Not Fade Away: The International Criminal Court and the State of Sovereignty

Sovereignty concerns were central to the negotiations over the ICC Statute. To be sure, the future court will relate to individuals and States, as well as inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, in a way that differs from the international institutions created at mid-century. But by designing an institution that must work through and with sovereign States in crucial aspects of its functioning, the ICC Statute presupposes the continued existence of a system based on sovereign States. The Statute\u27s details reinforce the notion that [d]irectly or indirectly, the entire edifice of international human-rights law is built on state sovereignty. Seen in this light, there seems little basis for predicting that the ICC will cause the sovereign State to fade away. Moreover, the ICC may actually strengthen individual States by acting both as a judicial model for effective domestic institutions, where they do not now exist, and as a prod for states to deal domestically with crimes within the court\u27s subject matter jurisdiction. To that extent, it is consistent with a growing realization that weak states can be as much of a threat to human rights as strong states. This does not mean, however, that the relationship between the future ICC and sovereign States is one that will be accepted by the U.S. political system through the process of advice and consent to ratification. That judgment remains to be made

Causal distributed breakpoints

The authors define a causal distributed breakpoint, which is initiated by a sequential breakpoint in one process of a distributed computation and restores each process in the computation to its earliest state that reflects all events that happened before the breakpoint. An algorithm for finding the causal distributed breakpoint, given a sequential breakpoint in one of the processes, is presented. Approximately consistent checkpoint sets are used for efficiently restoring each process to its state in a causal distributed breakpoint. Causal distributed breakpoints assume deterministic processes that communicate solely by messages. The dependencies that arise from communication between processes are logged. Dependency logging and approximately consistent checkpoint sets are implemented on a network of SUN workstations running the V-System. Overhead on the message-passing primitives varies between 1% and 14% for dependency logging. Execution time overhead for a 200×200 Gaussian elimination is less than 4% and generates a dependency log of 288 kbyte

Preparation of radioactive rare earth targets for neutron capture study

The understanding of thc details of nucleosynthesis in stars remains a great challenge. Though the basic mechanisms governing the processes have been known since the pioneering work of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle (l), we are now evolving into a condition where we can ask more specific questions. Of particular interest are the dynamics of the s ('slow') process. In this process the general condition is one in which sequential neutron captures occur at time scales long compared with the beta decay half lives of the capturing nuclides. The nucleosynthesis period for C or Ne burning stellar shells is believed to be in the year to few year time frame (2). This means that radionuclides with similar half lives to this burning period serve as 'branch point' nuclides. That is, there will be a competition between a capture to the next heavier isotope and a beta decay to the element of nexl higher atomic number. By understanding the abundances of these competing reactions we can learn about the dynamics of the nucleosynthesis process in the stellar medium. Crucial to this understanding is that we have a knowledge of the underlying neutron reaction cross sections on these unstable nuclides in the relevant stellar energy regions (neutrons of 0.1-100 KeV). Tm (1.9 years) and ls'Sm (90 ycws) have decay properties that permit their handling in an open fume hood. These Iwo were therefore selected to be the first radionuclides for neutron capture study in what will be an ongoing effort

Utilizing a Global Network of Telescopes to Update the Ephemeris for the Highly Eccentric Planet HD 80606 b and to Ensure the Efficient Scheduling of JWST

The transiting planet HD 80606 b undergoes a 1000 fold increase in insolation during its 111 days orbit due to it being highly eccentric (e = 0.93). The planet's effective temperature increases from 400 to over 1400 K in a few hours as it makes a rapid passage to within 0.03 au of its host star during periapsis. Spectroscopic observations during the eclipse (which is conveniently oriented a few hours before periapsis) of HD 80606 b with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are poised to exploit this highly variable environment to study a wide variety of atmospheric properties, including composition, chemical and dynamical timescales, and large scale atmospheric motions. Critical to planning and interpreting these observations is an accurate knowledge of the planet's orbit. We report on observations of two full-transit events: 2020 February 7 as observed by the TESS spacecraft and 2021 December 7-8 as observed with a worldwide network of small telescopes. We also report new radial velocity observations which, when analyzed with a coupled model to the transits, greatly improves the planet's orbital ephemeris. Our new orbit solution reduces the uncertainty in the transit and eclipse timing of the JWST era from tens of minutes to a few minutes. When combined with the planned JWST observations, this new precision may be adequate to look for non-Keplerian effects in the orbit of HD 80606 b

Energy dependence of fission product yields from 235

Under a joint collaboration between TUNL-LANL-LLNL, a set of absolute fission product yield measurements has been performed. The energy dependence of a number of cumulative fission product yields (FPY) have been measured using quasi-monoenergetic neutron beams for three actinide targets, 235U, 238U and 239Pu, between 0.5 and 14.8 MeV. The FPYs were measured by a combination of fission counting using specially designed dual-fission chambers and γ-ray counting. Each dual-fission chamber is a back-to-back ionization chamber encasing an activation target in the center with thin deposits of the same target isotope in each chamber. This method allows for the direct measurement of the total number of fissions in the activation target with no reference to the fission cross-section, thus reducing uncertainties. γ-ray counting of the activation target was performed on well-shielded HPGe detectors over a period of two months post irradiation to properly identify fission products. Reported are absolute cumulative fission product yields for incident neutron energies of 0.5, 1.37, 2.4, 3.6, 4.6, 5.5, 7.5, 8.9 and 14.8 MeV. Preliminary results from thermal irradiations at the MIT research reactor will also be presented and compared to present data and evaluations. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Los Alamos National Security, LLC under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 and by Duke University and Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory through NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliance grant No. DE-FG52-09NA29465, DE-FG52-09NA29448 and Office of Nuclear Physics Grant No. DE-FG02-97ER41033

Detector for advanced neutron capture experiments at LANSCE

The Detector for Advanced Neutron Capture Experiments (DANCE) is a 159-element 4x barium fluoride array designed to study neutron capture on small quantities, 1 mg or less, of radioactive nuclides. It is being built on a 20 m neutron flight path which views the 'upper tier' water moderator at the Manuel J. Lujan Jr. Neutron Scattering Center at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The detector design is based on Monte Carlo calculations which have suggested ways to minimize backgrounds due to neutron scattering events. A data acquisition system based on fast transient digitizers is bcing implemente

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead