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Abstract This article examines the durability of high postmortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in postmortem rates in the 1980s.

Archaeological investigations of the Idiofa region in the Kwilu Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo have yielded the earliest evidence for iron production, combined with ceramics and lithic artefacts, south of the Congo rainforest during the second century BC. Palaeoecological data show that the producers of this industry did not settle in open grasslands but in a habitat where the forests had started to undergo climate-induced degradation before their arrival. The Early Iron Age at Idiofa continues until the third century AD and is followed by a long hiatus that was not driven by climate change until the fifteenth century. Later Iron Age (LIA) pottery in the area, which dates to c. 1487–1648, is markedly distinct from that of the EIA in vessel forms, size, recipe and decoration. EIA pottery from Idiofa resembles most closely slightly younger Kay Ladio pottery (c. cal. AD 30–475) from the Lower Congo region further west, which is also associated with the first metallurgy there. Idiofa’s LIA pottery is indicative of a fifteenth- through seventeenth-century exchange network between the Kamtsha and Kasai Rivers. These shifting dynamics in pottery production are reflected in the region’s linguistic stratigraphy, which may contribute to the interdisciplinary reconstruction of the history of ancestral Bantu speakers south of the rainforest. Les recherches archéologiques dans la région d’Idiofa, dans la province du Kwilu, en République Démocratique du Congo, ont mené à la découverte des premières traces de la production du fer au sud de la forêt du bassin du Congo. Elles remontent au cours du deuxième siècle avant J.-C et sont associées à la céramique et aussi aux vestiges lithiques. Les données paléoécologiques montrent que les producteurs de cette industrie ne se sont pas installés dans des savanes ouvertes, mais dans un habitat dont les forêts avaient commencé à se dégrader avant leur arrivée, suite aux changements climatiques. L’Âge du Fer ancien à Idiofa continue jusqu’au troisième siècle de notre ère. Après cela un long hiatus non lié au changement climatique perdure jusqu’au quinzième siècle. La poterie de l’Âge du Fer récent (c. 1487–1648 ap. J.-C.) se distingue nettement de celle de l'Âge du Fer ancien par la forme, la taille, la composition et la décoration. La poterie de l’Âge du Fer ancien d'Idiofa ressemble davantage à la poterie Kay Ladio (c. 30–475 ap. J.-C.) de la région du Bas-Congo, située plus à l’ouest et de date un peu plus récente. Elle est également associée à la métallurgie la plus ancienne de cette région. La poterie d’Idiofa de l’Âge du Fer récent est révélatrice d’un réseau d’échange qui s’étendaient entre les rivières Kamtsha et Kasai du quinzième au dix-septième siècles de notre ère. Ces dynamiques en mutation dans la production de la poterie se reflètent dans la stratigraphie linguistique de la région, ce qui est pertinent pour la reconstruction interdisciplinaire de l’histoire des communautés bantouphones ancestrales au sud de la forêt tropicale.

Abstract Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

Abstract This article draws on a variety of primary sources to first illustrate the rise of African abolitionism in the Fante region in the mid-nineteenth century and then situate local abolitionists in the context of colonial legal abolition in the Gold Coast. When the British abolished slavery in 1874, various Fante groups had been developing local anti-slavery views and strategies closely connected to the evolution of a Fante ethnic identity fashioned against the “barbaric” Asante. Tensions arose between the Fante intelligentsia, which spearheaded local abolitionism, and British colonial elites. The article examines the rise of local abolitionism among the coastal Fante through specific ideas, individuals, and events, and discusses subsequent dynamics in the “first age” (1874–1900) of colonial abolitionism in the Gold Coast. It shows that the 1874 abolition was opposed by members of the Fante anti-slavery movement not—as has been argued—because Fante intellectuals were pro-slavery or opposed to the idea of abolition, but because they held different visions of emancipation and were critical of British abolition laws that, unlike in the West Indies, did not compensate slaveowners.

Published online: 09 January 2024 Four weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, US Senator John Kennedy accused the Biden administration of indirectly providing over $17 billion to Moscow as Putin was gearing up for war. In August 2021, the International Monetary Fund had indeed approved a historic $650 billion allocation of Special Drawing Rights to help member countries struggling with the Covid crisis. Russia benefited from these money transfers, as did Iran, China, and Myanmar, notwithstanding the authoritarian consolidation of these regimes. Kennedy's op-ed sparked a debate about the lack of transparency in the use of crisis resources and led to the adoption in the United States of the ‘Russia and Belarus SDR Exchange Prohibition Act’, which bans currency transactions with these countries through the IMF, following the imposition of 2,500 sanctions by the US Treasury since February 2022. The op-ed also reignited a decades-old debate over whether international organisations such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation (WTO) should be held accountable for supporting authoritarian and corrupt governments or interfering in the politics of sovereign nations. This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2023-2025). Support for this article came from ECOINT, a programme that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 885285).

