This article explores whether immigration plays a role in determining national welfare state effort in 16 European countries. It examines the relationship between stocks of migrants, the foreign-born population, on two different indicators of welfare state effort – social welfare spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and a welfare generosity index. The nexus between immigration and welfare is a controversial and highly sensitive political issue, and as such it typically divides opinion. Traditionally, it has been argued that increases in immigration create pressures for governments to reduce levels of social welfare provision. By building on theories and results from the political economy literature, this article provides further evidence on the debate through using a fresh approach to operationalize welfare state effort. The empirical results show that the foreign-born population has a positive and statistically significant relationship with social welfare spending and no statistically significant association with the welfare generosity index. The findings provide no evidence to support the hypothesis that the higher levels of immigration lead to reduced levels of social welfare provision. On the contrary, these findings lend support to the view that increasing immigration leads to welfare state expansion rather than retrenchment, and that European welfare states remain resilient in the face of the globalization of migration.

This paper reports the preliminary results from two short seasons of fieldwork that the Tunisian–British Bulla Regia Archaeological Report was able to undertake in September 2016 and 2017. In 2016, the work focused on a geophysical survey of the western cemetery and revealed a complex landscape of funerary enclosures and mausolea outside the protected boundaries of the site, likely to be of Roman date. In 2017, photogrammetric techniques were used to record and plan a Late Antique church and cemetery that was discovered during a rescue excavation in 2010. The church consists of three naves and a series of funerary annexes, which contained burials covered by mosaic or stone epitaphs, including those marking the graves of two bishops and two priests. The church is surrounded by an extensive cemetery with a variety of different tomb types, such as mosaic caissons and simple stepped masonry tombs. The mosaics, inscriptions and finds (ceramics, glass, coins) support a fourth to sixth/seventh century date for the church and cemetery.

Indonesia's national ulama council, the Majelis Ulama Indonesia, or MUI, has successfully transformed itself during the reform era reversing its earlier relationship with government. It is the MUI that now sets the agenda on appropriate ways to recognize, protect, and promote the majority faith. However it does not operate entirely separate to the state, indeed, there are numerous points of contact and mutual dependence between this group of Islamic scholars and state agencies.

This article offers two case studies on religious freedom demonstrating different aspects of the MUI's self-appointed role of national mufti. The first case study demonstrates how the MUI has taken control of the high ground of religious doctrine. Through its response to blasphemy cases and deviant Muslim activities the MUI defines appropriate, orthodox Muslim conduct. The second case study deals with the revised regime of halal food certification. Here the state has sought to bring the MUI back into its embrace, partly as a result of corruption scandals. In doing so, however, Islam continues to be further entrenched in state law and regulation.

Indonesian Islam was said to be deconfessionalized, reflecting the nature of the former authoritarian and bureaucratic state's engagement with various Islamic institutions. The changing role of the MUI demonstrates that the state and law are becoming increasingly confessionalized. This change has significant implications for Indonesia's democratic constitutional framework, evident in what these cases say about the enjoyment of the fundamental right of citizenship.

The effects of employee-perceived leadership paradigms on multiple measures of firm performance collected from managers and customers in small businesses were examined. Four leadership paradigms operating in Australian retail pharmacies were assessed against six performance measures – financial outcomes, staff and customer satisfaction, productivity, retaining staff, and manager retention. Structural equation modeling, regression, and analysis of variance were employed to test the hypotheses. Predictions that firms characterized by visionary and organic/distributed leadership would outperform those using classical and transactional leadership were supported on all measures. Furthermore, the emerging organic leadership paradigm outperformed the others on every measure.

The Last Glacial–Interglacial Transition (LGIT; 15,000–11,000 cal BP) was characterized by complex spatiotemporal patterns of climate change, with numerous studies requiring accurate chronological control to decipher leads from lags in global paleoclimatic, paleoenvironmental, and archaeological records. However, close scrutiny of the few available tree-ring chronologies and radiocarbon-dated sequences composing the IntCal13 14C calibration curve indicates significant weakness in 14C calibration across key periods of the LGIT. Here, we present a decadally resolved atmospheric 14C record derived from New Zealand kauri spanning the Lateglacial from ~13,100–11,365 cal BP. Two floating kauri 14C time series, curve-matched to IntCal13, serve as a 14C backbone through the Younger Dryas. The floating Northern Hemisphere (NH) 14C data sets derived from the YD-B and Central European Lateglacial Master tree-ring series are matched against the new kauri data, forming a robust NH 14C time series to ~14,200 cal BP. Our results show that IntCal13 is questionable from ~12,200–11,900 cal BP and the ~10,400 BP 14C plateau is approximately 5 decades too short. The new kauri record and repositioned NH pine 14C series offer a refinement of the international 14C calibration curves IntCal13 and SHCal13, providing increased confidence in the correlation of global paleorecords.

Research on the potato-root eelworm Heterodera rostochiensis has been severely handicapped by the fact that it is virtually impossible to estimate the infectivity of individual cysts. Since the infectivity of an individual cyst is determined by the number of viable larvae present within it, the problem can be settled in one of two ways—either by means of a technique which recovers all the viable larvae and rejects the non-viable or by estimating firstly the total contents and then the proportion of them which is viable. Techniques for the recovery of larvae from cysts have been described by Fenwick (1941) and Fenwick and Franklin (1940). The former of these sought to express soil infectivity directly in terms of available larvae per gm. of soil while the latter was concerned merely with obtaining a representative sample of larvae from a given batch of cysts. Neither claimed to estimate viability of the contents. A further technique (Bracey, 1946) which was described in a paper circulated among interested workers was a modification of that described by Fenwick and Franklin (loc. cit.) and claimed to express viability of cyst contents directly as a percentage.