Regional economic integration has long been recognized as a key strategy for enhancing trade, fostering economic development, and strengthening the bargaining power of developing regions. In this context, the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) marks a critical juncture in Africa’s economic trajectory. Beyond its aim to expand intra-African trade by harmonizing trade and economic policies across the continent, the AfCFTA also holds the potential of bolstering Africa’s negotiating position with external partners such as the European Union. At present, Africa–EU trade is governed by an overlapping network of bilateral and regional agreements with individual African countries or regional economic communities. The advent of the AfCFTA thus raises a critical question: to what extent can the agreement serve as a platform for a unified, inter-continent trade agreement with external partners such as the EU? Drawing on theories of regionalism, case studies of the EAC, ECOWAS, and Kenya—whose unilateral actions exemplify tensions between national and regional policies—and the history of Africa-EU trade, this article examines whether the AfCFTA can serve as a foundation for a unified African trade policy position. It concludes that while the AfCFTA creates a unique opportunity to consolidate Africa’s voice in global trade, major hurdles must be overcome, including divergent economic interests among member states, the need for deeper policy harmonization, and the complex challenges involved in establishing a unified customs framework.
History of Africa, African languages and literature
Quantum illumination represents one of the most interesting examples of quantum technologies. On the one hand, it can find significant applications; on the other hand, it is one of the few quantum protocols robust against noise and losses. Here we present a short summary of the history of this quantum protocol.
Solal Rapaport, Laurent Pautet, Samuel Tardieu
et al.
Version Control Systems (VCS) like Git allow developers to locally rewrite recorded history, e.g., to reorder and suppress commits or specific data in them. These alterations have legitimate use cases, but become problematic when performed on public branches that have downstream users: they break push/pull workflows, challenge the integrity and reproducibility of repositories, and create opportunities for supply chain attackers to sneak into them nefarious changes. We conduct the first large-scale investigation of Git history alterations in public code repositories. We analyze 111 M (millions) repositories archived by Software Heritage, which preserves VCS histories even across alterations. We find history alterations in 1.22 M repositories, for a total of 8.7 M rewritten histories. We categorize changes by where they happen (which repositories, which branches) and what is changed in them (files or commit metadata). Conducting two targeted case studies we show that altered histories recurrently change licenses retroactively, or are used to remove ''secrets'' (e.g., private keys) committed by mistake. As these behaviors correspond to bad practices-in terms of project governance or security management, respectively-that software recipients might want to avoid, we introduce GitHistorian, an automated tool, that developers can use to spot and describe history alterations in public Git repositories.
Xinjie Zhao, Shyaman Maduranga Sriwarnasinghe, Jiacheng Tang
et al.
The integration of artificial intelligence into development research methodologies presents unprecedented opportunities for addressing persistent challenges in participatory research, particularly in linguistically diverse regions like South Asia. Drawing from an empirical implementation in Sri Lanka's Sinhala-speaking communities, this paper presents an empirically grounded methodological framework designed to transform participatory development research, situated in the challenging multilingual context of Sri Lanka's flood-prone Nilwala River Basin. Moving beyond conventional translation and data collection tools, this framework deploys a multi-agent system architecture that redefines how data collection, analysis, and community engagement are conducted in linguistically and culturally diverse research settings. This structured agent-based approach enables participatory research that is both scalable and responsive, ensuring that community perspectives remain integral to research outcomes. Field experiences reveal the immense potential of LLM-based systems in addressing long-standing issues in development research across resource-limited regions, offering both quantitative efficiencies and qualitative improvements in inclusivity. At a broader methodological level, this research agenda advocates for AI-driven participatory research tools that maintain ethical considerations, cultural respect, and operational efficiency, highlighting strategic pathways for deploying AI systems that reinforce community agency and equitable knowledge generation, potentially informing broader research agendas across the Global South.
The article reveals decentralization process in Japan, initial steps of the Abe Cabinet to revitalize local communities within the course for economic revival of Japan, as well as prospects for local government reform. It also exposes interests of various groups of influence and key points of the ongoing administrative reform, which is expected to get a new impetus as the LDP return to power has finally brought a presumably long period of political stability.
Abstract. Background:. Non-smokers account for a large proportion of lung cancer patients, especially in Asia, but the attention paid to them is limited compared with smokers. In non-smokers, males display a risk for lung cancer incidence distinct from the females—even after excluding the influence of smoking; but the knowledge regarding the factors causing the difference is sparse. Based on a large multicenter prospective cancer screening cohort in China, we aimed to elucidate the interpretable sex differences caused by known factors and provide clues for primary and secondary prevention.
Methods:. Risk factors including demographic characteristics, lifestyle factors, family history of cancer, and baseline comorbidity were obtained from 796,283 Chinese non-smoking participants by the baseline risk assessment completed in 2013 to 2018. Cox regression analysis was performed to assess the sex difference in the risk of lung cancer, and the hazard ratios (HRs) that were adjusted for different known factors were calculated and compared to determine the proportion of excess risk and to explain the existing risk factors.
Results:. With a median follow-up of 4.80 years, 3351 subjects who were diagnosed with lung cancer were selected in the analysis. The lung cancer risk of males was significantly higher than that of females; the HRs in all male non-smokers were 1.29 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.20–1.38) after adjusting for the age and 1.38 (95% CI: 1.28–1.50) after adjusting for all factors, which suggested that known factors could not explain the sex difference in the risk of lung cancer in non-smokers. Known factors were 7% (|1.29–1.38|/1.29) more harmful in women than in men. For adenocarcinoma, women showed excess risk higher than men, contrary to squamous cell carcinoma; after adjusting for all factors, 47% ([1.30–1.16]/[1.30–1]) and 4% ([7.02–6.75]/[7.02–1])) of the excess risk was explainable in adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. The main causes of gender differences in lung cancer risk were lifestyle factors, baseline comorbidity, and family history.
Conclusions:. Significant gender differences in the risk of lung cancer were discovered in China non-smokers. Existing risk factors did not explain the excess lung cancer risk of all non-smoking men, and the internal causes for the excess risk still need to be explored; most known risk factors were more harmful to non-smoking women; further exploring the causes of the sex difference would help to improve the prevention and screening programs and protect the non-smoking males from lung cancers.
This paper deals with a theme that has been a topical issue since the beginning of 2020, the outbreak of coronavirus, by comparison with the philosophical and epistemological aspects of HIV/AIDS as they are reflected in different genres of Swahili literature. I will illustrate findings obtained through my analysis of William Mkufya’s novels dealing with HIV/AIDS in a prospective way with the upcoming literature dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The conclusions I have drawn from the analysis of the philosophical novels, by the Tanzanian intellectual William Mkufya, will be the departure point for my follow-up research on the epistemological, ontological and phenomenological aspects of Covid-19 in Tanzania through different genres of Swahili literature. The potential objectives of this forthcoming research will be the following: firstly, to establish a fictional genre that articulates knowledge about Covid-19; secondly, to explore the evolution of Swahili language used to communicate messages on Covid-19; thirdly, to illustrate the changes undergone by literature after the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak; and finally, to investigate the philosophical perspectives characterising this literary stream: Humanist or post-humanist?
No final da década de 1970, o mundo acompanhou os acontecimentos revolucionários que levaram à destituição da monarquia e à instauração de uma república islâmica no Irã. Michel Foucault viu nesses acontecimentos, caracterizados pela “espiritualidade política”, um potencial crítico à modernidade ocidental. Trata-se aqui de produzir uma reflexão sobre o impacto dessa “espiritualidade política” na construção de um Estado nacional baseado em tecnologias de poder/saber geradoras de distopia e conformadoras de uma ideologia nacional teocrática preocupada com o controle dos corpos e a imposição da heteronormatividade. Será possível, assim, abordar os modos criativos de resistência ao regime de verdade vigente e de produção de formas de subjetivação alternativas, principalmente no que diz respeito às experiências da diversidade sexual e de gênero. Esses modos compõem paisagens heterotópicas que desafiam a distopia reinante, como sugerido por minha experiência etnográfica no Irã em fevereiro de 2019.
Gender and Sexual Diversity, National State and Heterotopic Landscape: Foucault and Beyond
At the end of the 1970s, the world followed the revolutionary events that led to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran. Michel Foucault saw these events, characterized by a “political spirituality”, as a potential critic of Western modernity. This study presents a reflection on the effect of this “political spirituality” in the construction of a national State based on technologies of power/knowledge that generate a dystopia and shape a national theocratic ideology concerned with the control of bodies and the imposition of heteronormativity. This article shows the original ways of resistance established to counter the regime of truth and to produce an alternative way of being, especially regarding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity. These ways compose a heterotopic landscape that challenge the reigning dystopia, as suggested by observations in Iran in February 2019.
Sexuality | State | Nation | Heterotopia | Iran
We reconstruct the history of reionization using Gaussian process regression. Using the UV luminosity data compilation from Hubble Frontiers Fields we reconstruct the redshift evolution of UV luminosity density and thereby the evolution of the source term in the ionization equation. This model-independent reconstruction rules out single power-law evolution of the luminosity density but supports the logarithmic double power-law parametrization. We obtain reionization history by integrating ionization equations with the reconstructed source term. Using optical depth constraint from Planck Cosmic Microwave Background observation, measurement of UV luminosity function integrated till truncation magnitude of -17 and -15, and derived ionization fraction from high redshift quasar, galaxies and gamma-ray burst observations, we constrain the history of reionization. In the conservative case we find the constraint on the optical depth as $τ=0.052\pm0.001\pm0.002$ at 68% and 95% confidence intervals. We find the redshift duration between 10% and 90% ionization to be $2.05_{-0.21-0.30}^{+0.11+0.37}$. Longer duration of reionization is supported if UV luminosity density data with truncation magnitude of -15 is used in the joint analysis. Our results point out that even in a conservative reconstruction, a combination of cosmological and astrophysical observations can provide stringent constraints on the epoch of reionization.
Shizhe Chen, Pierre-Louis Guhur, Cordelia Schmid
et al.
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to build autonomous visual agents that follow instructions and navigate in real scenes. To remember previously visited locations and actions taken, most approaches to VLN implement memory using recurrent states. Instead, we introduce a History Aware Multimodal Transformer (HAMT) to incorporate a long-horizon history into multimodal decision making. HAMT efficiently encodes all the past panoramic observations via a hierarchical vision transformer (ViT), which first encodes individual images with ViT, then models spatial relation between images in a panoramic observation and finally takes into account temporal relation between panoramas in the history. It, then, jointly combines text, history and current observation to predict the next action. We first train HAMT end-to-end using several proxy tasks including single step action prediction and spatial relation prediction, and then use reinforcement learning to further improve the navigation policy. HAMT achieves new state of the art on a broad range of VLN tasks, including VLN with fine-grained instructions (R2R, RxR), high-level instructions (R2R-Last, REVERIE), dialogs (CVDN) as well as long-horizon VLN (R4R, R2R-Back). We demonstrate HAMT to be particularly effective for navigation tasks with longer trajectories.
Filipinas se convirtió en un espacio donde se intentó reproducir las mismas formas de organización ensayadas en América, pero la monarquía española en Asia buscaba en esa primera mitad del siglo XVII su expansión y afianzamiento mediante el reforzamiento militar del archipiélago. Este artículo trata de mostrar cómo se desarrollaron las esferas de intereses mancomunados entre el gobierno filipino y la Orden de Predicadores a través de los medios empleados para producir soldados en las islas, así como las dificultades enfrentadas. Las funciones que desempeñaron los dominicos fueron cruciales en un momento en que, a pesar de sus esfuerzos, el número de efectivos militares siempre fue insuficiente. Así, este clero regular se constituyó en un brazo armado del Estado español en Asia y muestra, en cierto modo, cómo el bastión de la fe se convierte, al mismo tiempo, en uno de pretensiones hegemónicas.
The systematic investigations on the value of social wasps as a food resource are deficient, in spite of the long history of the utilization of social wasps as food and pharmaceutical bioresources. <i>Vespa velutina nigrithorax</i> is an invasive alien wasp species that is currently dominating in East Asia and Europe, bringing huge economic damages. As a control over alien species is made when the valuable utilization of the invasive species as a potential resource are discovered, investigations on the potential of <i>V. v. nigrithorax</i> as a useful bioresource are also in demand. Nutritional and heavy metal analyses of the larvae revealed their balanced and rich nutritional value and safety as a food resource. The larval saliva amino acid composition was investigated for further study on amino acid supplementation and exercise enhancement.
