Since 2017, the world has been talking about the Uyghur people as a “Chinese minority” suffering mass violence at the hands of the Chinese government, which researchers and some countries describe as genocide. While China refutes these accusations and refers to them as “internal affairs,” both China and the rest of the world present the Uyghurs as an “ethnic minority,” thus deliberately denying the Sino-Uyghur colonial relationship that has lasted since the military invasion of East Turkestan in late 1949 by the People’s Liberation Army with the full support of Stalin. As an indigenous people under settler colonialism, the Uyghurs reject this categorization as a “minority,” which contributes to the eradication of their national identity and indigenous sovereignty.

This paper contributes to the literature on augmented wealth (the sum of public pension entitlements and net wealth) along three dimensions. First, it provides new country-specific estimates of augmented wealth for Austria in the year 2017 by combining data from the HFCS (Household Finance and Consumption Survey) and the social security registry. Second, it shows that the main results, which are based on statistical matching, are surprisingly similar to estimates that utilize direct survey responses or information on work history. This finding suggests that international comparisons might be possible even if the results are based on different methodologies. Third, the paper also contrasts the size and distribution of augmented wealth for Austria with comparable estimates for other countries. The household averages of the present value of pension entitlements and of private net wealth turn out to be similar (both amounting to around € 250,000), which is in line with the results for other countries like Switzerland, Germany, and the US. Also, the reduction in the Gini coefficient due to the inclusion of pension entitlements (a decrease from 0.73 to 0.53) is similar for Austria in comparison to other countries.

Quantifying marine reservoir effects (MREs) across time and space is crucial for establishing accurate archaeological chronologies, including the activities of past hominines. Although the northern Iberian Peninsula shows a high density of Upper Paleolithic sites and marine shells are frequently found in these assemblages, quantification of MREs in this coastal region remains limited. We performed Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon measurements from both terrestrial (Capra pyrenaica, Cervus elaphus and other herbivores unidentified at species level) and marine (Littorina littorea Linnaeus, 1758 and Patella vulgata Linnaeus, 1758 taxa) archaeological samples recovered from the Tito Bustillo cave (Asturias, Spain) in order to determine the ΔR values for northern Iberia during the Lower Magdalenian period (ca. 20–17 ka cal BP). For the time span between 18.6 and 18.2 ka cal BP we estimated ΔR values of –298±44 14C yr and –495±122 14C yr for the periwinkle L. littorea and the common limpet P. vulgata, respectively. This finding has significant implications for future archaeological research in the northern Iberian Peninsula, as researchers must apply distinct ΔR values depending on the mollusk species selected for radiocarbon dating. Furthermore, the consistency between our calculated ΔR value for P. vulgata and previously recorded data for the same taxon from a neighboring coastal region (Cantabria, Spain) suggests remarkable stability in the marine environment of this area during the Lower Magdalenian period.

A growing interest in informal institutions in the judiciary – Scarce empirical studies focusing on informal institutions in judicial decision-making – An in-depth case study of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (2012-2016) through an interview methodology – Constitutional Courts develop informal institutions often determinative of case outcomes – Polarisation negatively impacting compliance with preexisting informal institutions

This article brings to the debate on constitutional identity a category borrowed by feminist thought: patriarchy. Generally considered as a pre-existing identity, flushed out by a modern/progressive constitutional identity, this paper claims that patriarchy can be indirectly perpetuated by certain constitutional provisions if not differently interpreted. By focusing on the issue of the exclusion of women from the priesthood in some majoritarian religions spread in Europe, the paper observes that an effective impossibility of challenging this exclusion in front of a judge, due to the operation of the constitutional principle of religious freedom, creates a growing conflict with another constitutional principle: that of gender equality. The paper notes that this inner conflict between two core constitutional principles, both crucial to the Western constitutional identity, is overlooked by constitutional research and invites constitutionalists to self-reflect on the historical limits of the constitutions that were created by men, in states that often coalesced with religious institutions to assert patriarchy. The paper claims that the constitutional indifference toward the religious gap is no longer constitutionally sustainable in a context in which the EU says that there is no democracy without gender equality. The principle of religious freedom needs to be re-interpreted to readdress a historical injustice suffered by women in the long patriarchal process that excluded them from the sacred. Without imposing upon religion institutions by dictating their faith, the paper suggests some practical measures that can remedy the patriarchal harms suffered by women after they lost access to the altar.

This article seeks to capture the transformative potential of emergency powers, as a legal–political practice pertaining to liberal legality that ultimately can determine constitutional change, rather than a return to ‘normality’. It does so by providing an analysis of the transition from formal and limited liberal legality in Romania to the series of dictatorships that followed the instauration of the regime of royal dictatorship of King Carol II in 1938. Anchored in a close reading of the archival documents of the trial of the leader of the main far right movement, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and the subsequent legal proceedings, the proposed article aims to produce revaluation of the jurisprudential and constitutional status of the regime of King Carol II with a view of understanding the emergency-based dimension of this rule and the particular shift it operated foundational legal categories in criminal and constitutional law. I proceed by examining the current theoretical limitations in addressing the historical role of emergency in relation to constitutional orders. I turn then to exploring the political and legal context of the prorogation of emergency measures in 1938 Romania. Last, I examine the limited status of modern legality in a situation oversaturated by emergency measures.

This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) policies designed for livestock farming in Europe—and particularly France—have been limited by narrowly defined reduction targets. Although these policies have significantly decreased antibiotic use, they have also upheld a productivist agricultural model that continues to threaten human and animal health and the environment. By aligning AMR mitigation efforts with a biosecurity paradigm that is highly compatible with industrial livestock systems, the reduction in antibiotic use has not yielded all the anticipated benefits. Based on this assessment, we propose three avenues for fostering a just transition relevant to all sectors involved in AMR governance: transcending the dominant “One Global Health” paradigm; shifting power from institutional stakeholders to the public affected by AMR; and reimagining post-antibiotic futures that extend beyond prevailing dystopian narratives.

This article traces the history of teaching Vulgar and Late Latin (LVLT) at Finnish universities from the mid-19th century to the present, focusing on the University of Helsinki. Drawing on archival sources, we examine changes in teaching programmes, degree requirements and thesis output. We show how LVLT was gradually integrated into Latin studies through philological renewal, Romance philology and epigraphic research, peaking in a ‘boom’ from the 1960s to the 1990s. Key figures such as Veikko Väänänen and Iiro Kajanto were central to embedding LVLT in teaching and research. However, recent structural reforms and cuts to staff and courses have contributed to a decline in LVLT instruction.

The exchange of raw cotton and consumer textiles has been widely portrayed as a core element of European imperialism in Africa. The case appears straightforward: textile industries were vital to European economies, yet depended on imported raw cotton and external markets for their surplus output. To meet these needs, colonizers allegedly enforced trade and destroyed African textile sectors, leaving Africans to resist or be coerced. This stylized rendering of ‘cotton imperialism’ was central to metropolitan rhetoric promoted by textile sector lobbyists and government officials, and often remains unchallenged in scholarship today. I show, however, that it is at odds with actual colonial efforts and outcomes across twentieth-century Africa. Colonial cotton and textile trade did expand, but in ways hardly consistent with the aims of European industries, and even textile sector actors themselves showed limited and inconsistent commitment to cotton production in Africa. Policies on the ground were shaped above all by fiscal, administrative, and political priorities in the colonies. Metropolitan rhetoric mattered, but shaped colonial policies and practices only in muted and subverted ways.

Data from observations of pulsars made by Murriyang, the CSIRO Parkes 64-metre radio-telescope over the last three decades are more accessible than ever before, largely due to their storage in expansive long-term archives. Containing nearly 2 million files from more than 400 Parkes pulsar projects, CSIRO’s Data Access Portal is leading the global effort in making pulsar data accessible. In this article, we present the current status of the archive and provide information about the acquisition, analysis, reduction, visualisation, preservation, and dissemination of these datasets. We highlight the importance of such an archive and present a selection of new results emanating from archival data.

