The Paris Agreement on climate change has been widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph, but it commits its signatories only to a process, not to anything of substance. It represents a gamble: that if enough governments say they will act, they will believe each other and have the confidence to move forward – and that businesses and investors will believe them too. Six years later, the gamble appears to be succeeding, but despite this, progress is nowhere near fast enough. Global emissions of greenhouse gases are still going up.

Ancient communications were slow and precarious, so overseas commanders enjoyed/suffered from partial absence of control by home authorities. Isolation should not be overdone. Literary sources mention official letters home only when remarkable for some reason. Requests to the senate for supplies from Rome were made routinely. Equally, some messages and orders arrived from Carthage. ‘Peripheral imperialism’, far-reaching decisions by men on the spot, are a feature of Roman operations in Iberia. Publius Scipio (father)’s decision to fight the war there is a good example. Other examples are reviewed. Hannibal’s treaty with Philip was co-signed by Carthaginian advisers. Appointment of good subordinates is an important indicator of the quality of a commander’s personal initiatives. Italian Locri is taken as a case study because Hannibal and Scipio both made decisions affecting it. Hannibal’s appointee Hamilcar was guilty of long-term arrogance but was perhaps not as bad as Scipio’s scandalous lieutenant Quintus Pleminius.

Suggestions as to the non-medical logistical issues that the event planners will encounter when planning their mass gathering event: security, transportation, communications, and hazardous materials issues.

Large-scale incidents that involve chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) material, whether accidental or deliberate, remain a high-impact public health threat. This chapter describes research in which the social identity approach has been applied to examine the psychosocial aspects involved in the process of decontamination. It focuses on the willingness and ability of members of the public to undergo decontamination. This research programme highlights the role of social identity in shaping public behaviour and affecting public health outcomes during incidents involving mass decontamination. It identifies that, during incidents requiring decontamination, the relationship between responders and members of the public is likely to play a key part in shaping public behaviour. It proposes that effective communication must begin prior to an incident occurring, continuing into the early stages and throughout the duration of the incident. It also proposes several actions that responders should take to facilitate the decontamination process and its outcomes.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

The Paris Agreement on climate change has been widely hailed as a diplomatic triumph, but it commits its signatories only to a process, not to anything of substance. It represents a gamble: that if enough governments say they will act, they will believe each other and have the confidence to move forward – and that businesses and investors will believe them too. Six years later, the gamble appears to be succeeding, but despite this, progress is nowhere near fast enough. Global emissions of greenhouse gases are still going up.

At the beginning of 1845 members of parliament and newspaper leader writers celebrated the inventiveness and prosperity of Britain while also acknowledging that the ‘Condition of England Question’ cast a long shadow: ‘The people deteriorate.’ Leading writers such as Carlyle and Disraeli explored this question in their writings, often drawing upon documentary evidence in open letters to the newspapers or pamphlets framed as ‘letters’. Private letters also proliferated. Although leading figures in public life had secretaries who either wrote their employers’ letters to dictation or transcribed them in letter or copy books, senior professionals such as judges, generals, bishops and ministers of state, including prime ministers, generally wrote several letters each day, using a dip pen and inkstand while resting their paper – often a quarto sheet folded once – on a desk or table, or on a portable writing ‘slope’ or ‘desk’ when travelling. The letters of Augustus Welby Pugin and Edward FitzGerald provide examples of correspondence binding together communities of friends and colleagues through the universal penny post.

At one level or another, by one means or another, for one reason or another, a higher percentage of the population of western Europe was engaged with books and other forms of the printed word in the nineteenth century than at any time previously. In this as in most things, the various countries were not equal. Experience varied from region to region, from town to town and among different social groups. It depended on literacy rates, on transport and communication, on manufacturing capability, on education, on the requirements of everyday life whether in government, religion or social assumptions and practices.

One of the most striking developments of this period was the rise and success of the official lottery, first staged in 1694. Prior to its abolition in 1823 – the last official lottery was held in 1826 – the lottery represented state-sanctioned gambling, as well spawning a whole host of derivative gambling activities. This chapter explains the operations of the lottery, in particular the markets for lottery tickets as they developed very rapidly from the 1690s, and grew to encompass the whole of Britain, penetrating deep down into as well as across British society. It emphasizes how far the early development of the lottery marketplace was enfolded within the contemporaneous financial revolution. From early on, however, it also owed much to widely diffused entrepreneurial spirit and energies, in particular those of the lottery office keepers and their proliferating agents. The lottery was thus another facet of the accelerating commercialization of British society in this period, as well as a leading exploiter of the new power of publicity unleashed by a relatively free and ebullient print industry. From newspapers to hastily printed single-sheet handbills, publicity was key to stoking contemporary interest in and demand for the lottery and its various derivatives.

Chapter 4 provides the fullest discussion to date of the range of formal devices employed in the Tour. It suggests that Defoe enlists these to build up a regional scheme that will unify his picture of the nation, parallel in some ways to the zones into which modern British highways are divided, with a map to illustrate the process. A table and a map show the larger towns in Britain around 1700, with a population of 5,000 or more, as a basis for discussion of Defoe’s coverage of urban settlements. Further, the chapter provides a comparison with the methods used in previous travel writing, such as antiquarians (John Leland, William Camden) and subsequent authors of literary journeys (for example, Celia Fiennes, John Macky, William Cobbett). It defines the originality of the work within the history of this genre by means of a semiotic square, adapted from the schema developed by A.J. Greimas.