Kosovo and the gun : a baseline assessment of small arms and light weapons in Kosovo

Small arms have been at the heart of the upheavals in the Balkans over the last decade and a half. One of the most forceful images of the wars in Bosnia is that of snipers killing and maiming civilians in Sarajevo. In Albania, the most dramatic event of the 1990s was the looting of more than half a million small arms from army stockpiles in 1997, in a desperate response to the failed pyramid savings scheme in which many Albanians lost their meagre assets. In FYROM, images of the NATO-led operation ‘Essential Harvest’ often illustrate how war was narrowly averted in 2001. In this weapons collection effort, ethnic Albanian nationalists handed over approximately 3,800 small arms and light weapons to international forces. In Kosovo, finally, the armed KLA fighter remains a potent image of the desperation of the Kosovo Albanians after a decade of increasing oppression by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his followers. All these images of guns in the Balkans fit only too neatly with long-standing images in other parts of Europe of the region as ‘unruly’ and strongly attached to the gun.peer-reviewe

The illicit trade in small arms and light weapons

More than 600 million small arms and light weapons are estimated to be in circulation worldwide. They are directly responsible for the deaths of more than 300,000 people every year through armed conflict, homicides and suicides. The indirect effects of small arms use and availability are graver still, and include injury, disease, poverty, trauma and underdevelopment for millions

Beyond Weapons Collection: Promoting Safe and Responsible SA/LW Management

While the traditional focuses of many small-arms/light-weapons programs have been weapons collection and curbing proliferation, some humanitarian organizations—like Geneva Call and Danish Demining Group—advocate a model based on the promotion of safe and responsible weapons management. As illustrated by the experience of DDG with communities in Somaliland and by Geneva Call’s efforts with armed non-state actors, a participatory approach to weapons regulation and management offers promising alternatives to traditional weapons-control initiatives

TREM1/3 deficiency impairs tissue repair after acute kidney injury and mitochondrial metabolic flexibility in tubular epithelial cells

Long-term sequelae of acute kidney injury (AKI) are associated with incomplete recovery of renal function and the development of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which can be mediated by aberrant innate immune activation, mitochondrial pathology, and accumulation of senescent tubular epithelial cells (TECs). Herein, we show that the innate immune receptor Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells-1 (TREM-1) links mitochondrial metabolism to tubular epithelial senescence. TREM-1 is expressed by inflammatory and epithelial cells, both players in renal repair after ischemia/reperfusion (IR)-induced AKI. Hence, we subjected WT and TREM1/3 KO mice to different models of renal IR. TREM1/3 KO mice displayed no major differences during the acute phase of injury, but increased mortality was observed in the recovery phase. This detrimental effect was associated with maladaptive repair, characterized by persistent tubular damage, inflammation, fibrosis, and TEC senescence. In vitro, we observed an altered mitochondrial homeostasis and cellular metabolism in TREM1/3 KO primary TECs. This was associated with G2/M arrest and increased ROS accumulation. Further exposure of cells to ROS-generating triggers drove the cells into a stress-induced senescent state, resulting in decreased wound healing capacity. Treatment with a mitochondria anti-oxidant partly prevented the senescent phenotype, suggesting a role for mitochondria herein. In summary, we have unraveled a novel (metabolic) mechanism by which TREM1/3 deficiency drives senescence in TECs. This involves redox imbalance, mitochondrial dysfunction and a decline in cellular metabolic activities. These finding suggest a novel role for TREM-1 in maintaining tubular homeostasis through regulation of mitochondrial metabolic flexibility

Interleukin-10 negatively regulates local cytokine and chemokine production but does not influence antibacterial host defense during murine pneumococcal meningitis.

To determine the role of endogenous interleukin-10 (IL-10) in local host defense during pneumococcal meningitis, the inflammatory responses of IL-10-gene-deficient and wild-type mice after the induction of meningitis were compared. The absence of IL-10 was associated with higher cytokine and chemokine concentrations and a more pronounced infiltrate, but antibacterial defense or survival was not influenced

Large-scale structural analysis of the core promoter in mammalian and plant genomes

DNA encodes at least two independent levels of functional information. The first level is for encoding proteins and sequence targets for DNA-binding factors, while the second one is contained in the physical and structural properties of the DNA molecule itself. Although the physical and structural properties are ultimately determined by the nucleotide sequence itself, the cell exploits these properties in a way in which the sequence itself plays no role other than to support or facilitate certain spatial structures. In this work, we focus on these structural properties, comparing them between different organisms and assessing their ability to describe the core promoter. We prove the existence of distinct types of core promoters, based on a clustering of their structural profiles. These results indicate that the structural profiles are much conserved within plants (Arabidopsis and rice) and animals (human and mouse), but differ considerably between plants and animals. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these structural profiles can be an alternative way of describing the core promoter, in addition to more classical motif or IUPAC-based approaches. Using the structural profiles as discriminatory elements to separate promoter regions from non-promoter regions, reliable models can be built to identify core-promoter regions using a strictly computational approach

Cecal ligation and puncture induced sepsis impairs host defense against <i>Enterococcus faecium</i> peritonitis

Multiresistant and vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE) can cause serious infections in hospitalized patients with various co-morbid diseases. We investigated the course of VRE peritonitis after cecal ligation and puncture (CLP)-induced sepsis and compared this to sham operated mice. Mice were subjected to CLP or sham surgery. Forty-eight hours thereafter four groups were created by subjecting mice to peritoneal injection of either VRE or saline. Mice infected with VRE after CLP were severely impaired in eliminating VRE from the peritoneal cavity and distant body sites. These mice failed to mount an early inflammatory response at the primary site of VRE infection. VRE superinfection did not influence CLP-induced organ damage or polymicrobial bacterial loads. Sublethal polymicrobial sepsis greatly facilitates infection and dissemination of VRE. VRE does not influence the course of CLP-induced sepsi

Some properties of NaBaPO[4]:Eu luminophore surface

There is an increased interest to the compounds of the ABPO[4] type, activated by europium, where A and B are mono- and divalent cations, because of their luminescent properties. In this paper NaBaPO[4]:Eu{2+}phosphors with different europium content were synthesized by SHS method. It is shown that phosphor surface becomes less alkaline (pHiis changes in the interval 10,7-9,5) with an increase in the concentration of an introduced activator (5-12%). Two bands with maxima wavelength of approximately 425 and 490 nm are observed in the luminescent spectra (the positions of maxima differ somewhat in different spectra). The relationship between acid-base and luminescent properties of the investigated phosphor samples is traced