This article examines American “capitalist feminism” as a type of “business feminism” through the lens of biography. To demonstrate crucial linkages between business culture and historical social developments, the article foregrounds an account of the first woman president of a major commercial bank, Mary G. Roebling. Roebling sought women’s collective uplift primarily through economic empowerment, forwarding her message through accommodationist tactics, such as presenting a “feminine” image, embracing capitalism, and espousing moderate politics. This essay briefly explores additional biographies to suggest that other professionally successful, elite white women held similar “capitalist feminist” views. The article also employs biographical and associational examples to illustrate how capitalist feminism is a distinct category of business feminism.

In this paper we prove disintegration results for self-conformal measures and affinely irreducible self-similar measures. The measures appearing in the disintegration resemble self-conformal/self-similar measures for iterated function systems satisfying the strong separation condition. We use these disintegration statements to prove new results on the Diophantine properties of these measures.

Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical infrastructures, political institutions, and ideas. Across six essays, this forum examines the territorial, temporal, and ideational ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires, highlighting how individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg exercise unprecedented influence over states and societies. From charter cities and network-states to cloud computing and satellite systems, these oligarchs leverage personal wealth, technological mastery, and monopolistic control to bypass traditional state authority, turning themselves into quasi-sovereign actors. The essays situate these developments within historical and theoretical frameworks, comparing oligarchic power to early modern chartered corporations and the logic of state formation, while emphasizing the novel dimensions of control unique to the 21st century. Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individual technology oligarchs consolidate authority in ways that challenge traditional international relations theory, revealing a global order increasingly shaped by the ambitions and delusions of private actors.

The loss function is a mathematical representation of the costs experienced by a forecaster when observed outcomes differ from what was predicted. Prior studies suggest that USDA forecasts are not optimal based on an assumed mean-zero quadratic loss function. This study proposes an alternative view of forecast evaluation, which assumes all USDA forecasts are produced to minimize the forecasters’ costs, and searches for the dimensions of the loss function under which optimality holds. We illustrate the degree to which USDA loss functions vary across a series of WASDE price forecasts. A better understanding of USDA forecasters’ costs will benefit forecasters and forecast users.

We present the discovery of PSR J1728–4608, a new redback spider pulsar identified in images from the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope. PSR J1728–4608 is a millisecond pulsar with a spin period of 2.86 ms, in a 5.05 hr orbit with a companion star. The pulsar exhibits a radio spectrum of the form Sv ∝ vα, with a measured spectral index of α = –1.8(3). It is eclipsed for 42% of its orbit at 888 MHz, and multi–frequency image–domain observations show that the egress duration scales with frequency as a power law with index n = –1.74, where longer duration eclipses are seen at lower frequencies. An optical counterpart is detected in archival Gaia data within 0.5″ of the radio position. It has a mean G-band magnitude of 18.8 mag and its light curve displays characteristics consistent with a combination of ellipsoidal modulation and irradiation effects. We also report the nearest Fermi γ-ray source, located 2′ away from our source, as a possible association. A radio timing study constrains the intrinsic and orbital properties of the system, revealing orbital period variations that we attribute to changes in the gravitational quadrupole moment of the companion star. At the eclipse boundary, we measure a maximum dispersion measure excess of 2.0 ± 1.2 pc cm−3, corresponding to an electron column density of 5.9 ± 3.6 × 1018 pc cm−2. Modelling of the eclipse mechanism suggests that synchrotron absorption is the dominant cause of the eclipses observed at radio wavelengths. The discovery and characterisation of systems like PSR J1728–4608 provide valuable insights into pulsar recycling, binary evolution, the nature of companion-driven eclipses, and the interplay between compact objects and their plasma environments.