The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is accused of censorship after the forced cancellation of a lecture by gender-rights advocate Ueno Chizuko.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan this January, Tokyo University professor and well-known gender-rights advocate Chizuko Ueno accused the Tokyo Metropolitan Government of censorship.

Two recent libel cases have led to concerns that the freedom of Japanese journalists to investigate and, if necessary criticize the powerful is under attack. Both involve marginal publications that make a living tackling “taboo” subjects and which have suffered serious legal repercussions as a result. The mainstream media in Japan has so far declined to discuss the issues, still less to offer any expressions of solidarity for their plight. The cases coincide with the publication of a report by Reporters Without Borders, which called the “steady erosion” of press freedom in Japan “alarming” and again criticized the stifling role of press clubs on reporting in the world's second-largest economy.

It is an honor for me to be able to speak to you today on behalf of indigenous people throughout the world whose lives have been dramatically affected by the proliferation of weapons. I bring you the greetings of the people of the Marshall Islands, and more specifically the paramount leaders of the Ralik chain, Iroijlaplap Imata Kabua, and Iroijlaplap Anjua Loeak, whose domains have borne the brunt of United States military weapons development - from the nuclear bombs of the Cold War to the missiles that carry them today.

When Professor Sodei Rinjiro submitted his book on caricaturist and illustrator Arthur Szyk to his Hosei University publishers, he received an apologetic but unequivocal rejection: “It is well written, nothing wrong with the content, but we can't print the pictures.” The problem was several war-time caricatures of the late Emperor Hirohito that Sodei had provided from his personal collection. “I am sure they were afraid of right-wingers.”

Nuclear power stations now produce about 17% of the world's electricity. In France and Lithuania nearly 80%, in Britain about 25%. Popular attitudes to nuclear power in other countries vary from apathy and indifference to fear and loathing. For the most part it would be fair to say, that as long as they don't contaminate the environment, and there are no blackouts, nuclear reactors must be a good thing. What has been the record of the countries that have been using nuclear power for decades?

Digital innovations in insurance, ‘InsurTech’, bring together two transformational forces in our contemporary world – risk and digitization. InsurTech has been celebrated and criticized. A literature on the social studies of insurance provides valuable and more nuanced insights into the social, cultural, and technological properties of InsurTech but it tends to analyze these at the firm level. This article brings together themes from assemblage and international political economy theories to integrate analysis of the structure of the global industry and the role of cross-border regulatory arrangements with the firm-level insights of the social studies of insurance literature. The article examines differentiation in the industry structure between stages of the insurance value chain, between incumbent and start-up insurers and Big Tech, and across jurisdictions and regions. It also examines the most globally significant regulatory responses to InsurTech: from the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the US National Association of Insurance Commissioners. It shows that the nuance and ethical content that is evident at the firm level in the social studies of insurance literature is interacting with similar nuance and ethical content in global regulatory arrangements.

Let $(A,\mathfrak{m} )$ be a hypersurface local ring of dimension $d \geq 1$ and let I be an $\mathfrak{m} $-primary ideal. We show that there is a integer rI$\geq\;-1$ (depending only on I) such that if M is any non-free maximal Cohen–Macaulay (= MCM) A-module the function $n \rightarrow \ell(\operatorname{Tor}^A_1(M, A/I^{n+1}))$ (which is of polynomial type) has degree rI. Analogous results hold for Hilbert polynomials associated to Ext-functors. Surprisingly, a key ingredient is the classification of thick subcategories of the stable category of MCM A-modules (obtained by Takahashi, see [11, 6.6]).

What factors contribute to closing the turnout gender gap after female enfranchisement? In the wake of franchise expansion, we test whether being a poll officer—and hence being exposed to election management—boosted the politicisation and mobilisation of women. In the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–1939), we exploit a lottery that assigned recently enfranchised women to be poll officers in the first election women were allowed to vote (1933). We use an original individual-level panel database and show that women randomly selected as polling officers were as likely to participate in subsequent elections than men, while the gender turnout gap persisted among the rest. Further analyses suggest that being poll officers made women more receptive to political organisations mobilisation strategies, and their presence had positive externalities by encouraging other women to participate. Our findings highlight the potential benefits of exposure to election engineering among groups previously excluded or less engaged with democracy.

The University of California, Berkeley, is considering a proposal to un-name a building that honors Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), one of the leading liberal anthropologists in the United States. Tony Platt describes the controversy and explains why it is time to come to terms with Berkeley's “salvage archaeology” that deepened the misery of survivors of genocide by plundering the graves of 10,000 ancestors on Kroeber's watch.

Does the EU’s performance compared to neighboring countries influence public support? Using a benchmarking approach, we argue that people compare their country’s performance within the EU to that of a non-EU country, shaping their attitudes. The COVID-19 vaccine rollout in 2020 provides an ideal test case, as governments launched vaccination programs at different speeds. The UK began weeks before EU countries, allowing us to examine its impact on EU support. Using an Unexpected Event during Surveys Design (UESD) with Eurobarometer data, we find that the UK’s early rollout significantly reduced specific policy support for the EU but did not consistently affect diffuse support. Our findings offer key insights into attitudes toward European integration and performance evaluations.

Extraordinary finds from the Store Frigård cremation cemetery on the Danish island of Bornholm suggest that the society that used the site played a key role in supra-regional contacts and in the distribution of goods and people across the Baltic Sea between the Continent and Southern Scandinavia during the Iron Age.

This agenda identifies future research trajectories for the corpus revolution, proposing five specific research tasks designed to explore and advance the application of corpus linguistics in language education. These tasks focus on: (1) contrastive data-driven learning, (2) the development of corpus research for informing national language curricula, (3) the use of artificial intelligence for corpus informed language teaching and learning, (4) the reconsideration of the design and development of pedagogical corpora, and (5) the need for stakeholder engagement with corpus research design. Addressing these tasks requires a unified and collaborative effort as they sit at a number of key intersections in corpus applications to language pedagogy. We ask scholars executing them to engage in broad and cooperative research to meet the evolving needs of learners globally, to examine the potential of corpus linguistics for addressing new challenges in language education, and to influence and shape future directions in applied linguistics.