This paper reviews the World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel Report Russia – Measures Concerning Traffic in Transit of April 2019. It constitutes the first attempt to disentangle the legal and political aspects related to the invoked essential security interests from the economic considerations underlying the measures imposed on the transit through Russia of goods exported from Ukraine to the Republic of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. One the one hand, the panel's interpretation of Article XXI of the GATT denies Members unilateral determination over security exceptions. It further enables a pathway for future WTO panels to review possible abuses of security exceptions – a growing concern due to the rising complexity of transnational economic relations. On the other hand, our economic analysis suggests a stricter assessment of Russia's transit restrictions was necessary. In particular, it argues that the panel adopted a circular assessment when considering the plausibility of whether Russia implemented its measures for the protection of its essential security interests at a time of emergency in international relations. Ultimately, although the panel's focus on finding a diplomatic and legal path forward failed economic scrutiny a legal assessment argues that the panel's findings fit the legal design of Article XXI:b of the GATT.

This article presents an account of Faduma, a Somali woman currently living in Jakarta, Indonesia, in order to illustrate the creativity, resilience and adaptability required to make do as a refugee with little to no formal support in a rather hostile environment. For Faduma, Indonesia presents such an environment. As it offers no formal protection for asylum seekers and refugees and only tolerates their temporary presence without guaranteeing them any fundamental rights, such as the right to work, it can be characterised as a ‘deviant destination’ for refugees in search of durable and effective solutions. This article analyses Faduma's strategies, embedded in the macro-political context of forced migration, the Global North's externalised border policies, the absence of safe pathways, and the lack of proper refugee protection in Southeast Asia, for finding informal employment, attaining new skills and education, and forming strategic friendships with Indonesians and expatriates as a means of dealing with racism, exploitation and multifaceted precarity. We selected Faduma's case from amongst a number of encounters that we had with Somali refugees in Indonesia because of her extraordinary involvement with the Somali community. While the current toleration of refugee activities by Indonesian authorities enables refugees to survive in transit, we argue that such unintentional and informal protection is not a durable approach for larger groups of refugees enduring prolonged periods of waiting.

Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation.

This article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.

Publishing a newspaper was a popular undertaking for passengers aboard intercontinental vessels during the nineteenth century. Although in almost complete isolation for weeks or even months, many travellers saw the need to issue a regular periodical. This article sheds light on the functions that these publications had for the ships’ on-board communities. On the one hand, passengers used them to inculcate a sentiment of togetherness, no matter how ephemeral their community might initially appear. On the other, the periodicals also served to separate and create boundaries between different groups of individuals aboard. Focusing on these unique historical sources allows us to study the building and dissolving of a community feeling in transit in this era of globalizing intercontinental travel. This article shows that ship newspapers were simultaneously a space for social exchange and a means of establishing social boundaries at sea in an age of increasing global shipboard travel.

The transiting exoplanetary system HAT-P-24 was observed by using CCD cameras at Yunnan Observatory and Hokoon Astronomical Centre, China in 2010 and 2012. Three new transit light curves are analyzed by means of MCMC technique, and the new physical parameters of the system are derived, which are compatible with the old ones in the discovery paper. The orbital period of HAT-P-24b is refined and no obvious TTV signal can be found from five transit events during 2010-2012.

The NASA/DLR Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-meter infrared telescope on board a Boeing 747-SP, will conduct 0.3 - 1,600 μm photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging observations from altitudes as high as 45,000 ft., where the average atmospheric transmission is greater than 80 percent. SOFIA's first light cameras and spectrometers, as well as future generations of instruments, will make important contributions to the characterization of the physical properties of exoplanets. Our analysis shows that optical and near-infrared photometric and spectrophotometric follow-up observations during planetary transits and eclipses will be feasible with SOFIA's instrumentation, in particular the HIPO-FLITECAM optical/NIR instruments. The airborne-based platform has unique advantages in comparison to ground- and space-based observatories in this field of research which we will outline here. Furthermore we will present two exemplary science cases, that will be conducted in SOFIA's cycle 1.

The extra-solar planet WASP-1b, discovered by SuperWASP consortium in 2006, was observed through R filter using the 1-meter telescope with CCD camera at Yunnan Observatory on November 11, 2006. The systematic errors in photometric data were reduced by means of Tamuz et al. (2005) and Collier Cameron et al. (2006)'s algorithms. In order to estimate the parameters of the system, the MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) analysis is applied to fit the observed light curve. The following parameters of the system are derived: Rp=1.44RJ, Mp=0.88MJ, R*=1.52R⊙, a=0.0396AU. The new parameters of the planet imply its low density, which agrees to the previous results.

Intrinsic stellar variability can hinder the detection of shallow transits, particularly in space-based data. Therefore, this variability has to be filtered out before running the transit search. Unfortunately, filtering out the low frequency signal of the stellar variability also modifies the transit shape. This results in errors in the measured transit depth and duration used to derive the planet radius, and orbital inclination. We present an evaluation of the magnitude of this effect based on 20 simulated light curves from the CoRoT blind exercise 2 (BT2). We then present an iterative filter which uses the strictly periodic nature of the transits to separate them from other forms of variability, so as to recover the original transit shape before deriving the planet parameters. On average with this filter, we improve the estimation of the transit depth and duration by 15% and 10% respectively.

Three SuperWASP transiting planet candidates were observed through R or I filters using the 1-meter telescope and CCD camera of Yunnan Observatory from 2006 to 2007. The relative photometric data were corrected for the systematic errors by means of Tamuz et al. (2005) and Collier Cameron et al. (2006)'s algorithms. The resulting light curves demonstrate that one of three targets is a potential exoplanet candidate, which is worthy to perform further follow-up observation to clarify.

Digestibility is the result of two competing processes: digestion and digesta transit. To develop or parameterise mechanistic models of digestion, both processes have to be quantified. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of insoluble dietary fibre on the transit in the gastrointestinal tract of pigs. Six barrows (33 kg initial body weight and fitted with two simple T-cannulas at the proximal duodenum and distal ileum) were used in a double 3 × 3 Latin square design. Pigs were offered diets differing in total dietary fibre content (170, 220 and 270 g/kg DM) at 4 h intervals. A single meal marked with YbO2 and Cr-EDTA was used to determine the kinetics of markers concentrations of the solid and liquid phases, respectively. The mean retention time (MRT), calculated by the method of the moments, averaged 1, 4 and 38 h in the stomach, small intestine and large intestine, respectively. Increasing the insoluble fibre content in the diet had no effect on MRT in the stomach and decreased the MRT of both phases in the small intestine (P < 0·05). In the large intestine, increasing the insoluble fibre content decreased the MRT of the liquid phase (P = 0·02) and tended to decrease the MRT of the solid phase (P = 0·06). Transit of the solid phase in the large intestine was 4–8 h slower than transit of the liquid phase. Analysis of marker excretion curves indicated that the small and large intestine should be represented mathematically to have both a tubular (propulsion) and compartmental (mixing) structure.

The Automated Patrol Telescope, operated by the University of New South Wales, has been undertaking a search for extrasolar planets using the transit method. We present lightcurves from two recent promising candidates; spectroscopic follow-up using the ANU 2.3m telescope shows that the companions are probably low mass stars rather than planets, although more data will be needed to be certain. Additionally, we outline future improvements to our transit search: a hardware upgrade scheduled for 2006, and the addition of a robust trend-filtering algorithm to the data reduction software.