This paper examines Japanese media coverage and analysis of the recent Israel-Hamas war. Specifically, it argues that the Japanese public, media and government are being exposed to a distorted view of Islam and Muslim countries. For instance, Japanese academia seems captivated by anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, leading to the radicalization of students. This, in turn, results in distorted perspectives on Muslim affairs for the Japanese people, media and government. This paper will focus on a case study from YouTube conducted by Akari Iiyama, a Japanese author. It will illustrate how her analysis unveils a distorted perspective of the Israel-Hamas war. Further, this study suggests that media reports play a crucial role in our comprehension of language dynamics in contemporary everyday life. It aims to enhance our understanding, especially in the context of Israel-Hamas war reporting, of the theory of speech style in socio-linguistics. Specifically, the theory of “involvement” will be discussed in relation to Japanese web-based data.

The main objective of this study is to explore the relationship between total factor productivity and financial development for a group of Latin American countries consisting of Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico covering the period from 1996 to 2019. Total factor productivity, which is considered as one of the main drivers of sustainable economic growth, especially for emerging economies, is the measure of productive efficiency given by the ratio of aggregate output to aggregate inputs. Financial development refers to the development of financial institutions and financial markets. Latin American countries exhibit different levels of both total factor productivity and financial development mainly due to the emerging nature of their economies, which explains the motivation of choosing four of these countries as the sample to analyze the association between total factor productivity and financial development. Data for total factor productivity is taken from the Penn World Table while the Financial Development Index Database provided by the IMF is used in order to examine financial development. The results of this study indicate that countries with higher levels of total factor productivity also have higher levels of financial development. This finding can be interpreted as the outcome of the fact that there are macroeconomic and financial factors determining or similarly influencing both total factor productivity and financial development. Significant policy implications for emerging countries can be inferred from this close connection between total factor productivity and financial development, which constitutes the major contribution of this study to the literature.

Carbon dioxide is the most ubiquitous chemical constituent of life on Earth, and Earth is the only known planet on which life is present. Increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1870 are said to be associated with coal, oil and gas extraction and burning to have enhanced a natural cyclical warming trend which began in 1875: 1875 which was the coldest year in more than 2000 years, and marked the end of the Little Ice Age which began in 1250, and which is testified to in historic narrative weather records in Europe and China, and by modern studies of tree rings, ice core and other physical data (Thompson, Mosley-Thompson et al 1986). The coldest century in that era was the seventeenth. Historic records show a major die-off of the human population occurred in that century, provoked by large scale famines and wars. Numerous violent conflicts emerged in Europe and Asia, including the European Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, and a huge multi-decadal conflict that led to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in China (Parker 2013).

Institutions of higher education were historically organized to educate white students from privileged positions in society. This academic power structure supports a Eurocentric curriculum that discriminates again minority students and minority faculty. Institutions of higher education devalue the contributions of people of color, and this historical reality maintains social inequality and serves to make the educational process unequal and oppressive for students of color. Despite the growing opportunities for Black students to go to college and retaining them to the completion of their baccalaureate degrees is a challenge embedded in the oppressive educational process and philosophies embedded in predominately white institutions.