The lacking interest in interest rates: will the phase-out of LIBOR and negative rates go unnoticed by arbitration practitioners?

Interest plays a crucial role in ensuring that the compensation obtained by the winning party does not diminish throughout the many years between the breach and enforcement of the award. Despite its importance, interest is often the last element considered by arbitration practitioners, who sometimes rely on popular interest rate benchmarks that worked well in the past. However, some familiar benchmarks might no longer achieve the intended outcome. We have reviewed public investment arbitration awards rendered in 2019–2020 and identified three issues: the use of LIBOR despite its imminent phase-out, the use of benchmarks that have become negative, and the omission of interest from awards rendered in favour of respondent states. While solutions may vary, we discuss mechanisms that may be used to review existing awards, alternative interest rate benchmarks that may replace LIBOR, and floors that might be helpful to deal with negative interest rates. Arbitration practitioners regret to see it when transactional lawyers negotiate arbitration clauses as ‘midnight clauses’. However, it often escapes the arbitration community that it adopts a similar last minute approach to interest rates. It is hoped that this article might help interest rates avoid the fate of being a ‘midnight remedy’.

CLONING AND EXPRESSION OF A MURE LIGASE ENZYME AS A POTENTIAL TARGET AGAINST BACTERIA XANTHOMONAS ORYZAE PV. ORYZAE

Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) is causal agent of bacterial blight (BB) in rice. Many genes in Xoo have been identified in recently years. One of these genes, a gene coded for uridine diphosphate (UDP)-MurNAc-tripeptide ligase (MurE), catalyses the addition of meso-diaminopimelic acid (m-DAP) into peptidoglycan by coupled to the hydrolysis of ATP has more popular interest. However, there are no experimental data to confirm hypothesis of this enzyme in Xoo. A significant overview at the ATP binding site of most the MurE ligases demonstrated much more variable with amino acid sequence identities in this part, variable percentage around 22 to 26%. Besides, a refined homology structural feature between EcMurE and XooMurE will very important for determining possible involvement of the MurE ligase activity in Xoo. Therefore, a new recombinant protein named XooMurE from Xoo was purified with the N-terminal His-tagged form through a Ni-NTA column in this study. After purification, the Histag was removed then out of the N-terminal His-tagged XooMurE by TEV protease. Purification effectiveness of XooMurE over 95% in this study could produce an essential material for e studies about mechanism of XooMurE and consequently available direction for discovering novel anti-bacterial compounds against Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (xoo).

‘The Surest of All Morale Barometers’: Transnational Encounters in the XV International Brigade

Despite considerable scholarly and popular interest in the International Brigades, which fought on the side of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, traditional approaches centred on ‘national’ contingents of foreign volunteers have left significant gaps in historical knowledge. In particular, relations between the foreign volunteers and their Spanish hosts have received little attention, even though these relationships were fundamental to the everyday experience of volunteering, as well as affecting the International Brigades’ cohesion during their time in Spain. This account introduces a range of new archival material relating to the English-speaking XV International Brigade, arguing that pervasive structural and cultural factors led to a complex and variable set of outcomes that defy binary categorisation. In doing so, this study contributes to an emerging new literature on transnational approaches to the Spanish Civil War and interwar anti-fascisms, as well as comparative approaches to foreign fighter mobilisations.

The Germans and Air Power at Dieppe: The Raid and its Lessons from the ‘Other Side of the Hill’

Despite the vast academic and popular interest in the Dieppe raid of 19 August 1942, there remains a curious oversight of the German side of the story. This contribution interrogates German sources in order to explore the Dieppe air battle and its consequences from the perspective of the German armed forces. The paper ultimately demonstrates that the Germans learnt much about the role of air power in coastal defence from their experiences at Dieppe, but that the implementation of those lessons was lacking.

The Myth of Louis Riel

In recent years Louis Riel has become somewhat of a Canadian folk hero. At the official, scholarly, and popular levels the rebel hanged in 1885 has become the subject of much attention. Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the site of his two uprisings, have commemorated him in statue while the federal government which allowed his execution to take place in the 1880s has, in the 1980s, designated Batoche a national historic site. Canadian government money has also provided a half million dollar grant designed to allow the compilation and publication of all of Riel’s writings. Such scholarly and official interest is complemented by popular interest. Plays, poems, television dramas, and even an opera have been written about him. Riel has assumed mythical stature.

