosyntactic structures that, according to PT, align with L2 developmental stages. Implicational scaling revealed that although d/DHH learners followed a similar developmental sequence to their peers, they displayed a noticeable delay. They also appeared to require additional time and practice to fully produce the entire target structures after reaching certain developmental stages. The results provide stronger empirical evidence for d/DHH learners’ L2 development, supporting the qualitative similarity hypothesis in the field of special education, which posits that despite quantitative delays, d/DHH learners exhibit qualitatively similar L2 development to their hearing peers.

The extent to which the English common law protected civil liberties in the past is widely debated. Were the judges protectors of core freedoms such as liberty and the right to protest or were they allies of the executive in their hostility towards them? Since at least Dicey, the common law has had a vision of itself as the former, but what does practice reveal? This article explores the many ways in which the advocates of female suffrage in the 10 years or so before the First World War interacted with executive and judicial authority in their effort to use what they saw as their ancient freedoms to protect their campaigning for the vote for women. The suffragette campaign generated a series of conflicts between the judicial and executive branches of the state while also testing the depth of the common law’s commitment to civil liberties.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are implicated in various functions within the complex mechanisms of intercellular communication. There are several subpopulations of EVs, including apoptotic bodies, microvesicles and exosomes. These nanovesicles are capable of transferring functional proteins and genetic information to alter the phenotype and function of recipient cells. In animal reproduction, numerous studies have demonstrated that EVs are actively involved in the regulation of different physiological events, modulating a variety of processes such as follicular development, spermatogenesis, oocyte maturation, fertilization and embryo development, with results indicating improved gamete quality, embryo development and cryotolerance. Additionally, EVs show therapeutic potential in restoring reproductive function and supporting maternal-embryonic communication in both domestic and wild species. Therefore, the present review aimed to describe the main studies conducted using EVs in the field of animal reproduction, highlighting their biological relevance, experimental applications and future prospects for clinical implementation in assisted reproductive technologies.

Social scientists have quickly adopted large language models (LLMs) for their ability to annotate documents without supervised training, an ability known as zero-shot classification. However, due to their computational demands, cost, and often proprietary nature, these models are frequently at odds with open science standards. This article introduces the Political Domain Enhanced BERT-based Algorithm for Textual Entailment (DEBATE) language models: Foundation models for zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised classification of political documents. As zero-shot classifiers, the models are designed to be used for common, well-defined tasks, such as topic and opinion classification. When used in this context, the DEBATE models are not only as good as state-of-the-art LLMs at zero-shot classification, but are orders of magnitude more efficient and completely open source. We further demonstrate that the models are effective few-shot learners. With a simple random sample of 10–25 documents, they can outperform supervised classifiers trained on hundreds or thousands of documents and state-of-the-art generative models. Additionally, we release the PolNLI dataset used to train these models—a corpus of over 200,000 political documents with highly accurate labels across over 800 classification tasks.

Maternal diabetes during pregnancy, including pre-gestational and gestational diabetes mellitus (DM), can significantly affect fetal development, particularly in the kidneys. This study aimed to investigate the effects of maternal diabetes on fetal kidney size, parenchymal thickness, and renal artery hemodynamics using ultrasonography. A total of 128 pregnant women were enrolled and classified into pre-gestational DM (n = 28), gestational DM (n = 36), and control (n = 64) groups. Fetal kidney measurements, including anteroposterior, mediolateral, and longitudinal diameters as well as renal parenchymal thickness (RPT) and renal artery pulsatility index (PI), were assessed between 28 and 38 weeks of gestation. Fetal kidney volumes and their ratios to estimated fetal weight (EFW) and abdominal circumference (AC) were significantly lower in both the pre-gestational and gestational DM groups than in the controls (p < 0.05). However, no significant differences were observed in the RPT/AC ratios or renal artery PI among the groups. Furthermore, no significant correlations were found between maternal hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels and fetal kidney or blood flow parameters. These findings suggest that maternal diabetes alters fetal kidney growth patterns relative to the overall fetal size, potentially reflecting developmental programming that may affect nephron endowment and long-term renal health. The lack of significant differences in RPT/AC ratios and renal artery PI may be attributed to effective diabetes management or limitations in detecting subtle changes using the current ultrasound methodologies. Further longitudinal studies with larger cohorts and postnatal follow-up are warranted to clarify long-term renal outcomes and explore the precise mechanisms underlying these developmental changes.

Common Law, the shining cornerstone of the English Justice system, becomes a muddy pool when trying to uncover the ways in which it arrived into the early Virginian, Maryland, and early Eastern Australian colonies. This is particularly true for the common law of felony attainder. Attaint—social and legal death without physical death—had lasting implications on the question of legal personhood for the convicts transported from England to these colonies between 1614 and 1840. This article revisits the work done by Bruce Kercher, adding new primary research from the American colonies to enrich and challenge Kercher’s arguments. Expanding the primary source material used in the analysis gives us a deeper and more nuanced understanding about how attainder was received and applied in the colonies—in particular, in the American colonies—and a deeper understanding of outside forces that influenced property rights beyond that of the question of attainder. This article provides nuance to how common law was understood and applied by those with and without formal legal training in early developing colonial societies.