The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 396 to the mid-Norwegian margin recovered > 1300 m of pristinely preserved, volcanic-ash-rich sediments deposited during the late Paleocene and early Eocene from close to the centre of the North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP). Remarkably, many of these cores contain glendonites, pseudomorphs after the purported cold-water mineral ikaite, from sediments dated to the late Paleocene and early Eocene. These time intervals span some of the hottest climates of the Cenozoic, including the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Global deep-ocean temperatures are not thought to have dropped below 10 ∘C at any point during this time, making the occurrence of supposedly cold-water (near-freezing temperature) glendonite pseudomorphs seemingly paradoxical. This study presents a detailed sedimentological, geochemical, and microscopic study of the IODP Exp. 396 glendonites and presents an updated model for the ikaite-to-calcite transformation for these glendonites. Specifically, we show that early diagenesis of basaltic ashes of the NAIP appear to have chemically promoted ikaite growth in the sediments in this region. Together with existing knowledge of late Paleocene and early Eocene glendonites from Svalbard to the north and early Eocene glendonites from Denmark to the south, these new glendonite finds possibly imply episodic, short-duration, and likely localized cooling in the Nordic Seas region, which may have been directly or indirectly linked to the emplacement of the NAIP.

AbstractMovement of resources was essential to the survival and success of early complex societies. The sources and destinations of goods and the means of transportation – be it by boats, carts and/or foot – can often be inferred, but the logistics of these movements are inherently more difficult to ascertain. Here, we use strontium isotopic analysis to test hypotheses about the role of animal and animal-powered transport in medium and long-distance movement and exchange, using the Indus Civilization as a case study. Across the wide geographical spread of the Indus Civilisation, there is strong evidence for long-distance exchange of raw materials and finished objects and this process is presumed to involve boats and animal-driven transport, although there is little evidence as to the relative importance of each mode of movement. Strontium isotopic analysis of animal remains from four sites analysed for this study combined with results from nine other sites indicates limited long-distance animal movement between different geological zones within the Indus Civilisation. These findings suggest that individual animals primarily moved short- or medium-distances, though there are several significant exceptions seen in some pigs and cattle found at two large urban sites. We infer that long-distance transport of goods, be it raw materials, finished objects, other goods, or the animals themselves, could have occurred through the use of boats and waterways, by traction animals moving over long distances that did not end up in the archaeological record, and/or by different animals participating in many short to medium-distance movements.

After the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, particle physics community is exploring and proposing next accelerators, to address the remaining open questions on the underlying mechanisms and constituents of the present universe. One of the studied possibilities is FCC (Future Circular Collider), a 100 km long collider at CERN. The feasibility study of this future proposed accelerator implies the definition of tolerances on magnets imperfections and of the strategies of correction in order to guarantee the target performances of the High Energy Booster ring. The efficiency of the correction scheme, used to control the orbit, directly bounds the corrector needs and magnet tolerances. Analytic formulae give a first estimation of the average rms value of the required linear correctors' strengths and of the allowed magnets misalignments and field quality along the entire ring. The distribution of the correctors along the ring is simulated in order to verify the quality of the residual orbit after the proposed correction strategy and compared with the analytical predictions. First specifications of the orbit correctors strength and tolerances for the alignment of the main elements of the ring are presented. The limits of the studied correction scheme and method are also discussed. International audience

AbstractINTRODUCTIONThe apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele is associated with high risk for Alzheimer's disease. It is unclear whether individual levels of the circulating apoE4 protein in ε4 carriers confer additional risk. Measuring apoE4 protein levels from dried blood spots (DBS) has the potential to provide information on genetic status as well as circulating levels and to include these measures in large survey settings.METHODSWe developed a multiplex immunoassay to detect apoE4 protein levels in DBS from 15,974 participants, aged 50+ from Wave 6 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).RESULTSThe apoE4 protein signal was presented in two separable distributions. One distribution corresponded to carriers of at least one copy of the ε4 allele. Fieldwork cofounders affected protein levels but did not explain individual differences.DISCUSSIONFuture research should investigate how genotype and apoE4 level interact with lifestyle and other variables to impact cognitive aging.

The Dutch Northeastern province of Groningen has attracted national and international attention for being situated on top of Europe's biggest gas field. Decades of gas extraction have caused human-made gasquakes that have become highly politicized as they have resulted in the damage of thousands of houses, messy compensation policies, unsafe living situations, an intense situation of social and psychological desperation, and deep political distrust. An issue that has, however, been mostly absent from political debates is the fact that the gas extraction has also caused land subsidence with major implications for the area's water systems. In this article, we investigate the depoliticizing governmentality techniques of Groningen's extractive territorialization. In doing so, we differentiate how the same governmentality techniques have mostly depoliticized gas extraction-land subsidence while they have failed to depoliticize the gasquakes. We nuance the complex power dynamics (i.e., simultaneous de- and re-politicization), socio-material transformation processes (i.e., land subsidence and gasquakes), and institutional dynamics (i.e., public water management and private compensation organizations) evoked by extractive transformations. We argue that the extractive alliance's land subsidence-governmentalities reflect a subtle re-ordering of territorial control. Yet, we also highlight the limits, contestations, and contingency of extractive governmentalization. We unravel how an understanding of power as simultaneously unintentional and intentional informs our analysis. We show how the extractive alliance benefits from the interplay of power strategies, yet not without being strongly contested by local inhabitants and social movements.