The 2023 removal of Nigeria’s long-standing fuel subsidy triggered immediate and widespread socio-economic shocks. This paper examines the effects of this reform on Sokoto State’s informal transport sector, comprising motorcycles, tricycles, and minibuses that provide affordable transport and employment for low-income residents. Using documentary and secondary data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and national media sources, the paper explores how subsidy removal influenced operating costs, income, fare structures, and household welfare. Findings indicate that while subsidy removal aimed to promote fiscal sustainability, it has sharply increased operational costs for informal operators, leading to higher fares, reduced accessibility, and declining real incomes. Compounding these effects are weak and uneven palliative implementations. The study concludes that targeted palliatives, subnational microcredit schemes, and state-level transport support systems are essential to mitigate welfare losses while preserving reform objectives.
Keywords: Fuel Subsidy Removal, Informal Transport Sector, Sokoto State, Fiscal Reform, Public Policy, Nigeria.

This study analyzes the role of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) in preventing violent extremism in Kenya between 2015 and 2024. The research adopts a descriptive survey design, drawing on interviews with government officials, civil society actors, and community members, as well as document analysis. The findings reveal that UNCCT initiatives have shifted from state-centric, securitized approaches to more inclusive, community-led strategies that prioritize trust-building, capacity-building, and addressing root causes such as poverty and lack of opportunity. Key strategies include youth engagement, economic empowerment, strategic communication, and multi-agency coordination. The study highlights the effectiveness of localized, participatory models in building resilience, especially in urban informal settlements, and underscores the importance of involving local leaders, women, and former extremists in program design and implementation. However, challenges remain, including limited resources, poor coordination between national and county governments, and the need for more robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks. The research concludes that UNCCT’s holistic approach has contributed to Kenya’s evolving counter-extremism landscape, but ongoing refinement and inclusive participation are essential for sustainable impact.

The sixteenth century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase goes lengths to portray characters peeping and spying in the narration, suggesting a sense of voyeurism. Sight and vision in The Plum in the Golden Vase mainly stem from direct observation of characters’ quotidian life. Characters see or happen to see what happens in front of their eyes. Physical sight relies on characters’ physical proximity to what is being caught sight of. In later seventeenth century texts such as Li Yu’s Xiayilou and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, both texts point out an attempt to look into the distance. To mediate a geographical distance, Qu Jiren in Xiayilou extends restricted scope of human eyesight and observes what happens in the Zhan family through a use of the telescope. Resonating with Jiren’s extended vision, The Tempest draws on Ariel’s supernatural power to move across the space to extend Prospero’s vision, thereby creating a narrative telescope through the agency of Ariel’s sight. With a consideration of Zhang Dai’s “Mid- September on West Lake” in The Dream Recollections of Tao-an, the essay further draws attention to the subject and object of sight and to the question—who sees whom, implying a paradoxical fact that a spectator is simultaneously sighted by another spectator. This overlap of the subject and object of vision complicates the scope of human sight by emphasizing the scope of the subject of vision.

Discussions about method are not purely abstract. As the two examples discussed below demonstrate, they correspond to ideological choices that lead to distinct and significant economic policy decisions, depending on the method adopted. One must avoid abstractions or theories assumed to hold true in all times and situations, and instead recognise that economics is a historical science – shaped by historical contingencies and concrete circumstances. Following Popper, any legitimate degree of abstraction must rest on an empirical and historical foundation. Otherwise, myths are constructed – and nothing can be built upon myths.

This report presents a trial to visualize acoustic features of particular recorded speech sounds including the nasal consonant,n, in a classroom by using Praat, a software developed to analyze phonetic feature in a voice waveform. The waveforms were obtained in an English class of a high school. In a textbook, three words including /n/ (monkey /ˈmʌŋ·ki/, kangaroo /kæŋ·ɡəˈru/, Jane /ˈdʒeɪn/) were typed with illustration. The students uttered the words, and the voice was recorded through the tablet devices. Using the Praat, the perspectives of time, frequency, and spectrum of the words uttered by the students were compared. We considered that it would be useful for pronunciation instruction as it allows for visual confirmation of syllable pronunciation.

In this paper we will deal with the challenges faced by modern democratic societies and the role that education plays or should play in order to meet these demands. Modern democracies are faced with many new demands, to which they must adapt. In this regard, education is the essential helper, because it prepares the future, democratic citizen and at the same time is the foundation of the democratic system, given that its principles and values are transmitted, through the educational system, to citizens.
Keywords: education, democracy, society, politics

Since Afghanistan is an Islamic country, the cultivation, production, use, and trafficking of narcotic drugs are considered unlawful under Islamic law. Therefore, each Afghan government must adopt clear legal measures to implement this principle. This study comparatively analyzes the criminal policies of the Islamic Emirate and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan regarding the prevention of narcotic drug cultivation, production, usage, and trafficking.
The research employs both library and analytical methods, drawing information from legal documents, books, and reliable international journals. The findings reveal that the two governments have adopted different approaches: The Islamic Republic enacted a separate law on combating narcotics, specifying all types of narcotics, related crimes, offenders, punishments, confiscated drugs, and responsible authorities. In contrast, the Islamic Emirate implemented a unified manual outlining narcotics prevention measures and associated punishments.
This comparative analysis highlights the effectiveness and differences of criminal policies in curbing the cultivation and smuggling of opium and hashish, offering insights into strategies that have proven more successful.
Keywords: Hashish, Opium, Criminal Policy, Comparative Study

This study examines the prohibition on leaving the house at dusk in Javanese culture through an integrated analytical framework, namely Ricoeurian hermeneutics, Jungian archetypal psychology, and liminality theory. Although often understood as a simple prohibition in everyday practice, the ban on duskactually containsa layered structure of meaning that combines mythic, moral, and affective dimensions in regulating behavior and stabilizing the symbolic order. Based on primary data in the form of cross-generational interviews and textual sources regarding the myth of Bathara Kala, this study shows that the ban on dusk functions as a symbolic mechanism that transforms the existential ambiguity of dusk into a comprehensible cosmological order. In this context, Bathara Kala—depicted as a predatory creature at dusk—emerges as a local manifestation of a universal archetype Shadow and Devouring Father, which acts as a cultural technology to externalize and manage collective anxiety. At the social level, the prohibition of Maghrib (sunset prayer) operates as a pedagogical tool used by parents and family members to discipline children and maintain the rhythm of domestic life. Intergenerational analysis reveals a shift from the literal beliefs of older generations to the moral-pragmatic interpretations of younger generations, indicating that the continuity of tradition occurs through a process of resemantization adaptive. Comparative data from Africa, South Asia, and Latin America confirm that the twilight taboo is a cross-cultural pattern for responding to temporal ambiguity. Overall, this study offers a multidimensional analytical model that demonstrates how local myths, social discipline, and existential anxieties combine to sustain the continuity of living traditions in contemporary Javanese culture.
Keywords: Bathara Kala, hermeneutics, Javanese culture, Jungian archetypes, Maghrib prohibition

This study aims to investigate the presence and transmission of volleyball from Smyrna to Greece through the lens of the social history of sport and the refugee experience after 1922. It seeks to highlight how a sport that originated in a multicultural environment was transformed, following the Asia Minor Catastrophe, into a vehicle of identity, collective memory, and social integration. Early 20th-century Smyrna served as a laboratory for athletic modernization, where clubs such as Panionios and Apollon promoted volleyball as a means of education and progress. After the Catastrophe, this sporting tradition was preserved by refugees who settled in Greece, carrying with them the technical expertise, ethos, and educational values of Smyrna’s athletic culture. In Athens, the re-established Panionios led the dissemination of volleyball, organizing the first championships from 1925 and contributing to the establishment of sport as an element of school and communal education. In Thessaloniki, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) served as the main agent for the introduction and institutionalization of volleyball from 1919 onwards, linking it to pedagogical values such as cooperation and discipline, while functioning as a space for social integration for refugees. In Heraklion, OFI and Herodotos highlighted the importance of the sport in Crete, with OFI establishing one of the first women’s volleyball teams in Greece (1928), reflecting the modernizing character of the Asia Minor tradition. The research is based on archival sources, contemporary newspapers (Efimeris ton Valkanion, Empros, Amalthia, Patris, Makedonia, Athlitikos Kosmos, Vradyni), photographic evidence, and secondary literature from historians and sociologists. These sources document the contribution of Asia Minor refugees to the Greek athletic renaissance of the interwar period. In conclusion, the historical analysis demonstrates that volleyball transcended the narrow boundaries of sport, serving as a means of cultural preservation and social cohesion, linking the Asia Minor memory with the formation of modern Greek identity.
Keywords: refuge, sport, modernization, memory, integration.