Love and homophobia in Malawi's spoken-word poetry movement

By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. The selection of poetry presented here comes from a female and a male poet, who, unbeknown to each other, prepared poems sharply critical of homosexuality and what they regarded as its foreign and local advocacy. The same poets have also gained success for their love poems, which have depicted intimate desires in remarkably compatible ways for both women and men. The poets who performed ‘homophobic’ verse went against popular gender stereotypes in their depictions of romantic love and female and male desires. This introductory essay, as a contribution toAfrica's Local Intellectuals series, discusses the aesthetic challenges that the new poets have launched in the context of Malawi's modern poetry. With regard to gender relations in their love poems, the introduction also considers the poets’ possible countercultural contribution despite their avowed commitment to perform for ‘the people’.

The Celebration of Lesbian Female Psyche in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: A Critical Study

Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) taps into the increasing popular interest for exploring the ways in which gender and sexual identities are constructed in the mainstream British culture. Often been considered an autobiographical and a bildungsroman, this book has successfully dealt with the protagonist’s self-development from infancy to adulthood and her search for individuality through a series of formative experiences. These experiences, however, encapsulates her struggle against—the oppression of religion of the asphyxiating society where she lives, in her sexual initiation, in her subsequent isolation, and finally in her success to move away from oppression to freedom and independence. Thus this research paper is an attempt to excavate how Winterson has challenged the prescribed set of attitudes of a society (especially the religious ones) towards sexuality through the experiences of a character who experiences her lesbian identity within a closed society that rejects same-sex love and tendencies. Moreover, this paper also aims to redirect our focus towards the breaking down of traditional clear-cut boundaries with respect to the artificial construction of gender and identity.

“It’s a mix of authenticity and complete fabrication” Emotional camping: The cross-platform labor of the Real Housewives

Despite popular interest in reality television, social media, and self-branding, much scholarship focuses on a single platform and places the burden of self-branding on the individual alone. Drawing on 6 years of research into the Real Housewives (RH) franchise and interviews with “Housewives,” I focus on the women’s performances of identity and self-branding across platforms. This article demonstrates that the women of RH become experts at working the system that exploits them via a form of labor I conceptualize as “emotional camping.” Successfully branded “Housewives” tend to be (1) dedicated to Bravo, (2) inclined to present as walking GIFs on Instagram, and (3) seemingly authentic. I argue this self-branding strategy affords these women a semblance of privacy in their highly public careers. These findings are a critique of and feminist mediation into the legitimate labor reality stars do for networks and themselves across platforms.

Writing Upwards: Letters to Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister, 1949–1966

Robert Gordon Menzies received approximately 22,000 letters during his record-breaking second term of office as Australia’s Prime Minister (1949–66). This article examines the corpus as an example of “writing upwards,” a distinctive epistolary genre in which the weak wrote to the powerful, to praise them, berate them, abuse them, or perhaps wish them a happy birthday. From this perspective, the Menzies correspondence takes its place alongside the correspondence of other twentieth-century leaders that has already attracted scholarly and popular interest (the Belgian monarchy, Hitler, Mussolini, Mitterrand, Obama). After surveying this literature and establishing the Australian context, I give a brief presentation of the corpus as a whole. I then focus on one fundamental assumption of letter writers engaged in “writing upwards”: they believed their leader or superior was directly accessible and that they could establish a personal connection with him. By cutting through bureaucratic red tape and by using the epistolary hotline to the top, they could solve a problem or at least make their grievance heard. I indicate the difficulties and illusions they experienced, and outline the tactics deployed by Menzies’s secretariat in responding to their letters.

Profits of deceit: Performing populism in polarised times

The article is an invited contribution to the special issue to mark the anniversary of the publication of Jim McGuigan’s ‘Cultural Populism’. Drawing on work on authoritarian populism produced by the scholars grouped around the Frankfurt Institute of Research during their war-time exile in the Unites States, this article explores the right-wing populist platforms developed by Donald Trump during and after his presidential campaign and by the two Leave campaigns in the British referendum on European Union membership. It argues that understanding their popular appeal requires us to pay particular attention to the performative styles employed and the ways they mobilise motifs from popular media and direct forms of communicative address to connect with lived experiences, articulate anxieties and present policies that benefit the already privileged as true expressions of the popular interest.