Books on the topic 'Global news stream'

This chapter adds a global perspective to the European and American traditions and includes feminist, indigenous, and “new philosophies” from throughout the world. These philosophies are born in a globalized world and yet often stress the significance of local knowledges, and they typically cut across the philosophical traditions introduced previously in this book. First, this chapter discusses feminist philosophy, which has challenged the dominance of male-centered perspectives and has also led to many fruitful qualitative studies. Second, this chapter discusses some of the variety of indigenous philosophies and how these represent qualitative forms of inquiry that may also be inspiring for other (Western) qualitative researchers, not least because of the non-acceptance of the nature/culture divide in most indigenous cosmologies. Finally, the chapter discusses the post-qualitative movement, which also does not accept the nature/culture and matter/meaning divides but tries to approach practices of inquiry from other theoretical perspectives.

As estimations and predictability of water supply in basins around the globe become difficult under a changing global climate, the need for new transboundary water management arises. To avoid international tensions related to water, traditional water agreements between states need to be transformed into more sophisticated and flexible arrangements of water governance. Designing and implementing such arrangements is a huge challenge since they must involve multiple stakeholders, must take into consideration the accelerating global water scarcity, and are dependent on the risks and unknowns of global climate change. Following an exploration of the core literature on the topic and the theoretical underpinnings of how to govern future risks, this chapter takes a closer look at the status of three important transboundary basins: the Meuse, the Mekong, and the Teesta basin. These basins all experience water stress with riparian states at different stages of agreeing on transboundary institutions and institutional cooperation.

This book provides a comprehensive historical review of American liberal democratic internationalism. It argues that the global strength and prestige of democracy today are due in large part to America's impact on international affairs. The book documents the extraordinary history of how American foreign policy has been used to try to promote democracy worldwide, an effort that enjoyed its greatest triumphs in the occupations of Japan and Germany but suffered huge setbacks in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. With new chapters and a new introduction and epilogue, this expanded edition also traces U.S. attempts to spread democracy more recently, under presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and assesses America's role in the Arab Spring. The book argues that liberal internationalism is built on powerful global historical trends, and the liberal internationalist streak in American foreign policy has been responsible for shaping a liberal world order conducive to American security and economic interests.

This chapter provides a new perspective on the subject of maritime security. It argues that piracy and armed robbery at sea are in reality land-based problems, the root causes of which still remain to be addressed by the international community. However, this chapter also maintains that, instead of focussing on short-term security measures, the stress factors that lead to instability, insecurity, and uncontrolled mass migration should also be addressed. The aim should be to improve economic development, supported by maritime development and underpinned by maritime security. Furthermore, the chapter examines not only the issue of piracy and terrorism at sea but also International Maritime Organization (IMO) measures aimed at improving security of international movements of containers, which has a wider implication than just prevention of terrorism and the protection of customs revenues.

In the global economy, individuals have to engage in cross-cultural interactions when tasked to develop creative new products or services. Research on the effects of cultural diversity on creativity, however, has been equivocal. One stream of research champions that cultural diversity in relationships broadens ideas and resources for creative thinking, whereas skeptics counter that intercultural tensions and conflicts hurt rather than help. This chapter discusses both sides of the argument. We examine the effects of intercultural relationships on creativity from three perspectives: (a) how a culturally diverse social environment (including social networks) influences individuals’ creativity; (b) how individuals can successfully engage in intercultural dyadic creative collaboration; and (c) how intercultural relationships influence creativity of multicultural teams. In addition, we investigate the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of how intercultural relationships impact creative performance. We conclude by integrating ideas from existing research and proposing new research directions.

Species acclimatization--the organized introduction of organisms to a new region--is much maligned in the present day. However, colonization depended on moving people, plants, and animals from place to place, and in centuries past, scientists, landowners, and philanthropists formed acclimatization societies to study local species and conditions, form networks of supporters, and exchange supposedly useful local and exotic organisms across the globe. Pete Minard tells the story of this movement, arguing that the colonies, not the imperial centers, led the movement for species acclimatization. Far from attempting to re-create London or Paris, settlers sought to combine plants and animals to correct earlier environmental damage and to populate forests, farms, and streams to make them healthier and more productive. By focusing particularly on the Australian colony of Victoria, Minard reveals a global network of would-be acclimatizers, from Britain and France to Russia and the United States. Although the movement was short-lived, the long reach of nineteenth-century acclimatization societies continues to be felt today, from choked waterways to the uncontrollable expansion of European pests in former colonies.

Over the last three decades cross-border innovation has profoundly changed. The global fragmentation of global value chains, increased global connectedness, and pervasive digitalization have contributed to shaping innovation processes that increasingly span country borders. This process of change has involved a wide array of actors (players) in a variety of geographical locations and organizational spaces (places), calling for new guidelines, public interventions, and regulatory frameworks (policies). Considering this complexity, the existing literature has only partially captured the ongoing changes in cross-border innovation and showed limited engagement in an integrative debate across different disciplines. This book features chapters by distinguished scholars who are all expert in their chosen topics and who provide complementary and novel perspectives on the phenomenon by bridging research streams, including international business, strategy, innovation studies and policy, international economics, industrial organization, economic geography, business ethics, and sustainability. The book is organized in three major sections, focusing on players, places, and policies in contemporary cross-border innovation and featuring both research chapters and commentaries. The book highlights the changing role of multinational enterprises and the growing participation of emerging actors in cross-border innovation via formal and informal networks, which are increasingly shaped around highly mobile individuals and new geographical places. The book also emphasizes the intertwined role of policies at national and international level, stressing the importance of supply- and demand-oriented policies and presenting intellectual property right policies as a double-edged sword for cross-border innovation.

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston’s South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States

The ritual animal longs to belong. Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. The ritual modes theory set out in this book seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes, and to explain how ritual behaviour evolved, including how different modes of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia. Testing the theory has meant designing experiments run with children in psychology labs and on remote Pacific islands, gathering survey data with armed insurgents in the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, monitoring heart rate and stress among football fans in Brazil, and measuring changes in the brain as people observe traditional Chinese rituals in Singapore. The results of all this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems: from preventing violent extremism to motivating action on the climate crisis. Although this book is about the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity, more broadly it models a new approach to the science of the social—an approach that is driven by real-world observation but grounded in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. More ambitiously still, it shows how cumulative theory building can be used to deliver practical benefits for society at large, perhaps even addressing problems on a global scale by harnessing the formidable cohesive and cooperative capacities of the ritual animal.

The book seeks to lay the groundwork for a new conception of democracy. By contrast to traditional views which located its distinctive character simply in the expansion of the number of rulers, the book presents the rise of modern democracy as a basic ‘paradigm shift’ involving multiple dimensions of change (including political, metaphysical, and even theological dimensions). Harking back to Montesquieu’s stress on the needed ‘spirit of equality,’ the new conception focuses on ethical ‘relationality’ and human ‘potentionality,’ that is, on the cultivation of ethical relations with others and the potentiality for genuine engagement (on an equal basis). In this manner, the modal radically challenges the dominant (liberal) conception anchored in egocentrism, voluntarism, and individual or collective self-interests. More specifically, the new model is predicated on the tensional balance of three key elements: the ‘people’ (potentia); political actors or policy makers (potestas); and the political aim or purpose (‘good life,’ bonum commune). The book extends the relational model to the global level, insisting on progressive indigenous democratization without hegemonically imposed ‘regime change.’

Over 120 scholarly articlesCrime and punishment fascinate. Overwhelming in their media dominance, they present us with our most popular television programs, films, novels, art works, video games, podcasts, social media streams and hashtags. This encyclopedia, a massive and unprecedented undertaking, offers a foundational space for understanding the cultural life and imaginative force and power of crime and punishment. Across five areas foundational to the study of crime and media, leading scholars from five continents engage cutting edge scholarship in order to provide definitive overviews of over 120 topics. In the context of an unprecedented global proliferation in the production of images, they take up the perennial and emergent problems of crime's celebrity and fascination; stereotypes and innovations in portrayals of crime and criminals; and the logics of representation that follow police, courts, capital punishment, prisons, and legal systems across the world. They also engage new, timely, and historically overlooked categories of offense and their representations, including child sexual abuse, violence against women, and human trafficking. A series of entries on mediums and methods provide a much needed set of critical approaches at a historical moment when doing media and visual research is a daunting, formidable undertaking. This is also a project that stretches our understanding of conventional categories of crime representation. One example of this is homicide, where entries include work on the ever-popular serial killer but also extend to filicide, infanticide, school shootings, aboriginal deaths in custody, lynchings, terrorism and genocide. Readers will be will be hard-pressed to find a convention, trope, or genre of crime representation that is not, in some way, both present and enlarged. From film noir to police procedurals, courtroom dramas and comedies to comic books, crime news to true crime and reality tv, gaming to sexting, it is covered in this encyclopedia.

Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.

Sesame Street has a global reach, with more than thirty co-productions that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts.

This chapter discusses the articulatory and acoustic properties of the sound system of Standard Modern Persian. It starts with a brief review of early work on the sound system of New Persian and its development into Modern Persian. The second section examines consonants and vowels in Standard Modern Persian. In this section, issues such as place and manner of articulation of consonants, Voice Onset Time and its importance in distinguishing voiced and voiceless obstruents, the acoustics of glottal consonants, sibilant and non-sibilant fricatives, and rhotics are discussed. The section on vowels addresses vowel space, vowel length, and the acoustics of diphthongs in Standard Modern Persian. The phonetics of the suprasegmental features of stress and intonation are the topic a final section in this chapter.

The study of the biology of tumours has grown to become markedly interdisciplinary, involving chemists, statisticians, epidemiologists, mathematicians, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists alongside medical scientists. Oxford Textbook of Cancer Biology brings together the developments from different branches of research into one volume. Structured in seven sections, the book starts with a review of the development and biology of multicellular organisms, how they maintain a healthy homeostasis in an individual, and a description of the molecular basis of cancer development. The book then illustrates how, once cells become neoplastic, their signalling network is altered and pathological behaviour follows. Changes that cancer cells can induce in nearby normal tissue are explored, and the new relationship established between them and the stroma is explicated. Finally, the authors illustrate the contribution provided by high throughput techniques to map cancer at different levels, from genomic sequencing to cellular metabolic functions, and how information technology with its vast amounts of data are integrated with traditional cell biology to provide a global view of the disease. The book concludes by summarizing what we know to date about cancer, and in what direction our understanding of cancer is moving.

These remarks reiterate the view articulated in the book that the rise of modern democracy signifies more than just the expansion of the number of rulers, but rather a basic “paradigm shift” involving multiple dimensions of life and thought (comprising political, metaphysical, and even theological dimensions). By comparison, the remarks stress a more holistic breakthrough: the emergence of a new spirituality coupled with the deepening of a lateral or horizontal humanism under the aegis of a relational democracy. The constitutive elements of democracy—whose relationship has to be continuously renegotiated—are mainly three: the people as a whole (potentia), the political rulers or agents (potestas), and the goal or basic orientation of the community (telos, bonum commune). In our time, democratic rule has to be promoted not only domestically, but globally (without violence) to avoid the autocratic domination of some societies or people by others.

For more than three hundred years, Mexico City’s Baratillo marketplace was synonymous with crime, vice, and the most disreputable elements of urban society. Despite countless attempts to disband it, the Baratillo persevered, outlasting Spanish colonial rule and dozens of republican governments. In the twentieth century, transformed the neighborhood of Tepito it into a global hub of black-market commerce. Black Market Capital argues that the Baratillo and the broader shadow economy—which combined illicit, informal, and second-hand exchanges—have been central to the economy and the politics of Mexico City since the seventeenth century. The Baratillo benefited a wide swath of urban society, fostering unlikely alliances between elite merchants, government officials, newspaper editors, and street vendors. Vendors in the Baratillo turned their market’s economic appeal into political clout, petitioning colonial and national-era officials and engaging in the capital’s public sphere to defend their livelihoods. Using records from municipal and national archives in Mexico City, newspapers, travelers’ accounts, and novels, Black Market Capital reconstructs the history of one of Mexico City’s most enduring yet least understood institutions. It provides a new perspective on the relationship between urban politics, the informal economy, and public space in Mexico City between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries.

