Turkish cultural diplomacy toward China’s Turkic communities (1933–1949)

Despite the availability of a modest body of research on Ottoman policies towards the Uyghurs and Türkiye’s post-1950 stance, the 1933–1949 interim period has been mostly overlooked. This study examines Türkiye’s cultural diplomacy towards China and the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority in northwest China, with a special focus on the 1933–1949 period, which corresponds to the crystallisation of Uyghur national identity through the Turkic Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET, 1933–1934) and the Second East Turkestan Republic (SETR, 1944–1949). This era saw Türkiye’s increased cultural involvement, driven by revolutionary changes under Atatürk and China’s political instability. In this article, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of declassified diplomatic archives, made available under Presidential Decree No. 11 (2018) to explore the evolution of Turkish cultural diplomacy. Before the conclusion of World War II, Turkish diplomacy primarily focused on understanding local cultural contexts, implementing educational reforms, facilitating student exchanges, promoting the Kemalist Revolution, and disseminating the new Turkish alphabet and cultural materials, which were positively received by Chinese authorities. Interestingly, China’s initiatives were crucial in sparking diplomatic relations. In the changing geopolitical environment of the post-war period, Turkish cultural diplomacy gradually shifted from emphasising the new Turkish alphabet and Kemalist ideals to incorporating Arabic and English materials, which was accompanied by a more cautious approach aimed at avoiding tensions with major international powers

Mapping socioeconomic factors driving antimicrobial resistance in humans: an umbrella review

Introduction: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest public health challenges of our time. National Action Plans have failed so far to effectively address socioeconomic drivers of AMR, including the animal and environmental health dimensions of One Health. Objective: To map what socioeconomic drivers of AMR exist in the literature with quantitative evidence. Methods: An umbrella review was undertaken across Medline, Embase, Global Health, and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, supplemented by a grey literature search on Google Scholar. Review articles demonstrating a methodological search strategy for socioeconomic drivers of AMR were included. Two authors extracted drivers from each review article which were supported by quantitative evidence. Drivers were grouped thematically and summarised narratively across the following three layers of society: People & Public, System & Environment, and Institutions & Policies. Results: The search yielded 6300 articles after deduplication, with 23 review articles included. 27 individual thematic groups of drivers were identified. The People & Public dimensions contained the following themes: age, sex, ethnicity, migrant status, marginalisation, sexual behaviours, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, household composition, maternity, personal hygiene, lifestyle behaviours. System & Environment yielded the following themes: household transmission, healthcare occupation, urbanicity, day-care attendance, environmental hygiene, regional poverty, tourism, animal husbandry, food supply chain, water contamination, and climate. Institutions & Policies encompassed poor antibiotic quality, healthcare financing, healthcare governance, and national income. Many of these contained bidirectional quantitative evidence, hinting at conflicting pathways by which socioeconomic factors drive AMR. Conclusion: This umbrella review maps socioeconomic drivers of AMR with quantitative evidence, providing a macroscopic view of the complex pathways driving AMR. This will help direct future research and action on socioeconomic drivers of AMR

Critical raw materials, the net-zero transition and the 'securitization' of the trade and climate change mitigation nexus: pinpointing environmental risks and charting a new path for transnational decarbonization

The exercise of environmental ‘leverage’ via trade-related measures and trade in environmental goods offers opportunities to tackle the climate crisis and advance transnational decarbonization. Inward-looking, adversarial, and short-term national security-centred approaches, however, are disrupting the trade and climate change mitigation linkage. This article employs the race for critical raw materials and US and EU strategies to promote the net-zero transition at the domestic level as case studies to illustrate the environmental pitfalls of the ‘securitization’ of the trade and climate change mitigation nexus. The article demonstrates that the pursuit of strategic dominance in key net-zero sectors, attempts to exclude systemic rivals and reshore supply chains, opportunistic forms of friendshoring and loose agreement on regulatory means jeopardize recourse to environmental ‘leverage’ and undermine decarbonization at both national and transnational levels. This analysis casts a light on the inherent tension between national security and climate change mitigation. Taking stock of these findings, the article advocates a radically different approach to the governance of the trade and climate change mitigation nexus

Prediction of implant failure risk due to periprosthetic femoral fracture after primary elective total hip arthroplasty: a simplified and validated model based on 154,519 total hip arthroplasties from the Swedish Arthroplasty Register

Aims While cementless fixation offers potential advantages over cemented fixation, such as a shorter operating time, concerns linger over its higher cost and increased risk of periprosthetic fractures. If the risk of fracture can be forecasted, it would aid the shared decision-making process related to cementless stems. Our study aimed to develop and validate predictive models of periprosthetic femoral fracture (PPFF) necessitating revision and reoperation after elective total hip arthroplasty (THA). Methods We included 154,519 primary elective THAs from the Swedish Arthroplasty Register (SAR), encompassing 21 patient-, surgical-, and implant-specific features, for model derivation and validation in predicting 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, and one-year revision and reoperation due to PPFF. Model performance was tested using the area under the curve (AUC), and feature importance was identified in the best-performing algorithm. Results The Lasso regression excelled in predicting 30-day revisions (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) = 0.85), while the Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) model outperformed other models by a slight margin for all remaining endpoints (AUC range: 0.79 to 0.86). Predictive factors for revision and reoperation were identified, with patient features such as increasing age, higher American Society of Anesthesiologists grade (> III), and World Health Organization obesity classes II to III associated with elevated risks. A preoperative diagnosis of idiopathic necrosis increased revision risk. Concerning implant design, factors such as cementless femoral fixation, reverse-hybrid fixation, hip resurfacing, and small ( 52 mm) femoral heads increased both revision and reoperation risks. Conclusion This is the first study to develop machine-learning models to forecast the risk of PPFF necessitating secondary surgery. Future studies are required to externally validate our algorithm and assess its applicability in clinical practice