This article reflects on the Javanese view of death, based notably on first-hand accounts of ritual masters, their conceptions and ritual practices. Existing ethnographic literature on Javanese funerary rituals is largely descriptive and delves little into conceptual issues. A comparative analysis of the literature and first-hand data reveals that death must ultimately be understood in relation to the social action of ancestors called to be reborn or not. Considered from this angle, it is possible to define various types of action that do not lead to ancestralisation as well as define various categories of death. Ultimately, these categories induce the different types of action and social relations of the living. The perspective is notably based on Robert Hertz’s observations on funerary rites and the central role and unique configuration of second funerals in Java.
ʿAbd al-Sattār Nāṣir (1947–2013) belonged to the group of Iraqi writers and intellectuals called Jīl al-Sittināt "the Sixties Generation", which dominated the cultural scene at the time.
This article examines Nāṣir as a driven writer, who initially wrote out of a morally induced reaction to expose the suffering and brutalization of all Iraqi peoples and ethnicities by a controlling totalitarian regime, and as a once-incarcerated author of brave novels he hoped would someday catalyze a popular overthrow of the lawless, abusive leaders, thereby ending the fears and violence possessing Iraq’s body politic. Two themes -- the destruction wreaked by those with extraordinary power and their use of lies and deception to control the people –- are central to the three novels chosen as representative of Nāṣir’s oeuvre: Abū al-Rīsh (2002), Niṣf al-Aḥzān 'Half Sorrows' (2000) and Qushūr al-Badhinjān 'Eggplant Peels' (2007).
In these three novels, Nāṣir exposes the unimaginable terror, violence and cruelty of Saddām Ḥusayn and his henchmen, as well as their propaganda, which consisted of lies and deception. Saddām is depicted as a ruler who presents himself as an inspiring revolutionary, but in fact is a tyrant who deceives the citizens, subjecting them to brutal control and leading them into deadly wars.
Following George Orwell’s 1984, Nāṣir’s literary corpus attempts to rip the masks from the faces of the dictator and his lackeys, who oppress the people, deny them any freedom of thought and keep them under constant surveillance.
We present a new method that incorporates the horizontal branch morphology into synthetic colour-magnitude diagram based star formation history determinations. This method, we call MORGOTH, self-consistently takes into account all the stellar evolution phases up to the early asymptothic giant branch, flexibly modelling red giant branch mass loss. We test MORGOTH on a range of synthetic populations, and find that the inclusion of the horizontal branch significantly increases the precision of the resulting star formation histories. When the main sequence turn-off is detected, MORGOTH can fit the star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss at the same time, efficiently breaking this degeneracy. As part of testing MORGOTH, we also model the observed colour-magnitude diagram of the well studied Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We recover a new more detailed star formation history for this galaxy. Both the new star formation history and the red giant branch mass loss we determined for Sculptor with MORGOTH are in good agreement with previous analyses, thus demonstrating the power of this new approach.
The Maxey-Riley equation has been extensively used by the fluid dynamics community to study the dynamics of small inertial particles in fluid flow. However, most often, the Basset history force in this equation is neglected. Including the Basset force in numerical solutions of particulate flows involves storage requirements which rapidly increase in time. Thus the significance of the Basset history force in the dynamics has not been understood. In this paper, we show that the Maxey-Riley equation in its entirety can be exactly mapped as a forced, time-dependent Robin boundary condition of the one-dimensional heat equation, and solved using the Unified Transform Method. We obtain the exact solution for a general homogeneous time-dependent flow field, and apply it to a range of physically relevant situations. In a particle coming to a halt in a quiescent environment, the Basset history force speeds up the decay as stretched-exponential at short time while slowing it down to a power-law relaxation, $\sim t^{-3/2}$, at long time. A particle settling under gravity is shown to relax even more slowly to its terminal velocity ($\sim t^{-1/2}$), whereas this relaxation would be expected to take place exponentially fast if the history term were to be neglected. For a general flow, our approach makes possible a numerical scheme for arbitrary but smooth flows without increasing memory demands and with spectral accuracy. We use our numerical scheme to solve an example spatially varying flow of inertial particles in the vicinity of a point vortex. We show that the critical radius for caustics formation shrinks slightly due to history effects. Our scheme opens up a method for future studies to include the Basset history term in their calculations to spectral accuracy, without astronomical storage costs. Moreover our results indicate that the Basset history can affect dynamics significantly.