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As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

Reliable data about socio-economic conditions of individuals, such as health indexes, consumption expenditures and wealth assets, remain scarce for most countries. Traditional methods to collect such data include on site surveys that can be expensive and labour intensive. On the other hand, remote sensing data, such as high-resolution satellite imagery, are becoming largely available. To circumvent the lack of socio-economic data at high granularity, computer vision has already been applied successfully to raw satellite imagery sampled from resource poor countries.

The twentieth century has witnessed episodes of unprecedented barbarism. At the same time cruelty, warfare, destruction and violence have never been portrayed so vividly, so stunningly and in such detail, as in the photographs, documentaries and feature films made since the First World War. Compared to many other genres, films on warfare – particularly about the battlefield itself − have hardly been systematically studied at all. At the same time these films have been − and still are – a key to self-understanding for various social groups, nations or even civilizations. These visual representations, like other narrative forms, play a crucial role in society, and have not only a ritual but also a mythical meaning. This chapter uncovers aspects of the complex relationship between history, memory and film, by tracing some major and even genealogical patterns in the narration and representation of war, from the British propaganda documentary Battle of the Somme (1916) and the seminal All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), to recent blockbusters like Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Dunkirk (2017).

Noon foF2 monthly median values for equinoctial months of solar cycles 20, 21 and 22, were analyzed for 37 worldwide stations. For each solar cycle and for a given Rz, the difference between foF2 in the falling branch of the cycle and the corresponding value of the rising branch is evaluated. The maximum difference, considered as the hysteresis magnitude, varies systematically with geomagnetic latitude. The pattern is similar for every cycle, with greater hysteresis magnitudes for stronger solar cycles. It is positive between 45° S and 45° N, with minimum values at equatorial latitudes and maximum at around 25°–30° on either side of the equator. For latitudes greater than 50° negative values are observed. At around 25°–30° and at high latitudes the hysteresis magnitude reaches 2 MHz for solar cycle with high activity levels, which represents around 20% of foF2. The effects of foF2 hysteresis on the analysis of long-term data sequences is analyzed. In the case of long-term trend analysis, the hysteresis behavior may induce spurious trends as a consequence of the filtering processes applied to foF2 time series previous to trend values estimation. This problem may be solved by considering time series covering several solar cycles.

Since the 1980s, an array of legal and non-legal practices—labeled Transitional Justice—has been developed to support post-repressive, post-authoritarian, and post-conflict societies in dealing with their traumatic past. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, the contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms and look at how genocide, mass political violence, and historical injustices are being institutionally addressed. They invite readers to speculate on what (else) the transcripts produced by these institutions tell us about the past and the present, calling attention to the influence of implicit history conveyed in the narratives that have gained an audience through international criminal tribunals, trials, and truth commissions. Nanci Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts that provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones.