Clerical sexual misconduct involving adults in the Roman Catholic Church: The intersection of abusive power and vulnerability

Within the context of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), officially speaking at least, all sexual activity by a cleric is forbidden. Research suggests that this is not occurring in the RCC, but rather, there is a significant amount of clerical sexual activity in various forms. There appears, however, to be a great deal of ambiguity or ambivalence as to whether clergy sexual misconduct against adults (CSMAA) is actually abusive, or even misconduct. Drawing on qualitative data from a self-identified victims of CSMAA, this paper seeks to offer clarity to the dynamics of this form of abuse

Attributing long-term changes in airborne birch and grass pollen concentrations to climate change and vegetation dynamics

Changes in climate and land-use may elicit an increased emission of allergenic pollen amounts in the air, causing a rise in respiratory allergies and affecting public health more than previously thought. Here we have used a well-established pollen transport model SILAM (System for Integrated modeLling of Atmospheric coMposition) for attributing the long-term changes in airborne pollen concentrations of birches and grasses to climate change and vegetation dynamics. The pollen transport model is applied for Belgium and is driven by ECMWF ERA5 meteorological data (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, fifth generation of ECMWF atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate). The dynamic vegetation components of the model are based on multi-decadal datasets for 1982–2019 on spatially distributed birch and grass pollen emission sources. For each model gridcell we have computed the change rate of the seasonal birch and grass pollen cycles based on daily pollen concentrations, and of the daily meteorological model input. Finally, the gridcell based association between trends in pollen and climate change are derived. Our findings show that during the period 1982–2019 a strong increase in birch pollen concentrations is associated with increasing radiation, decreasing precipitation and decreasing horizontal wind speed near the surface. A strong decrease of grass pollen concentrations over time is driven by a decreasing trend in grass pollen sources, and it is also associated with decreasing precipitation. The magnitude of the associations between meteorology and airborne birch pollen concentrations are almost twice the association between meteorology and grass pollen, and the spatial variations are substantial even on the scales of small countries. The specific contribution of birch tree and pollen production dynamics to the concentrations of birch pollen in the air over time is highly associated with wind speed and precipitation. Introducing the inter-seasonal variation in birch pollen production during the period 1982–2019 intensifies the climate induced increase of airborne birch pollen concentrations with ∼6%. In contrast, the grass pollen production dynamics resulted into ∼10 times less grass pollen over the studied period compared to climate change&nbsp;effects.</p

A.: A generalized Wiener attack on RSA

Abstract. We present an extension of Wiener’s attack on small RSA secret decryption exponents [10]. Wiener showed that every RSA public key tuple (N, e) with e ∈ φ(N) that satisfies ed − 1 = 0 mod φ(N) for some d &lt; 1 3 N 1 4 yields the factorization of N = pq. Our new method finds p and q in polynomial time for every (N, e) satisfying ex + y = 0 mod φ(N) with x &lt; 1 3 N 1 4 and |y | = O(N − 3 4 ex). In other words, the generalization works for all secret keys d = −xy −1, where x, y are suitably small. We show that the number of these weak keys is at least N 3 4 −ɛ and that the number increases with decreasing prime difference p − q. As an application of our new attack, we present the cryptanalysis of an RSA-type scheme presented by Yen, Kim, Lim and Moon [11, 12]. Our results point out again the warning for cryptodesigners to be careful when using the RSA key generation process with special parameters

Transcatheter aortic valve thrombosis: the relation between hypo-attenuated leaflet thickening, abnormal valve haemodynamics, and stroke

Cardiolog

Identifying the genetic basis of ecologically and biotechnologically useful functions of the bacterium Burkholderia vietnamiensis

Signature-tagged mutagenesis (STM) was used to identify genetic determinants of fitness associated with two key ecological processes mediated by bacteria. Burkholderia vietnamiensis strain G4 was used as a model bacterium to investigate: phenol degradation as a model of bioremediation, and pea rhizosphere colonization as a prerequisite to biological control and phytoremediation. A total of 1900 mutants were screened and 196 putative fitness mutants identified; the genetic basis of 137 of these mutations was determined by correlation to the G4 genome. The phenol-STM screen was more successful at identifying phenol degradation mutations (83 mutants; 4.4% hit rate) than a conventional agar-based phenol screen (49 mutants, 5319 screened, 0.92% hit rate). The combination of both screens completely defined the components of the TOM pathway in strain G4 and also identified novel accessory genes not previously implicated in phenol utilization. The rhizosphere-STM screen identified 113 mutants (5.9% hit rate); 107 had reduced tag signals indicative of poor rhizosphere colonization (Rhiz-), while six mutants produced high hybridization signals suggesting increased rhizosphere competence (Rhiz+). Competition assays confirmed that 69% of Rhiz- mutants tested (24/35) were severely compromised in their rhizosphere fitness. Seventy Rhiz- mutations mapped to genes with the following putative functions: amino acid biosynthesis (25; 36%), general metabolism (18; 26%), hypothetical (9; 13%), regulatory genes (4; 5.7%), transport and stress (2 each; 2.8% respectively). One of the most interesting discoveries mediated by the rhizosphere-STM screen was the identification of three Rhiz+ mutants inactivated within a single virulence-associated autotransporter adhesin gene; this mutation consistently produced a hyper-colonization phenotype suggesting a highly novel role for this surface adhesin during plant interactions. Our study has shown that STM can be successfully applied to ecologically important microbial interactions, defining the underlying genetic systems important for biotechnological fitness of environmental bacteria such those from the Burkholderia cepacia complex