Green growth is the idea that a society’s ecological and economic goals can be pursued as a mutually reinforcing, positive sum. It accepts that economies increase in scale and efficiency, but that economic growth may occur in less harmful ways ecologically through the use of new policies, patterns of investment, technology innovation, and behavioral change. The ultimate goal is a green economic transition, in which ecological objectives and policies are effectively integrated with many others—energy, transportation, manufacturing, and infrastructure, to name a few—and all sectors of society work more collaboratively to maximize opportunities for positive-sum solutions. The concept of green growth offers a means of reframing ecology–economy relationships and defining a pragmatic framework for making and implementing policy choices. The feasibility of and capacity for green growth depends on three sets of factors: understanding ways of linking ecological and economic goals; having governance capacities for ecological protection and policy integration; and creating the social conditions for acting collectively and valuing ecological public goods. Political systems vary in their ability to meet these conditions. For the United States, which exhibits both advantages and disadvantages in the pursuit of a green growth path, the challenge is to achieve the political conditions for promoting change. Principal among these conditions are to build a political coalition in support of a green economic transition, implement institutional reforms that enhance democracy, reduce economic inequality, and stress global action and interdependency.

This book tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West. In compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control the world’s deadliest terrorist movement - and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped to rebuild it. She shows that the diffusion of Islamist terrorism to Europe and North America was driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement nevertheless adapted to Western repertoires of protest even as it agitated for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam. The jihadists—Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their many affiliates and associates— also proved to be amazingly resilient. Again and again, the movement recovered from major setbacks. Appealing to disaffected Muslims of immigrant origin and alienated converts to Islam, Jihadist groups continue to recruit new adherents in Europe and North America, street-side in neighborhoods, in jails, and online through increasingly clandestine platforms. Taking a comparative and historical approach, deploying cutting-edge analytical tools, and drawing on her unparalleled database of up to 6,500 Western jihadist extremists and their networks, Klausen has produced the most comprehensive account yet of the origins of Western jihadism and its role in the global movement.

Human migration involves moving to a new permanent or semi-permanent location. Whether on an individual basis, in small groups or in large numbers, whether due to economic necessity (emigrants), sociocultural strife or the effects of war (refugees), it can contribute to stress in the mobile along with the settled population. Uncertainty then, increases the risk of psychosomatic disease in those relocating because of the changes in their personal/social support networks. The available healthcare for the displaced may not address their health needs adequately. Chapter 12 deliberates on this. Gender-related issues, with a female preponderance as victims come to the fore in displaced populations. These include the health effects of domestic and sexual violence or gender-based violence. International organisations, including the UN, the WHO, and FIGO, along with organisations from various countries that promote women's and children's health, have developed guidelines, and attempted to engender political will to endeavour to stop this preventable morbidity. Nevertheless, it persists with a biopsychosociocultural impact, and can be fatal. Unwanted pregnancies can result from gender-based violence or failed contraception with the pregnant woman seeking termination (abortion). Annually, about 42 million women resort to illegal methods of abortion, and risk grievous harm due to a lack of legalized services. Female genital mutilation, a form of gender-based violence with genitourinary sequelae that is carried out on girls, has global implications. It prevails due to cultural acceptance, despite major health consequences. It is illegal in the UK, and the RCOG has developed guidelines. Vignettes in this chapter illustrate these gender-related health issues.

In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. This book explores how this financialized form of globalism took shape a century ago, when Tokyo joined London and New York as a major financial center. This book shows that close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I—the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. The text tells the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

This book offers the first scholarly treatment of the history of public eating in London in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The quotidian nature of taking a meal in public during the working day or evening should not be allowed to obscure the significance of the restaurant (defined broadly, to encompass not merely the prestigious West End restaurant, but also the modest refreshment room, and even the street cart) as a critical component in the creation of modern metropolitan culture. The story of the London restaurant between the 1840s and the First World War serves as an exemplary site for mapping the expansion of commercial leisure, the increasing significance of the service sector, the introduction of technology, the democratization of the public sphere, changing gender roles, and the impact of immigration. The book incorporates what I term ‘gastro-cosmopolitanism’ to highlight the existence of an international, heterogeneous, and even hybrid, culture in London in this period that requires us to think, not merely beyond the nation, but beyond empire. The restaurant also had an important role in contemporary debates about public health and the (sometimes conflicting, but no less often complementary) prerogatives of commerce, moral improvement, and liberal governance. This book considers the restaurant as a business and a place of employment, as well as an important site for the emergence of new forms of metropolitan experience and identity. While focused on London, it illustrates the complex ways in which cultural and commercial forces were intertwined in modern Britain, and demonstrates the rewards of writing histories which recognize the interplay between broad, global forces and highly localized spaces.

