Prospects for Burma After Aung San Suu Kyi’s Release (ARI)

Aung San Suu Kyi’s release coincided with the holding of national elections for a military-designed state to provide the ruling junta with a veneer of legitimacy. Nevertheless, the lifting of sanctions will remain the central issue facing Burma’s relations with foreign countries, which will have to balance out human rights issues and investment opportunities. Aung San Suu Kyi and her treatment by the new government will play a determining role in deciding this issue

Transnational Corporations and Developing Public International Law

In recent years the international community has been developing various international codes of conduct, many of which will contain rules governing the behavior of transnational corporations (TNCs). Most of these rules are being developed with little or no direct TNC participation. Professor Charney argues that because TNCs represent major, independent centers of influence, failure to include them in the codes of conduct negotiations may result in rules that do not accurately reflect the realities of TNC interests and power. If the international community later seeks to convert these rules into legal norms, TNC resistance will probably place costly strains on both the rules and the entire international legal system. Professor Charney concludes that the international community should permit TNCs and other interested power groups to participate directly in the development of international norms applicable to their interests. But he cautions that it would be unwise to give TNCs complete international legal personality because this, too, might place undue strains on the international legal system

Large Scale Developments and One House Zoning Controls

Identification of nonlinear systems is a problem with many facets and roots in several diverse fields. It is not possible to survey the area in a short text. The current presentation gives a subjective view on some essential features in the area. These concern a classification of methods, the use of physical insight in models, and some overall issues like bias-variance trade-off. It is also discussed how the methods can be made available in software packages