Be Free? The European Union's post-Arab Spring Women's Empowerment as Neoliberal Governmentality

This article analyses post-Arab Spring EU initiatives to promote women's empowerment in the Southern Mediterranean region. Inspired by Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, it investigates empowerment as a technology of biopolitics that is central to the European neoliberal model of governance. In contrast to dominant images such as normative power Europe that present the EU as a norm-guided actor promoting political liberation, the article argues that the EU deploys a concept of functional freedom meant to facilitate its vision of economic development. As a consequence, the alleged empowerment of women based on the self-optimisation of individuals and the statistical control of the female population is a form of bio-power. In this regard, empowerment works as a governmental technology of power instead of offering a measure to foster fundamental structural change in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) societies. The EU therefore fails in presenting and promoting an alternative normative political vision distinct from the incorporation of women into the hierarchy of the existing market society

Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden

Heat shock protein expression and apoptosis in myeloid leukaemias

The heat shock response was originally described as a phenomenon of inducible gene expression in Drosophila in response to hyperthermia, but has rapidly become recognised as a ubiquitous response by virtually all cell types to a wide variety of environmental stresses. Much of the early work on heat shock protein (hsp) structure and function concentrated on the analysis of heat shock gene expression in Drosophila, but it soon became clear from studies involving higher eukaryotes and prokaryotes that the heat shock response is highly conserved and a high degree of homology in the nucleic acid sequence of related heat shock genes is evident in all species from bacteria to man. Over the past decade, the study of heat shock protein expression has diversified into broad areas of biological research. The importance of heat shock proteins as molecular chaperones which mediate the folding and assembly of polypeptide chains has led to a reexamination and broadening of our understanding of the principles of protein folding and transport. In immunology, heat shock proteins have been shown to act as major antigens involved in the immune response to pathogens, and mechanisms involving heat shock proteins have been implicated in the pathogenesis of a variety of autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. At the conception of this research, evidence existed that expression of heat shock proteins was related to the differentiation of cells, including haemopoietic cells, and abnormal expression in some tumour cells had been reported, although not in leukaemic cells. It was against this background that the ideas for this research project were conceived. Based in the Department of Haematology at Warwick Hospital, I had access to samples from leukaemic patients, providing an opportunity to examine heat shock protein expression in malignant cells from these patients. As the project evolved, the significance of lisp expression was addressed by studying the relationship between heat shock protein expression and apoptosis. This mode of cell death has recently been shown to be crucial in carcinogenesis. A tumour is known to develop if the balance between cell division and cell death by apoptosis is disturbed, permitting a potentially malignant clone of cells to escape elimination. In addition, most, if not all, the cytotoxic drugs used to target malignant cells are known to exert their effects via the induction of apoptosis. The expression of genes which influence the susceptibility of cells to chemotherapy-induced apoptosis may therefore have a bearing upon the efficacy of chemotherapeutic regimens. Since heat shock proteins have been shown to protect cells against apoptosis induced by a variety of stresses, their expression in leukaemic cells is particularly worthy of investigation, both in terms of leukaemogenesis and the response of leukaemic cells to chemotherapy. This research project has therefore evolved to question the role of heat shock proteins in the biology and treatment of leukaemia and to establish their role in the control of apoptosis, with particular reference to the stress response of cells exposed to the chemotherapeutic agents used in the treatment and clinical management of these malignancies

Signal processing techniques for landmine detection using impulse ground penetrating radar

Abstract—Landmines are affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. A number of detection techniques, developed for use with impulse ground penetrating radar, are described, with emphasis on a Kalman filter based approach. Comparison of results from real data show that the Kalman filter algorithm provides the best detection performance, although its computational burden is also the highest. Index Terms—Buried object detection, Kalman filtering, radar signal processing

A laboratory model of toxin-induced hemolytic uremic syndrome

A laboratory model of toxin-induced hemolytic uremic syndrome.BackgroundVerocytotoxin-producing (Shiga-like toxin-producing) Escherichia coli infection is the principal cause of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). The pathogenesis is unclear, and there is a need for animal models. These are impeded by the different distribution of verocytotoxin receptors between species. We have circumvented this restriction using ricin, which gains entry into cells via various galactose receptors. Like verocytotoxin, ricin specifically cleaves a single adenine from ribosomal RNA.MethodsRats were given ricin at a dose of 6.7 μg/100g body wt, with or without lipopolysaccharide at 10 μg/100g body wt. Lipopolysaccharide alone or saline were used as controls. Changes in glomerular filtration rate, hematological parameters, histology, and plasma cytokine concentrations were measured.ResultsExtensive glomerular thrombosis, pyknotic nuclei, and an infiltration of ED1-positive cells into glomeruli were observed eight hours after an injection of ricin. Other vascular beds were unaffected. Histologic changes were preceded by oliguric renal failure, hemolysis, and thrombocytopenia. Ricin produced a rise in plasma concentrations of monocyte chemotactic protein-1, > tumor necrosis factor-α, > interleukin-1β, > interleukin-6. Interferon-γ showed a small increase at the end of the experiment.ConclusionsRicin induces glomerular thrombotic microangiopathy, closely resembling that which occurs in verocytotoxin-producing E. coli–induced HUS. As in HUS, high concentrations of proinflammatory cytokines are present, which are probably a result of cytokine superinduction by the toxin

Topographic fingerprints of bedrock landslides.

Bedrock landslides in mountainous regions may be triggered by either storms or earthquakes; the dominant mechanism in a region affects both landscape evolution and landslide hazard. We describe a simple observational test to distinguish between storm and earthquake triggers based on a probabilistic measure of hillslope morphology. In areas that are dominated by storm-triggered landslides, steep topographic slopes are concentrated on the lowermost parts of the hillslopes. Storm triggers act primarily on the hillslope toes, and landslides preferentially remove material from those locations, giving rise to inner gorges. Areas where most landslides are earthquake triggered have more uniform spatial distributions of steep topographic slopes, because coseismic shaking causes failures at both ridge crests and hillslope toes. Earthquake-triggered landslides lead to planar hillslopes and rare or absent inner gorges

From "woman-blind" to "man-kind": should men have more space in gender and development?

Summaries This article considers a series of conceptual, practical and strategic reasons why Gender and Development policy and planning might benefit from incorporating men to a greater degree than has been the case thus far. The article is divided into three main sections. The first sketches in some of the background to the emergence of interest in ‘men in GAD’. The second outlines some of the main problems associated with the exclusion of men from gender planning at institutional and grassroots levels. The third identifies how a more active and overt incorporation of men as gendered and engendering beings in gender policy and planning has the potential of expanding the scope of gender and development interventions, and of furthering struggles to achieve greater and more sustained equality between men and women