As a bacteria threatens to wipe out humankind, a plutocrat sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a survivalist colony. In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland's Clyde Valley. Discovering just how far their employer is willing to go in his effort to spare one million lives, Jack Flint, the colony's director of operations, and Elsa Huntingtower, Nordenholt's personal assistant, are forced to grapple with the question of whether a noble end justifies dastardly means. Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History, Palimpsest, and Tree, as well as the story collection The Sovereignties of Invention. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science, technology, and the natural world have appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, and Orion. For Harvard''s metaLAB, he develops research into the dark abundance of collections, cultural and technology, and conditions of experience in the context of deep time. Evan Hepler-Smith teaches the history of science and technology and environmental history at Duke University. He has a special interest in the history of chemicals and chemistry, information technology, and environmental regulation. His book in progress is entitled Compound Words: Chemical Information and the Molecular World. His writing has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, and Public Books.

Melodious panpipes and kena flutes. The shimmering strums of a charango. Poncho-clad musicians playing “El Cóndor Pasa” at subway stops or street corners while selling their recordings. These sounds and images no doubt come to mind for many “world music” fans when they recall their early encounters with Andean music groups. Termed “Andean conjuntos” in this book and “pan-Andean bands” in other scholarship, four-to-six member ensembles of this type have long formed part of the “world music” circuit of the Global North, and also been present in the music scenes of Latin America’s major cities. It is only in Bolivia, however, that the Andean conjunto format has represented the preeminent ensemble line-up for interpreting “national music” since the late 1960s. The La Paz band Los Jairas is widely credited, by scholars and local musicians alike, with canonizing the Andean conjunto tradition in the Bolivian context. When the group debuted in 1966, though, their interpretive approach and instrumentation did not represent a radically new direction for the Bolivian folklore movement. As this book reveals, Los Jairas made popular in Bolivia a style of “national music” interpretation with roots in the folklorization practices developed by previous generations of urban criollo-mestizo musicians. A major goal of this book is to illuminate how urban La Paz folkloric musical trends, practices, and initiatives of the early-to-mid 20th century paved the way for Los Jairas’ dramatic ascent to national stardom in the mid-to-late 1960s and facilitated Bolivia’s ensuing canonization of the Andean conjunto. The second principal aim is to shed light on the Bolivian state’s role in the folkloric music movement, from the period when indigenismo first became a major influence on La Paz artists (the 1920s), to the boom decade of the local folklore movement (the 1960s). The third major goal is to elucidate how La Paz folkloric musical practices articulated with non-Bolivian artistic currents. Perhaps surprisingly to many people, given Bolivia’s image internationally as one of the most “Indian” and therefore culturally traditional countries of Latin America, the Bolivian folkloric music movement developed in close dialogue with a wide array of transnational or cosmopolitan musical trends in the pivotal era spanning the 1920s to 1960s.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has sparked a global health crisis that has altered our perceptions of the world and our daily lives. Not only has the velocity of infection and transmission patterns undermined our feeling of agency, but the safety measures to restrict the virus's spread also demanded social and physical separation, prohibiting us from seeking solace in the company of others. The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc on daily life and normal activities as well as having serious health, economic, financial, and societal consequences Lockdowns and physical/social distancing measures were enforced in numerous countries throughout the world beginning in March 2020. COVID-19 has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. This high death toll, combined with the rapid changes in daily life brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, may have a negative impact on child and adolescent mental health. Individuals' reactions to the security measures adopted to combat the epidemic varied depending on the social roles they played. Some segments of the population seem to be more exposed to the risk of anxious, depressive, and post-traumatic symptoms as the population is more susceptible to stress. COVID-19 pandemic has generated a situation like mass hysteria or fear. This mass fear of COVID-19, termed as “Coronaphobia”, has generated a plethora of psychiatric manifestations across societies. In India, the first and foremost responses to the pandemic have been fear and a sense of clear and imminent danger. Fears have ranged from those based on facts to unfounded fears based on misinformation circulating in the media, particularly social media. All of us respond differently to the barrage of information from all the available sources. It is equally important to consider the impact of the various phases of the pandemic on children, the elderly and pregnant women. The worries of adults can be transmitted to children and make them anxious and fearful. They can become very easily bored, angry and frustrated. Without an opportunity for outdoor play and socialization, they may become increasingly engrossed in social media and online entertainment, which can make them even more socially isolated when they emerge out of this situation. Parents need to know means of keeping the children engaged, providing an opportunity to learn new skills at home, as well as encourage children to participate in activities, get them engaged in “edutainment” and hone their extracurricular skills as well. Children with special needs may need innovative approaches to engage them and keep them active at home. For the elderly, they can feel further isolated and neglected, become more worried about their families, and increasingly worried about their health. They may not have the support systems to care for them, particularly in terms of their medical needs. This can aggravate into anxiety and depression.

