Exploring International Legal Governance of Global Solar Fuels

This paper critically examines the role of international law in establishing the appropriate governance framework for enhanced global collaboration on solar fuels. It will particularly evaluate the right to enjoy the benefit of scientific progress and it

Trials and tribulations in the removal of dextropropoxyphene from the Australian register of therapeutic goods

The Therapeutic Goods Administration determined in November 2011 that dextropropoxyphene should be removed from the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. This is consistent with this drug's removal from the market in many other developed countries. H

Implementing US-style anti-fraud laws in the Australian pharmaceutical and health care industries

This article critically analyses the prospects for introducing United States anti-fraud (or anti-false claims) laws in the Australian health care setting. Australian governments spend billions of dollars each year on medicines and health care. A recent report estimates that the money lost to corporate fraud in Australia is growing at an annual rate of 7%, but that only a third of the losses are currently being detected. In the US, qui tam provisions - the component of anti-fraud or anti-false claims laws involving payments to whistleblowers - have been particularly successful in providing critical evidence allowing public prosecutors to recover damages for fraud and false claims made by corporations in relation to federal and state health care programs. The US continues to strengthen such anti-fraud measures and to successfully apply them to a widening range of areas involving large public investment. Australia still suffers from the absence of any comprehensive scheme that not only allows treble damages recovery for fraud on the public purse, but crucially supports such actions by providing financial encouragement for whistleblowing corporate insiders to expose evidence of fraud. Potential areas of application could include direct and indirect government expenditure on health care service provision, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, defence, carbon emissions compensation and tobacco-related illness. The creation in Australia of an equivalent to US anti-false claims legislation should be a policy priority, particularly in a period of financial stringency

ACT Human Rights Act: Legality of abortion remains with the Legislative Assembly

One current argument against the ACT Human Rights Bill, focuses on proposed provisions therein rendering it “unlawful” for public authorities to engage in conduct “incompatible” with “every human being’s inherent right to life” (clauses 2.1 and 6.1-2). These, it is alleged, may threaten the decriminalisation of abortion, recently achieved by legislation in this jurisdiction (Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Act 2002)

Does the world need a global project on artificial photosynthesis?

This paper introduces a theme issue of Interface Focus derived from papers presented at the Royal Society supported meeting ‘Do we need a global project on artificial photosynthesis?’ held at Chicheley Hall in July 2014. At that meeting, leaders of national solar fuels and chemicals projects and research presented ‘state of the art’ on artificial photosynthesis (AP) in the context of the policy challenges for globalizing a practical technology to address climate change and energy and food security concerns. The discussions included contributions from many experts with legal and policy skills and uniquely focused on producing principles for prioritizing and specializing work while enhancing the funding and attendant public policy profile. To this end, representatives of major public, philanthropic and private potential stakeholders in such a project (such as the Wellcome Trust, the Moore Foundation, Shell, the Leighty Foundation, the EPSRC and Deutsche Alternative Asset Management) were invited to provide feedback at various points in the meeting. For this Interface Focus issue, speakers at the Chicheley Hall meeting were required to present a snapshot of their cutting edge research related to AP and then draw upon the Chicheley Hall discussions to innovatively analyse how their research could best be advanced by a global AP project. Such multidisciplinary policy analysis was not a skill many of these researchers were experienced or trained in. Nonetheless their efforts here represent one of the first published collections to attempt such a significant task. This introduction contains a brief summary of those papers, focusing particularly on their policy aspects. It then summarizes the core discussions that took place at the Chicheley Hall meeting and sets out some of the central ethical principles that were considered during those discussionsARC DP14010056

Regional drivers of organic carbon age in lotic systems of the conterminous United States

Rivers play a critical role in global carbon (C) budgets despite their comparatively small surface area. A significant portion of the terrestrial C that they receive is transformed, re-mineralized, or stored during transit to the ocean. Radiocarbon (∆14C) data show that a fraction of riverine organic C (OC) has been pre-aged in the terrestrial environment. Lateral export of carbon from these aged pools may contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions through microbial and photochemical oxidation. However, little is known about the regional climatic, anthropogenic, and landscape factors that promote the mobilization of aged OC to rivers. This study examines associations between riverine OC and river basin characteristics. It leverages data from two sources: 1) a spatially extensive collection of literature-reported ∆14C measurements and 2) the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Stream-Catchment (StreamCat) database. The radiocarbon data include 95 dissolved (∆14CDOC) and 54 particulate (∆14CPOC) organic C measurements after averaging by location. We used the random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm to build independent models of ∆14CDOC (MSR = 7319.51, % var explained = 17.05) and ∆14CPOC (MSR = 11254.03, % var explained = 45.36). In both RF models, the StreamCat data were used aspredictor variables. Model validation was accomplished with a random, 75:25 split where 75% of the data were used for model building and the remaining 25% were used for testing and validation (∆14CDOC RMSE = 61.23, r = 0.71; ∆14CPOC RMSE = 39.82, r = 0.94). Key predictors of ∆14CDOC were generally climactic or land cover variables affecting terrestrial primary productivity. Key predictors of ∆14CPOC were primarily factors associated with sediment transport and erosion, but also included several indicators of anthropogenic influence. Human activities appear to be destabilizing both C pools, resulting in aged C flux to the more rapidly cycled C reservoir in rivers