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AbstractQatar, a small Gulf Arab nation with a de facto absolute monarchy, held its first general elections ever for 30 Shura Council seats on October 2, 2021. This marked the first time in Qatar's history that citizens played a more direct role in government, moving beyond symbolic elections. This study aimed to examine the factors likely to have influenced voters' selection of candidates, the key issues that are significant to Qatari citizens, and the possible characteristics of candidates that are deemed essential. While informal conversations are the main method of data collection for this study, social identity theory, specifically group‐based models, was used to understand the influences that shape Qatari voters' choices of candidates. Findings indicate that tribe‐related and family‐connected attributes constitute important influences on voters' choice decisions. Moreover, voters were concerned about candidates' characteristics and the issues and policies candidates deemed important. Discussion and recommendations are provided.

We discuss cases of salvation and non-salvation by deletion in the domain of lexical gaps, and distinguish two types of defectiveness: (a) defectiveness that can be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of an eligible allomorph for certain environments within a language, and (b) defectiveness that cannot be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of a proper alloseme for a given environment. With ellipsis modeled as an instruction for nonpronunciation on the PF branch of the grammar, only gaps on the Exponent List can be saved by it.

Abstract It is generally agreed that statutory limitations applicable to civil proceedings have no place in international arbitration proceedings, unless these have been specifically accepted by the parties; are imposed by mandatory laws, or; otherwise compelled by public policy. In equal measure, the process and recognition of enforcement awards should not be subjected to any statutory limitations, as such limitations are absent in the New York Convention and generally excluded by reference to transnational legal instruments, such as the uncitral Model Law. Investor and commercial actors operating in Central Asia should be cautious when embroiled in disputes with state entities because of the latter tend to protract and delay negotiations in order to impose statutory limitations to claims. It is imperative that upon commencement of negotiations foreign entities take appropriate measures to ensure that their claim is not undergoing a ticking time-ban. This may be achieved by serving the other party with an official notice as to the commencement of negotiations and a statement that this is not a substitute of a civil suit or arbitral proceedings. Equally, one of the parties may trigger arbitral proceedings but ask the arbitrators to suspend all hearings until after the termination of negotiations.

AbstractAlthough the birth of Classical Greece is often attributed to the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes (508/507 BCE), the achievement of an economically minded government under the Peisistratid tyrant Hippias (527–510 BCE) potentially paved the way by advancing Athenian silver for exportation in international trade. It is proposed here that new silver technology, which initiated the transition from acquiring silver from ‘dry’ silver ores to silver‐bearing lead ores, was introduced to Greece during the time of the Peisistratids (561–510 BCE). Massive exploitation of silver‐bearing lead ores at Laurion in Attica, which later financed the construction of a war navy, appears evident in the lead pollution records of Greenland ice, lead isotopic analyses of sixth‐century BCE Attic silver coins and late Iron Age Levantine hacksilver, and is reflected in the numbers of lead votive figurines at sanctuaries in Sparta. Against the backdrop of the threat of war with Persia and an imminent Spartan invasion which resulted in the overthrow of Hippias (510 BCE), it is considered that a political transition occurred because Greece was both geologically and politically disposed to adopt this labour‐intensive silver technology which helped to initiate, fund and protect the radical social experiment that became known as Classical Greece.

Abstract Traditional socio-legal works showed that authoritarian regimes benefit from embracing international arbitration, obviating any foreign investor’s distrust of non-independent and non-democratic courts. This article explores judicial cooperation by analysing the methods of dispute settlement adopted between China and the Arab Middle Eastern States involved in the BRI. After reviewing the background of China’s legal involvement in the Middle East, China’s involvement with various transnational dispute resolution institutions in the Middle East is discussed, and special consideration is given to legal disputes in Kuwait, UAE, and Egypt. Finally, this article argues that rule of law legitimacy, social and cultural inertia, and governance cost-effectiveness all influence the resulting transnational dispute settlement scheme.

The written notes in the Electronic Health Records contain a vast amount of information about patients. Implementing automated approaches for text classification tasks requires the automated methods to be well-interpretable, and topic models can be used for this goal as they can indicate what topics in a text are relevant to making a decision. We propose a new topic modeling algorithm, FLSA-E, and compare it with another state-of-the-art algorithm FLSA-W. In FLSA-E, topics are found by fuzzy clustering in a word embedding space. Since we use word embeddings as the basis for our clustering, we extend our evaluation with word-embeddings-based evaluation metrics. We find that different evaluation metrics favour different algorithms. Based on the results, there is evidence that FLSA-E has fewer outliers in its topics, a desirable property, given that within-topic words need to be semantically related.

Abstract This article examines Hebrew- and English-medium pedagogical materials aimed at Haredi learners of Yiddish. Our main findings are 1) the materials are produced by and for the community, which reflects the commonly held Haredi view that knowledge of Yiddish is a key element of in-group identity and therefore must be maintained and taught, 2) the learning materials tend to adopt an inductive approach informed by the traditional Ashkenazic taytsh educational model, where forms and structures are absorbed through exposure, rather than a deductive one, which differs from most non-Haredi Yiddish pedagogical resources, 3) some features (e.g., personal pronouns) presented in the materials are more conservative than those typically used in spoken Haredi Yiddish, and there is considerable variation among the different resources vis-à-vis the grammatical elements presented (e.g., noun case and gender, which supports earlier research demonstrating that these features are absent from or in flux in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish).