Legal Issues Before the United Nations Sanctions Committee

This paper will seek to present certain legal issues which have arisen before the Security Council Committee Established in Pursuance of Resolution 253 (1968) Concerning the Question of Southern Rhodesia,1 hereinafter referred to as the Sanctions Committee . 2 After outlining briefly the nature and scope of the obligation to implement sanctions, and describing the Sanctions Committee, we shall proceed to consider the following legal issues which have arisen before the Committee: (1) The Committee\u27s competence to make determinations as to compliance with, or breach of, sanctions obligations; (2) The Committee\u27s competence to make recommendations to the Security Council for strengthening sanctions; (3) The distinction between mandatory and non-mandatory obligations under resolution 253 (1968); (4) The responsibility of States regarding sanctions violations by their nationals who are abroad; (5) The position of neutral States and non-member States; (6) The question of who decides whether a case falls under one of the permitted exceptions; (7) The question of pre-sanctions contracts or licences and the plea of hardship

The Office of the United Nations Secretary-General

In the last decade of the twentieth century the international community is turning increasingly to international organizations to co-ordinate international protection of the common welfare, to promote global interests, and to help enhance human dignity and freedom. International organizations are not being entrusted with governmental functions per se, but they are being called upon to help develop and operate what may be described as strategies of international governance in the environmental, political, economic, social, and humanitarian sectors. The enhanced role of international organizations is accompanied by related innovations in international law

Legal Issues Before the United Nations Sanctions Committee

This paper will seek to present certain legal issues which have arisen before the Security Council Committee Established in Pursuance of Resolution 253 (1968) Concerning the Question of Southern Rhodesia,1 hereinafter referred to as the Sanctions Committee . 2 After outlining briefly the nature and scope of the obligation to implement sanctions, and describing the Sanctions Committee, we shall proceed to consider the following legal issues which have arisen before the Committee: (1) The Committee\u27s competence to make determinations as to compliance with, or breach of, sanctions obligations; (2) The Committee\u27s competence to make recommendations to the Security Council for strengthening sanctions; (3) The distinction between mandatory and non-mandatory obligations under resolution 253 (1968); (4) The responsibility of States regarding sanctions violations by their nationals who are abroad; (5) The position of neutral States and non-member States; (6) The question of who decides whether a case falls under one of the permitted exceptions; (7) The question of pre-sanctions contracts or licences and the plea of hardship

Legal Issues Before the United Nations Sanctions Committee

This paper will seek to present certain legal issues which have arisen before the Security Council Committee Established in Pursuance of Resolution 253 (1968) Concerning the Question of Southern Rhodesia,1 hereinafter referred to as the Sanctions Committee . 2 After outlining briefly the nature and scope of the obligation to implement sanctions, and describing the Sanctions Committee, we shall proceed to consider the following legal issues which have arisen before the Committee: (1) The Committee\u27s competence to make determinations as to compliance with, or breach of, sanctions obligations; (2) The Committee\u27s competence to make recommendations to the Security Council for strengthening sanctions; (3) The distinction between mandatory and non-mandatory obligations under resolution 253 (1968); (4) The responsibility of States regarding sanctions violations by their nationals who are abroad; (5) The position of neutral States and non-member States; (6) The question of who decides whether a case falls under one of the permitted exceptions; (7) The question of pre-sanctions contracts or licences and the plea of hardship

Gender Differences in Russian Colour Naming

In the present study we explored Russian colour naming in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment (http://www.colournaming.com). Colour singletons representing the Munsell Color Solid (N=600 in total) were presented on a computer monitor and named using an unconstrained colour-naming method. Respondents were Russian speakers (N=713). For gender-split equal-size samples (NF=333, NM=333) we estimated and compared (i) location of centroids of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs); (ii) the number of words in colour descriptors; (iii) occurrences of BCTs most frequent non-BCTs. We found a close correspondence between females’ and males’ BCT centroids. Among individual BCTs, the highest inter-gender agreement was for seryj ‘grey’ and goluboj ‘light blue’, while the lowest was for sinij ‘dark blue’ and krasnyj ‘red’. Females revealed a significantly richer repertory of distinct colour descriptors, with great variety of monolexemic non-BCTs and “fancy” colour names; in comparison, males offered relatively more BCTs or their compounds. Along with these measures, we gauged denotata of most frequent CTs, reflected by linguistic segmentation of colour space, by employing a synthetic observer trained by gender-specific responses. This psycholinguistic representation revealed females’ more refined linguistic segmentation, compared to males, with higher linguistic density predominantly along the redgreen axis of colour space

Porewater methane transport within the gas vesicles of diurnally migrating Chaoborus spp.: An energetic advantage

We show that diurnally migrating Chaoborus sp. (phantom midge larvae), which can be highly abundant in eutrophic lakes with anoxic bottom, utilises sediment methane to inflate their tracheal sacs, which provides positive buoyancy to aid vertical migration. This process also effectively transports sediment methane bypassing oxidation to the upper water column, adding to the total methane outflux to the atmosphere

The acceptability and feasibility of using the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) to inform practice in care homes

Background: The Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) measures social care related quality of life (SCRQoL) and can be used to measure outcomes and demonstrate impact across different social care settings. This exploratory study built on previous work by collecting new inter-rater reliability data on the mixed-methods version of the toolkit and exploring how it might be used to inform practice in four case study homes. Method: We worked with two care home providers to agree an in-depth study collecting SCRQoL data in four case-study homes. Data was collected about residents’ age, ethnicity, cognitive impairment, ability to perform activities of daily living and SCRQoL in the four homes. Feedback sessions with staff and managers were held in the homes two weeks after baseline and follow-up data collected three months later. Interviews with managers explored their views of the feedback and recorded any changes that had been made because of it. Results: Participant recruitment was challenging, despite working in partnership with the homes. Resident response rates ranged from 23 to 54 % with 58 residents from four care homes taking part in the research. 53 % lacked capacity to consent. Inter-rater reliability for the ASCOT ratings of SCRQoL were good at time one (IRR = 0.72) and excellent at time two (IRR = 0.76). During the study, residents’ ability to perform activities of daily living declined significantly (z = -2.67, p < .01), as did their expected needs in the absence of services (z = -2.41, p < .05). Despite these rapid declines in functionings, residents’ current SCRQoL declined slightly but not significantly (Z = -1.49, p = .14). Staff responded positively to the feedback given and managers reported implementing changes in practice because of it. Conclusion: This exploratory study faced many challenges in the recruitment of residents, many of whom were cognitively impaired. Nevertheless, without a mixed-methods approach many of the residents living in the care homes would have been excluded from the research altogether or had their views represented only by a representative or proxy. The value of the mixed-methods toolkit and its potential for use by providers is discussed

Deep learning for image-based cassava disease detection

Open Access Journal; Published online: 27 Oct 2017Cassava is the third largest source of carbohydrates for human food in the world but is vulnerable to virus diseases, which threaten to destabilize food security in sub-Saharan Africa. Novel methods of cassava disease detection are needed to support improved control which will prevent this crisis. Image recognition offers both a cost effective and scalable technology for disease detection. New deep learning models offer an avenue for this technology to be easily deployed on mobile devices. Using a dataset of cassava disease images taken in the field in Tanzania, we applied transfer learning to train a deep convolutional neural network to identify three diseases and two types of pest damage (or lack thereof). The best trained model accuracies were 98% for brown leaf spot (BLS), 96% for red mite damage (RMD), 95% for green mite damage (GMD), 98% for cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), and 96% for cassava mosaic disease (CMD). The best model achieved an overall accuracy of 93% for data not used in the training process. Our results show that the transfer learning approach for image recognition of field images offers a fast, affordable, and easily deployable strategy for digital plant disease detection

The Role of Scleraxis in Fate Determination of Mesenchymal Stem Cells for Tenocyte Differentiation

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are pluripotent cells that primarily differentiate into osteocytes, chondrocytes, and adipocytes. Recent studies indicate that MSCs can also be induced to generate tenocyte-like cells; moreover, MSCs have been suggested to have great therapeutic potential for tendon pathologies. Yet the precise molecular cascades governing tenogenic differentiation of MSCs remain unclear. We demonstrate scleraxis, a transcription factor critically involved in embryonic tendon development and formation, plays a pivotal role in the fate determination of MSC towards tenocyte differentiation. Using murine C3H10T1/2 pluripotent stem cells as a model system, we show scleraxis is extensively expressed in the early phase of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP)-12-triggered tenocytic differentiation. Once induced, scleraxis directly transactivates tendon lineage-related genes such as tenomodulin and suppresses osteogenic, chondrogenic, and adipogenic capabilities, thus committing C3H10T1/2 cells to differentiate into the specific tenocyte-like lineage, while eliminating plasticity for other lineages. We also reveal that mechanical loading-mediated tenocytic differentiation follows a similar pathway and that BMP-12 and cyclic uniaxial strain act in an additive fashion to augment the maximal response by activating signal transducer Smad8. These results provide critical insights into the determination of multipotent stem cells to the tenocyte lineage induced by both chemical and physical signals