Communities and individuals globally continue to suffer the violent impacts of colonialism and racism, in a global system of governance that remains rooted in unequal and hierarchical power imbalances. The interpersonal, societal, and structural violence that persists around the world exists in violation of human rights, and is evidence of a persistent lack of political will to effectively invest in human rights, including the right to health, as a true priority.

The demand on States and non-State actors to fulfil the human right to health is imperative. Attacks on civilians during times of conflict and catastrophe, as seen in the latest escalation and display of imperial aggression by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory, demonstrate the consistent uneven application of human rights and commitment to fulfilling them.

Protecting human rights, and specifically the realization of the right to health, is fundamental as it has significant consequences for the realisation of other human rights. Eliminating discrimination requires paying sufficient attention to groups of individuals that suffer historical or persistent prejudice. Fulfilling a commitment to health equity and justice demands creating opportunity and conducive conditions for the dignity for all people.

Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China has systematically centralized decision-making power over a wide range of policy areas while strengthening the organizational capacity of Party institutions to implement the Party’s agenda. The Party has expanded its presence and influence across government agencies, private enterprise and non-profit organizations. The final frontier for Party control lies in the countryside, where villages have enjoyed relative autonomy and civic organizational status since decollectivization in the early 1980s. This article explains how the Party has systematically deepened its penetration into China’s villages by empowering village-level Party branches and Party agents to take control of village affairs. The policies have sought to turn village committees into party-state implementation agencies, but messy realities on the ground raise questions about the efficacy of the measures for policy implementation and formal Party control. Drawing on interviews with villagers, village leaders and township officials in several rural Chinese counties in western and eastern parts of China, alongside Party documents and Chinese-language academic journal articles, this article examines the Party’s strategy for taking greater control of China’s 600,000 plus villages and presents observations about the impacts and consequences of the recent centralization initiatives for rural governance in China.

This study addresses the Aircraft Reactive Scheduling Problem (ARSP) on multiple parallel runways in response to operational disruptions. We specifically consider three disruptive event types; flight cancelations, delays and unexpected arrivals. Interruptions to aircraft schedules due to various reasons (e.g. bad weather conditions) may render the initial schedule not optimal or infeasible. In this paper, the ARSP is conceptualised as a multi-objective optimisation problem wherein considerations encompass not only the quality of the schedule but also its stability, defined as its conformity to an initial schedule, are of interest. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is introduced to obtain optimal solutions under different policies. Repair and regeneration heuristic approaches are developed for larger instances for which optimal solutions are time-consuming to obtain. While prevailing literature tends to concentrate on individual disruption types, our investigation diverges by concurrently addressing diverse disruption types through multiple disruptive events. We introduce alternative reactive scheduling methodologies wherein the model autonomously adapts by dynamically choosing from a range of candidate solution methods, considering conflicting objectives related to both quality and stability. A computational study is conducted, and we compare the solutions of heuristics to optimal solutions or the best solution found within a time limit, and their performances are assessed in terms of schedule stability, solution quality and computational time. We compare the solutions of heuristics and optimal solutions (i.e. the best solution found so far), and their performances are assessed in terms of schedule stability, solution quality and computational time.

Geyer larkspur is a native perennial forb toxic to cattle. Herbicide control of Geyer larkspur is variable and most likely attributable to the growth stage of the plant when herbicide is applied. The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate aminopyralid, aminopyralid + florpyrauxifen-benzyl, aminopyralid + 2,4-D, aminopyralid + metsulfuron-methyl, metsulfuron-methyl, triclopyr, and triclopyr + 2,4-D for efficacy in controlling Geyer larkspur; (2) determine if plant growth stage (vegetative or flowering) at the time of herbicide application influences herbicide effectiveness; and (3) determine whether herbicide treatment alters norditerpenoid alkaloid content of Geyer larkspur. Plots were established in eastern Wyoming (2021) and northern Colorado (2022). Herbicide application at the different phenological stages did not affect Geyer larkspur density at the Wyoming site (P = 0.1065; data not shown). Geyer larkspur density at the Wyoming site was reduced by all herbicide treatments 1 year after treatment (YAT) at the vegetative stage and by all herbicides except for triclopyr 2 YAT (P = 0.0249). At the flowering stage, Geyer larkspur density was reduced by all herbicides except metsulfuron-methyl, triclopyr, and triclopyr + 2,4-D at 1 YAT and triclopyr and triclopyr + 2,4-D at 2 YAT. In contrast, there were no differences in Geyer larkspur density across treatments at the Colorado site (P = 0.9621). Precipitation was below average several months prior to herbicide application, which may have affected herbicide effectiveness. The metsulfuron-methyl treatment resulted in the highest total alkaloid concentrations of Geyer larkspur at the vegetative stage and the lowest concentrations at the flowering stage at the Wyoming site. Control efforts of Geyer larkspur in semiarid rangelands can be effectively accomplished with aminopyralid herbicides across vegetative and flowering growth stages provided environmental conditions prior to herbicide application are sufficient for plant growth and uptake of the herbicide.

In this paper, we consider an optimal distributed control problem for a reaction-diffusion-based SIR epidemic model with human behavioural effects. We develop a model wherein non-pharmaceutical intervention methods are implemented, but a portion of the population does not comply with them, and this non-compliance affects the spread of the disease. Drawing from social contagion theory, our model allows for the spread of non-compliance parallel to the spread of the disease. The quantities of interest for control are the reduction in infection rate among the compliant population, the rate of spread of non-compliance and the rate at which non-compliant individuals become compliant after, e.g., receiving more or better information about the underlying disease. We prove the existence of global-in-time solutions for fixed controls and study the regularity properties of the resulting control-to-state map. The existence of optimal control is then established in an abstract framework for a fairly general class of objective functions. Necessary first–order optimality conditions are obtained via a Lagrangian-based stationarity system. We conclude with a discussion regarding minimisation of the size of infected and non-compliant populations and present simulations with various parameters values to demonstrate the behaviour of the model.