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Studying the driving factors of environmental pollution is of great importance for China. Previous literature mainly focused on the cause of national aggregate emission changes. However, research about the effect of fiscal expenditures on science and technology (FESTs) on environmental pollution is rare. Considering the large gap among cities in China, it is necessary to investigate whether and how FESTs affect environmental pollution among cities. We adopted three kinds of typical environmental pollutants including sulfur dioxide (SO(2)) emissions, wastewater emission, and atmospheric particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM(2.5)). Using the data of 260 prefecture-level cities over ten years in China, we found that FESTs play a significantly positive role in reducing sulfur dioxide (SO(2)) emissions and PM(2.5) concentrations, but fail to alleviate wastewater emissions. Specifically, for every 1% increase in FESTs, SO(2) emissions were reduced by 5.317% and PM(2.5) concentrations were reduced by 5.329%. Furthermore, we found that FESTs reduced environmental pollution by impeding fixed asset investments and by promoting research and development activities (R&D). Moreover, the impacts of FESTs on environmental pollution varied across regions and sub-periods. Our results are robust to a series of additional checks, including alternative econometric specifications, generalized method of moments (GMM) analysis and overcoming potential endogeneity with an instrumental variable. Our findings confirm that government efforts can be effective on pollution control in China. Hence, all governments should pay more attention to FESTs for sustainable development and environmental quality improvements.

AbstractMartin Luther argued that the Hebrew Bible's Song of Songs was "an encomium of the political order," a praise and thanksgiving to God for the gift of temporal government. Luther's political interpretation of this book was unique in his age, and remains so in the history of biblical commentary. This paper offers an account of Luther's peculiar interpretation, as well as its place in his interpretation of the Bible and in the history of biblical commentary, by arguing that it exhibits the foundational idea of his political thought that secular authority is a precious gift from God, and that the Song of Songs, as a praise of conjugal love, provides for political authority a fitting biblical encomium.

PurposeThis study explores how the context of a classical Christian school (CCS) interacted with a how teacher taught and how students learned and experienced a unit about World War II.Design/methodology/approachA sixth-grade class was observed during their 13-day unit on World War I. The teacher was interviewed before the unit began to understand her goals for the unit and was interviewed after for her to reflect on her teaching and student learning. All classroom documents (notes, worksheets, essays) were collected. After the unit, each student participated in a think aloud of the assessment and reflected on their experiences during the unit.FindingsThe findings suggest that teacher and students were greatly impacted by the classical Christian nature of the school. The teacher used three biblical themes to frame the unit, which caused misconceptions for students. While students learned factual information about World War II, they struggled to relate the teacher's themes to World War II.Originality/valueThis study adds insights about teaching and learning history in a CCS and highlights the need for more research to explore what and how students in private religious schools are learning. While the teacher's themes could have been useful organizing concepts for the material, they instead complicated student learning.

This essay proposes that certain cinematic conventions of the horror film are uniquely suited to bring into visibility everyday, endemic horror – a horror that many in US society refuse to see. I call this use of horror, 'horror vérité' or truthful horror. As a form of politically inflected horror, it has potential to perform the kind of materialist history that Walter Benjamin theorizes, in which the historical materialist 'appropriate[es] a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger' in order to recast the present. Jordan Peele's 2017 film, Get Out, is an example of 'horror vérité', because it uses the mechanics of the horror genre to expose actually existing racism, to render newly visible the very real, but often masked, racial landscape of a professedly liberal post-racial America. The film analysis considers: first, the use of the conventions of horror to expose everyday racial violence; second, its reliance on a dialectic of sleeping (hypnosis) and waking up (provoked by photography); and third, its performing of the historical materialism Benjamin describes, in which the jarring confrontation of the past and the present radically alters the landscape of the present. ; Postprint version of the published article.

For around seventeen centuries the Sinhalese have sustained a historical consciousness through oral and written modes of transmission. These vamsa traditions emphasise the moment of civilisational state formation through the founding father, Vijaya, a tale that enters modem history texts and thus receives the status of 'fact'. This tale enters contem porary verbal battles of legitimation between Sinhalese and Tamil protagonists. A recent article by Wickramasinghe indicates how the Vijaya story can be a central pillar in the refusal to countenance devolution of power to the Tamils in the north-east. His unelabor ated reference to Vijaya indicates how the belief in the Sinhalese claims to original pos session operates in semi-subterranean ways among those extremists who deny the need for autonomy on various constitutional grounds in the vocabulary of democracy. One such is the Sinhala Urumaya (Heritage) Party that emerged in mid-2000 and around which many lines of opposition to the government's 'Devolution Package' coalesced. Despite its poor electoral performance in October 2000, the SU represents a powerful strand of thinking that bears the values associated with the 'revolution of 1956', values which are now ingrained in all the Sinhala-dominated parties.

Summary
The history of vasectomy, which began at the end of the nineteenth century, was made more complex during the inter-war period. While vasectomy was used as a method of rejuvenation in many European countries and was advocated as a means of enforcing eugenicist policies, it was used also clandestinely for contraception since the late 1920s. Male sterilisation has been the subject of a transfer of knowledge from the medical to the political sphere. While doctors were discreetly going beyond the therapeutic framework, clandestine militant action was gradually organised. The networks developed beyond borders and the biography of a clandestine steriliser highlights the forms of popularisation of an expertise specific to the anarchist circles. While the practice of the operation itself questions men's involvement in contraception, its legal treatment demonstrated the limits of personal disposal of oneself, whereas its political use underlined the stakes of reappropriation of sexual knowledge.

Political parties can play a crucial role in linking citizen preferences to political decision making, but have been criticized for not accomplishing this task. In an attempt to address this linkage problem and enhance policy representation, political parties have recently opened up their decision‐making processes and promoted online participation among their members and supporters; for example, by establishing online platforms that allow citizens and party members to discuss policy issues and generate policy proposals. However, in most instances, participation is low. Drawing on the case of the German Green Party and applying three well‐established models of offline political participation, the article examines why only some party members and supporters use these channels to communicate their preferences. Comparing users and nonusers, we conclude that socioeconomic resources or attitudes alone cannot explain differences in participation. Instead, participation is motivated by process‐related and ideological incentives.

The complex relationship between globalization and health calls for research from many disciplinary and methodological perspectives. This editorial gives an overview of the content trajectory of the interdisciplinary journal 'Globalization and Health' over the first six years of production, 2005 to 2010. The findings show that bio-medical and population health perspectives have been dominant but that social science perspectives have become more evident in recent years. The types of paper published have also changed, with a growing proportion of empirical studies. A special issue on 'Health systems, health economies and globalization: social science perspectives' is introduced, a collection of contributions written from the vantage points of economics, political science, psychology, sociology, business studies, social policy and research policy. The papers concern a range of issues pertaining to the globalization of healthcare markets and governance and regulation issues. They highlight the important contribution that can be made by the social sciences to this field, and also the practical and methodological challenges implicit in the study of globalization and health.