The ASEAN community-based tourism standards: looking beyond certification

This paper reports findings from an opportunity study on the appropriateness of implementing community-based tourism standards (CBTS) certification through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) criteria, as a way to improve sustainable tourism provision in the region. Framed by critical reflections on community-based tourism (CBT) literature and existing sustainable tourism standards (STS) practices, qualitative research consisting of interviews with six key industry experts provided core insights into a number of CBTS’ implementation challenges. Findings indicate the main hindering factors for the implementation of CBTS to be the lack of adequate governance, limited funding and insufficient community capacity. The study concluded that although at the moment the full implementation of CBTS as a certification programme would be premature, ASEAN-CBTS’ criteria are a useful benchmarking and strategic planning tool for local communities, which would eventually lead to improved CBT benefits, standards and performance in the region. At the same time, this paper argues that aspects including CBT competitiveness and service delivery need to be tackled first to create fruitful grounding for CBT certification

The Unintended Consequences of a European Neighbourhood Policy without Russia

After Russia’s retreat from the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU’s policy towards its eastern neighbours was split up. The internal unintended consequence of the EU’s choice to leave its policy unaltered was a tension between the objective of privileged relations with ENP countries and a promise to recognise the interests of Russia as an equal partner. Externally, the unintended outcome was that this fostered two opposing strategic environments: a cooperative one for the EaP and a competitive one with Russia. In terms of the management of unintended consequences, the EU has actively sought to reinforce its normative hegemony towards EaP countries, while at the same time mitigating certain negative unintended effects

The challenges of renewed independence: The Baltic states since 1991

This article offers a comparative assessment of how successfully Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have coped with the challenges of renewed independence since 1991, focusing on various aspects of political, economic, and social development. In the post-communist context the Baltic states have clearly outpaced other former Soviet republics and also performed reasonably well in comparison to the countries of Eastern Europe. The convergence of the Baltic experience, which began already in the early 20th century, has continued in the recent past as well, as the three states have adopted a number of similar approaches in domestic politics, the search for security, and economic policy. They also face a number of similar unsolved problems, including considerable political alienation, tensions in relations with Russia, socioeconomic disparity, and demographic challenges. The most important difference in the issues confronting the Baltic states today continues to be the large non-Baltic, mainly Russian presence in Estonia and Latvia, a result of Soviet-era policies. How to effect the meaningful integration of a multiethnic society remains a continuing challenge in these two countries. In contrast, population shifts under Soviet rule never became massive in Lithuania, and ethnic relations are a minor issue there today

Disruption of the acetate kinase (ack) gene of Clostridium acetobutylicum results in delayed acetate production

In microorganisms, the enzyme acetate kinase (AK) catalyses the formation of ATP from ADP by de-phosphorylation of acetyl phosphate into acetic acid. A mutant strain of Clostridium acetobutylicum lacking acetate kinase activity is expected to have reduced acetate and acetone production compared to the wild type. In this work, a C. acetobutylicum mutant strain with a selectively disrupted ack gene, encoding AK, was constructed and genetically and physiologically characterized. The ack− strain showed a reduction in acetate kinase activity of more than 97% compared to the wild type. The fermentation profiles of the ack− and wild-type strain were compared using two different fermentation media, CGM and CM1. The latter contains acetate and has a higher iron and magnesium content than CGM. In general, fermentations by the mutant strain showed a clear shift in the timing of peak acetate production relative to butyrate and had increased acid uptake after the onset of solvent formation. Specifically, in acetate containing CM1 medium, acetate production was reduced by more than 80% compared to the wild type under the same conditions, but both strains produced similar final amounts of solvents. Fermentations in CGM showed similar peak acetate and butyrate levels, but increased acetoin (60%), ethanol (63%) and butanol (16%) production and reduced lactate (−50%) formation by the mutant compared to the wild type. These findings are in agreement with the proposed regulatory function of butyryl phosphate as opposed to acetyl phosphate in the metabolic switch of solventogenic clostridia

Finding Diagnostically Useful Patterns in Quantitative Phenotypic Data.

Trio-based whole-exome sequence (WES) data have established confident genetic diagnoses in ∼40% of previously undiagnosed individuals recruited to the Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) study. Here we aim to use the breadth of phenotypic information recorded in DDD to augment diagnosis and disease variant discovery in probands. Median Euclidean distances (mEuD) were employed as a simple measure of similarity of quantitative phenotypic data within sets of ≥10 individuals with plausibly causative de novo mutations (DNM) in 28 different developmental disorder genes. 13/28 (46.4%) showed significant similarity for growth or developmental milestone metrics, 10/28 (35.7%) showed similarity in HPO term usage, and 12/28 (43%) showed no phenotypic similarity. Pairwise comparisons of individuals with high-impact inherited variants to the 32 individuals with causative DNM in ANKRD11 using only growth z-scores highlighted 5 likely causative inherited variants and two unrecognized DNM resulting in an 18% diagnostic uplift for this gene. Using an independent approach, naive Bayes classification of growth and developmental data produced reasonably discriminative models for the 24 DNM genes with sufficiently complete data. An unsupervised naive Bayes classification of 6,993 probands with WES data and sufficient phenotypic information defined 23 in silico syndromes (ISSs) and was used to test a "phenotype first" approach to the discovery of causative genotypes using WES variants strictly filtered on allele frequency, mutation consequence, and evidence of constraint in humans. This highlighted heterozygous de novo nonsynonymous variants in SPTBN2 as causative in three DDD probands