Regimes, leaders, and lockdowns: who responded more quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Explanations of the speed of policy responses to COVID-19 highlight two sets of arguments. One focuses on regime type. Did autocracies, with fewer institutional constraints and high coercive power, lock down more quickly than democracies? The second concerns the “type” of health policymaker. Did governments led by doctors or natural scientists respond more quickly, and did men and populists delay lockdown? We examine these relationships with a global dataset of political regimes and relevant traits of 188 political leaders and health ministers in office at the start of the pandemic. Our setup addresses concerns about reciprocal causation and sample selection bias and proves robust to potential confounders. We find autocracies locked down more slowly than democracies, while leader traits appear not to matter. However, medical doctors in the health portfolio are associated with lower likelihood of lockdown, suggesting they may have provided cover for leaders hesitant to do so

From vision to reality: the EU's pharmaceutical reforms and the path to improved access

Disparities in access to oncology medicines in European Union (EU) member states can impact patient outcomes profoundly, with availability and timely access varying significantly across and within member states. This paper discusses the intersection of the new European Health Technology Assessment Regulation (HTAR), the provisions of the proposed pharmaceutical legislation and their potential impacts on access to oncology medicines across EU member states. The HTAR, seeking to standardise the clinical evaluation of new medicines, has the potential to streamline the evaluation process but also risks oversimplifying diverse national healthcare needs. While the HTAR may accelerate access in countries with less-developed health technology assessment systems, it could potentially conflict with established practices in countries with advanced assessment systems, resulting in both joint and national clinical evaluations becoming necessary. The proposed pharmaceutical legislation reform, in both initial and updated forms, aims to incentivise an EU-wide launch of new medicines that challenges the feasibility for manufacturers, particularly in the context of diverse and complex national pricing and reimbursement systems. Both initiatives mark a significant shift towards more collaborative European healthcare policy yet faces the potential of unintended consequences owing to an apparent lack of pragmatism, such as delays in access because of increased administrative burdens and possible deterrents for innovation in Europe. The paper underscores the need for policy adaptation and multi-stakeholder collaboration to ensure the legislative changes achieve equitable and timely access to oncology treatments across the EU

A paralegal institution: tribunals and the place of law in the framework of internment during the Second World War

This article examines the emergence of tribunals as a system for legalising the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain and the United States during the Second World War. Reconstructing how these emergent quasi-judicial structures classified and reclassified civilians, it uncovers the moral uncertainties, legal frameworks, and bureaucratic dynamics that shaped the internment practices of democratic states. The history of these tribunals also sheds light on the long-term attitudes towards immigration and foreign influence in Anglophone societies. Debates on belonging, citizenship, and civil liberties within democratic societies often spanned a longer time period, reaching from the anti-immigration legislation of the 1900s to the globalisation of internment in the First World War, before culminating in the emergency measures of the Second World War. The article uses a multidirectional approach at the intersection of legal studies, biography, social and institutional history. By synthesising historical records, juristic analyses, and personal narratives, it elucidates how the tribunal systems navigated the complexities of intelligence assessments and public opinion dynamics. Furthermore, the comparison between British and American tribunal systems unveils both convergences and divergences in legal approaches and administrative practices. Considered within broader historical contexts, the tribunal system sheds light on the way legal frameworks both shaped and were shaped by wartime exigencies

Understanding patterns of loneliness in older long-term care users using natural language processing with free text case notes

Loneliness and social isolation are distressing for individuals and predictors of mortality, yet data on their impact on publicly funded long-term care is limited. Using recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), we analysed pseudonymised administrative records containing 1.1 million free-text case notes about 3,046 older adults recorded in a London council between 2008 and 2020. We applied three NLP methods — document-term matrices, pre-trained embeddings, and transformer-based models — to identify loneliness or social isolation. The best-performing model, a bidirectional transformer, achieved an F1 score of 0.92 on a test set of unseen sentences. Using this model, we generated predictions for the full dataset and assessed construct validity through comparison with survey data and the literature. Our measure is associated with expected characteristics, such as living alone and impaired memory, and is a strong predictor of social inclusion services. Approximately 43% of individuals had a sentence indicating loneliness or isolation in their case notes at their initial care assessment, comparable to survey-based estimates. Unlike surveys, our indicator is linked to other administrative data, enabling development of models of service use with loneliness or isolation as independent variables. An open-source version of the model is available in a GitHub repository: https://github.com/samrickman/lonelinessmode