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Set in the early 2010s, the backdrop of Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire (2017) is a familiar one to contemporary readers, colored by the rise of farright populist movements and the increase in anti-Muslim initiatives. This article examines how the novel engages with new Orientalist representations post-9/11 on two levels. Firstly, Shamsie's novel is shaped by the political narratives of the War on Terror and, in turn, responds to the upshot of these new configurations of power, reflecting how the difficulty of making sense of 9/11 exacerbated the Orientalist binary of East and West. Secondly, the novel reflects on the unenviable choice, for female kin to male terrorists, of either being Orientalized or re-orientalizing, a form of self-perpetrated Othering. This study is framed by re-orientalism theory in its analysis of how the East continues to engage the West in increasingly self-aware, multi-layered ways, constantly renegotiating positions of power and influence.

Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho's film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga's novel Last Man in Tower (2011), this article is concerned with the impact on individuals and communities of forms of impersonal, systemic violence resulting from neoliberal accumulation and the reproduction of mobile capital, extending existent precarities as well as opening up new precarities. We examine the experiences of the previously less precarious – that is, members of the middle classes in Recife, Brazil, and Mumbai, India – now rendered newly precarious. We frame the temporality of these precarities via themes of memory, presentism and futurity in order to depict how sites in the Global South are targeted by mobile capital, and how individuals and communities are impacted by the growing extent of precarities, eroding long-established systems of social and communal protection, and undermining social loyalties and securities. Through the narratives of a novel and a film, we analyse cultural representations of redevelopment projects as epitomes of frictionless, mobile capital. Such capital has the effect of increasing the precarity of individuals, which in turns frays the bonds of communities, heightening network and community precarities. This selection is grounded in Jacques Rancière's argument that '[f]iction is at work whenever a sense of reality must be produced' and interrelatedly in the critical space offered by the interpenetration between fiction, political life and the construction of social realities. Engaging with the fictional situations depicted in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower adds to the understanding of what happens in the lifeworld when residents are thrown into a condition of sudden and acute precarity when coerced to evacuate their long-time homes as a result of redevelopment projects, and in particular the pressures faced by the last individuals standing, especially when they speak truth to power.

The branding and marketing of post-millennial India as a global service provider has been relentless. Indian cities have now been de-exoticized from their previous association to elephants, snake-charmers, and slums, and are now being marketed as the hub of Global North medical infrastructure and scientific advancement, at attractive Global South rates. Legalized only in 2002, international commercial gestational surrogacy (ICGS) in India, a lucrative niche market within the sector of medical and healthcare tourism, has been an industry worth US$ 2.3 billion annually at its peak. Now, however, it stands on the brink of being banned by a bill introduced in the Indian parliament in 2016. This essay advances the argument that the selling points of ICGS have been premised on structural and systemic inequalities of gender and class, as well as of biopolitical power. We further build on Graham Huggan's early twenty-first-century thesis on the marketing of the postcolonial margins to explore the emergent gendered subjectivities and attendant fictional representations of ICGS and its various actors in the novel The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) by the diasporic British Indian author Meera Syal. Drawing on this novel, we map and examine the perceptions and representations of ICGS, investigating that which facilitates and promotes exploitation to deduce the resultant impact on the stakeholders and active agents in this industry in the space of India and in the West. The essay concludes that, seen through the lenses of re-orientalism, the exploitations within India's ICGS are not merely along national or ethnic and gender lines, but also class based and geographically enabled.

Modern urban flood and water management emphasises holistic strategies that reduce flood risk while providing co- benefits to urban economies, societies and environments. The 'Blue‐Green City' concept provides a viable framework for putting this into practice. Ningbo, is a coastal city with high flood risk, whose history as a Chinese 'water town' demonstrates that approaches to water management implicit to the 'Blue‐Green' concept were practiced in ancient times, and lessons can be learned from these applications. Furthermore, recent launch of the 'Sponge City' campaign by China's National Government demonstrates the political will to implement sustainable flood and water management in ways consistent with the 'Blue‐Green' ideals. Selection of Ningbo for a pilot project presents the opportunity to integrate new 'Sponge city' approaches with ancient 'Blue‐Green' principles, within the contexts of both new urban development and retrofit. Reinventing traditional approaches to urban water management and governance offers the possibility of maintaining flood risk at acceptable levels without constraining urban growth in China and other countries experiencing rapid urban development.

Modern urban flood and water management emphasises holistic strategies that reduce flood risk while providing co- benefits to urban economies, societies and environments. The 'Blue‐Green City' concept provides a viable framework for putting this into practice. Ningbo, is a coastal city with high flood risk, whose history as a Chinese 'water town' demonstrates that approaches to water management implicit to the 'Blue‐Green' concept were practiced in ancient times, and lessons can be learned from these applications. Furthermore, recent launch of the 'Sponge City' campaign by China's National Government demonstrates the political will to implement sustainable flood and water management in ways consistent with the 'Blue‐Green' ideals. Selection of Ningbo for a pilot project presents the opportunity to integrate new 'Sponge city' approaches with ancient 'Blue‐Green' principles, within the contexts of both new urban development and retrofit. Reinventing traditional approaches to urban water management and governance offers the possibility of maintaining flood risk at acceptable levels without constraining urban growth in China and other countries experiencing rapid urban development.

Over the last two decades, important contributions were made at national, European and international levels to foster collaboration into rare diseases research. The European Union (EU) has put much effort into funding rare diseases research, encouraging national funding organizations to collaborate together in the E-Rare program, setting up European Reference Networks for rare diseases and complex conditions, and initiating the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) together with the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Co-ordination of the activities of funding agencies, academic researchers, companies, regulatory bodies, and patient advocacy organizations and partnerships with, for example, the European Research Infrastructures maximizes the collective impact of global investments in rare diseases research. This contributes to accelerating progress, for example, in faster diagnosis through enhanced discovery of causative genes, better understanding of natural history of rare diseases through creation of common registries and databases and boosting of innovative therapeutic approaches. Several examples of funded pre-clinical and clinical gene therapy projects show that integration of multinational and multidisciplinary expertize generates new knowledge and can result in multicentre gene therapy trials. International collaboration in rare diseases research is key to improve the life of people living with a rare disease.