Addressing the accountability challenges of international policing in peace support operations

"There is increasing concern over the behaviour and accountability of international personnel, including CIVPOL contingents, deployed in peace-keeping and peace-building missions throughout the world. From the point of view of local populations the ‘internationals’ are typically perceived to be ‘above the law’. This is directly related to the fact that under status of forces or mission agreements (SOFAs or SOMAs) they are exempt from local host state jurisdiction. There are also significant practical problems in gathering and presenting evidence for disciplinary or criminal proceedings in their home states. This paper will analyse these problems in detail, based on a study of some recent European Union and international missions and suggest how a more co-operative home and host state approach to monitoring, investigation and adjudication of alleged misconduct might achieve more effective accountability and thus contribute to the overall success of CIVPOL missions." [auhtor's abstract

Reforming HMRC : Making it Fit for the Twenty-First Century - First Stage Report

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) performs a vital task in collecting taxes, enforcing lax laws and delivering services to taxpayers. Against a background of reductions in resources, it has experienced considerable difficulties in meeting the service expectation of taxpayers and challenging organised tax avoidance. This policy paper investigates the difficulties and makes recommendations to strengthen HMRC and its public accountability

Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

Telomere length is a risk factor in disease and the dynamics of telomere length are crucial to our understanding of cell replication and vitality. The proliferation of whole genome sequencing represents an unprecedented opportunity to glean new insights into telomere biology on a previously unimaginable scale. To this end, a number of approaches for estimating telomere length from whole-genome sequencing data have been proposed. Here we present Telomerecat, a novel approach to the estimation of telomere length. Previous methods have been dependent on the number of telomeres present in a cell being known, which may be problematic when analysing aneuploid cancer data and non-human samples. Telomerecat is designed to be agnostic to the number of telomeres present, making it suited for the purpose of estimating telomere length in cancer studies. Telomerecat also accounts for interstitial telomeric reads and presents a novel approach to dealing with sequencing errors. We show that Telomerecat performs well at telomere length estimation when compared to leading experimental and computational methods. Furthermore, we show that it detects expected patterns in longitudinal data, repeated measurements, and cross-species comparisons. We also apply the method to a cancer cell data, uncovering an interesting relationship with the underlying telomerase genotype

Publisher Correction: Telomerecat: A ploidy-agnostic method for estimating telomere length from whole genome sequencing data.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper