Court records are rich primary sources to social historians, and much attention has been paid to these types of documents in different African territories. In most cases only summaries have survived, but in Angola complete proceedings have been preserved. Examining the court case collection available at the Benguela District Court, we discuss its strengths and methodological challenges, and present possible themes for future research. The use of these records reveals new aspects of the Angolan past, including more information on local norms and the ability of African women to use the Portuguese courts.

Education is essential for addressing the global environmental crisis and engaging students through experiential learning is crucial. In physical education, physical literacy offers a holistic approach to sustainable education, with plogging exemplifying this integration. This study investigates the perceptions of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students regarding the implementation of plogging in school curricula. Using qualitative interviews with 80 PETE students and analysing responses with NVIVO 12 software, the study reveals mixed feelings about this innovative practice. Participants see plogging as valuable for fostering both physical literacy and environmental awareness. However, concerns about feasibility include the need for institutional support, curriculum flexibility and community involvement. These findings highlight the potential of plogging to enhance educational programmes by combining physical activity with environmental stewardship. The results can inform the development of future educational strategies that integrate plogging to promote sustainability and holistic student development.

Members of the genus Actinia are familiar members of rocky shore communities across much of the world. However, to date, no Actinia species have been reported from the North American continent. Here, we report Actinia from an approximately 22 km length of the New Jersey, US shoreline, where it was first discovered in 2021. Morphology and DNA barcoding data (mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I and nuclear internal transcribed spacer) indicate that these populations are Actinia equina. The presence of these populations close to major ports in New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia suggests a probable introduction from shipping activities.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often referred to as the “World Court,” plays a central role in the field of international law. Despite the significance of this court, socio-legal scholarship has not examined the ICJ’s inner workings due to limited access. Drawing from field theory and organizational theory, this study addresses this gap by using various data sources including interviews, organizational documents, and publicly available texts from insiders. Based on this data, this article explores how the ICJ’s institutional context shapes its organization and the experiences of its actors. We argue that the ICJ provides a space that tightly connects institutional myths, organizational practices, and individual action. This tight coupling effectively mediates and manages differences among ICJ actors, fostering a stable practice of international law within a field otherwise marked by conflict. This enables the ICJ to produce and sustain a specific way of doing international law which has stabilizing effects in this field. By linking the macro level of the field – an area emphasized in prior scholarship – with a microlevel organizational perspective, this article offers a nuanced understanding of the conflicts and organizational practices influencing the ICJ’s operations and development of international law.

The present study aimed to utilize maize landraces from the North Eastern Hill Region (NEHR) of India for hybrid development, addressing the absence of established heterotic groups for maize in this region. Eighty inbreds derived from diverse local landraces were test-crossed to two testers LM-13 and LM-14. The 160 testcrosses were evaluated over two seasons using an alpha lattice design. Heterotic grouping studies utilizing BLUP values, included analyses of specific combining ability (SCA), specific and general combining ability (HSGCA), and GCA of multiple traits (HGCAMT). Additionally, 34 SSR markers were employed to group the inbreds based on genetic distance (SSR_GD). Breeding efficiency tests indicated that the conventional SCA and HSGCA methods were the most effective for heterotic grouping, enabling classification of the overlapping inbreds into the corresponding tester groups. Validation involving 10 inbreds – 5 from each tester group crossed in a full diallel fashion – revealed that gene action was predominantly non-additive, a prerequisite for heterosis breeding. The highest-performing hybrids exhibited better parent heterosis (BPH) ranging from 75 to 384%, demonstrating significant yield advantages. These hybrids combined moderately divergent parents with contrasting female and male GCA values and BPH was significantly associated with SCA effects, providing predictive insights for optimizing hybrid development. The findings of this study highlight the potential of NEHR germplasm for developing high-yielding hybrids tailored to local conditions. These hybrids would particularly benefit smallholding farmers practicing shifting cultivation by enabling cost-effective production and providing economic benefits.

Through analyzing the compensation accounts and stock ledgers in the Bank of England Archive, this article explores how British firms—especially those in the City of London—profited from the unique business opportunity that arose through the payment of slavery compensation in 1835. It uses a new dataset with 18,930 observations to establish that a cohort of 27 “compensation agents” handled as intermediaries approximately two-thirds of the transactions associated with £5 million paid in compensation as government stock (3.5% Reduced Annuities) to slave owners in Barbados, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Virgin Islands. The article argues that this demonstrates how the City’s financial capacity, infrastructure, and business community were significant in delivering the efficient payment of compensation. It also underscores the need to understand the slavery compensation process as contemporaries did; as an important moment in the history of the City and its financial markets.

A good knowledge of connectives like moreover and therefore is crucial for reading comprehension and academic success, yet not all connectives, especially infrequent connectives mostly used in writing, are well mastered even by adults. The main goal of this paper is to assess the possibility to improve the ability to use connectives in discourse during the transitional teenage years. To do so, we examined whether 228 native French-speaking teenagers and 60 adults improved their performance with eight infrequent (prototypical and non-prototypical) connectives in a sentence-completion task after active or passive training. The results revealed that training had only a limited effect on the ability to use both types of connectives, while the degree of exposure to print was an important predictor of individual variations. These findings suggest that connectives’ mastery depends more on exposure to extensive written input that allows to internalize their procedural meaning over time rather than on one-time explicit activation of the mapping between their form and function.