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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).

Palaeolithic sites are complex palimpsests due to the recurrent presence of human groups and carnivores through time, as documented in several European caves and rock shelters. Within these contexts, it can be challenging to identify the main contributors to bone accumulations and interpret human subsistence strategies and the role of carnivores. Consequently, taphonomic analyses are crucial for distinguishing the origins of these occupation episodes. One example of alternating occupations is found at El Castillo cave (Cantabria, Spain), specifically in the so-called Transitional Aurignacian level (∼46-42 ka uncal BP). According to a recent study conducted at this level (Luret et al., 2020), the human groups had a hunting specialisation focused on red deer, while carnivores had little influence on the assemblage. However, these interpretations were based only on the faunal assemblage from the recent excavations (1980–2011). A previous excavation phase was conducted on this site from 1910 to 1914, and after that, the faunal remains recovered were separated across several institutions, lacking a complete archaeozoological and taphonomic analysis of the whole level. In this work, a new taxonomic assessment and, for the first time, a taphonomic study of the macrofauna recovered in the Aurignacian Delta level during the initial excavations, stored at Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira (Cantabria, Spain), is carried out. This work provides new information about the human and carnivore groups that occupied El Castillo, constructing new hypotheses to interpret this relevant archaeological level.

This report describes the dental calculus sampling conducted during the MEDICAL project (Medical Treatments in Medieval Leprosaria. Exploring Healing Remedies through Dental Calculus Analysis). The research is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 844364. The samples were collected from the human skeletal remains excavated from the St Leonard leprosy hospital in Peterborough (UK). The skeletal collection is stored at Durham University. This file is not publicly accessible but is available upon request.

What are the effects and significance of inscribing an archive or group of documents in a heritage list? In light of the positive effects of digital technology on archival science, should all archives and past documents be considered “heritage,” or are some more significant than others? What are the implications and benefits of a heritage archive? Is creating a digital database of a specific archive considered part of heritage conservation? Is the term "heritagization" or "heritage making" a synonym for preservation or conservation? In this article, I will attempt to answer some of these questions from the point of view of premodern literature, drawing on recent researches in heritage studies, specifically in the subfield of "critical heritage studies. After briefly introducing the current state of heritage scholarship, I will present the definition of "textual heritage" that I developed during my most recent project. Secondly, to reflect on how the concept of textual heritage can affect our understanding of historical archives, I will present the case of the Hyakugo Archive of Toji Temple (Kyoto, Japan), a collection of 19,000 documents dating from the eight to the eighteenth century, which was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World List in 2005 and has been fully digitized and made available to the public via the Internet. I will examine a particular historical event that occurred during the 17th century, which can be viewed as a re-birth of this archive as a cultural heritage and reflect on the implications of this event for the survival of the archive itself and its use today.

POGO (Philology-Oriented Graphematics Ontology, https://github.com/vedph/graphematics) is an ontology including key concepts of graphematics (such as Grapheme, Allograph, Glyph, Brevigraph). It is oriented towards digital philology: it includes the concepts/objects that a philologist needs to create a digital diplomatic transcription of a textual document (such as European and Near Eastern medieval manuscripts, inscriptions, papyri) written with pre-modern handwritten writing systems.

AbstractUnalloyed copper objects were produced in the Chalcolithic Southern Levant in a two‐step process. Copper ore was smelted in pit furnaces, and the mechanically extracted copper prills melt in crucibles and cast into objects. However, the air supply remained unknown, and practical considerations shed doubt on the validity of some of the reconstructed practices. To refine the reconstruction, the metallurgical material from Abu Matar was reassessed. Most importantly, several previously unreported fragments suggest the use of bellows and covering the furnace with large pottery fragments. Our results provide probably the earliest evidence for the use of bellows.

Research in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine has recently introduced the concept of Polygenic Scores (PGSs), namely, indexes that aggregate the effects that many genetic variants are predicted to have on individual disease risk. The popularity of PGSs is increasing rapidly, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the idealisations they make about phenotypic development. Indeed, PGSs rely on quantitative genetics models and methods, which involve considerable theoretical assumptions that have been questioned on various grounds. This comes with epistemological and ethical concerns about the use of PGSs in clinical decision-making. In this paper, I investigate to what extent idealisations in genetics models can impact the data gathering and clinical interpretation of genomics findings, particularly the calculation and predictive accuracy of PGSs. Although idealisations are considered ineliminable components of scientific models, they may be legitimate or not depending on the epistemic aims of a model. I thus analyse how various idealisations have been introduced in classical models and progressively readapted throughout the history of genetic theorising. Notably, this process involved important changes in the epistemic purpose of such idealisations, which raises the question of whether they are legitimate in the context of contemporary genomics.