Any public debate about air pollution starts with the premise that air pollution cannot be good for you, so we should have less of it. However, it is much more difficult to determine how much is dangerous, and even more difficult to decide how much we are willing to pay for improvements in measured air pollution. Recent UK estimates suggest that fine particulate pollution causes about 6500 deaths per year, although it is not clear how many years of life are lost as a result. Some deaths may just be brought forward by a few days or weeks, while others may be truly premature. Globally, household pollution from cooking fuels may cause up to two million premature deaths per year in the developing world. The hazards of black smoke air pollution have been known since antiquity. The first descriptions of deaths caused by air pollution are those recorded after the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. In modern times, the infamous smogs of the early twentieth century in Belgium and London were clearly shown to trigger deaths in people with chronic bronchitis and heart disease. In mechanistic terms, black smoke and sulphur dioxide generated from industrial processes and domestic coal burning cause airway inflammation, exacerbation of chronic bronchitis, and consequent heart failure. Epidemiological analysis has confirmed that the deaths included both those who were likely to have died soon anyway and those who might well have survived for months or years if the pollution event had not occurred. Clean air legislation has dramatically reduced the levels of these traditional pollutants in the West, although these pollutants are still important in China, and smoke from solid cooking fuel continues to take a heavy toll amongst women in less developed parts of the world. New forms of air pollution have emerged, principally due to the increase in motor vehicle traffic since the 1950s. The combination of fine particulates and ground-level ozone causes ‘summer smogs’ which intensify over cities during summer periods of high barometric pressure. In Los Angeles and Mexico City, ozone concentrations commonly reach levels which are associated with adverse respiratory effects in normal and asthmatic subjects. Ozone directly affects the airways, causing reduced inspiratory capacity. This effect is more marked in patients with asthma and is clinically important, since epidemiological studies have found linear associations between ozone concentrations and admission rates for asthma and related respiratory diseases. Ozone induces an acute neutrophilic inflammatory response in both human and animal airways, together with release of chemokines (e.g. interleukin 8 and growth-related oncogene-alpha). Nitrogen oxides have less direct effect on human airways, but they increase the response to allergen challenge in patients with atopic asthma. Nitrogen oxide exposure also increases the risk of becoming ill after exposure to influenza. Alveolar macrophages are less able to inactivate influenza viruses and this leads to an increased probability of infection after experimental exposure to influenza. In the last two decades, major concerns have been raised about the effects of fine particulates. An association between fine particulate levels and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality and morbidity was first reported in 1993 and has since been confirmed in several other countries. Globally, about 90% of airborne particles are formed naturally, from sea spray, dust storms, volcanoes, and burning grass and forests. Human activity accounts for about 10% of aerosols (in terms of mass). This comes from transport, power stations, and various industrial processes. Diesel exhaust is the principal source of fine particulate pollution in Europe, while sea spray is the principal source in California, and agricultural activity is a major contributor in inland areas of the US. Dust storms are important sources in the Sahara, the Middle East, and parts of China. The mechanism of adverse health effects remains unclear but, unlike the case for ozone and nitrogen oxides, there is no safe threshold for the health effects of particulates. Since the 1990s, tax measures aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions have led to a rapid rise in the proportion of new cars with diesel engines. In the UK, this rose from 4% in 1990 to one-third of new cars in 2004 while, in France, over half of new vehicles have diesel engines. Diesel exhaust particles may increase the risk of sensitization to airborne allergens and cause airways inflammation both in vitro and in vivo. Extensive epidemiological work has confirmed that there is an association between increased exposure to environmental fine particulates and death from cardiovascular causes. Various mechanisms have been proposed: cardiac rhythm disturbance seems the most likely at present. It has also been proposed that high numbers of ultrafine particles may cause alveolar inflammation which then exacerbates preexisting cardiac and pulmonary disease. In support of this hypothesis, the metal content of ultrafine particles induces oxidative stress when alveolar macrophages are exposed to particles in vitro. While this is a plausible mechanism, in epidemiological studies it is difficult to separate the effects of ultrafine particles from those of other traffic-related pollutants.