Mobilizing International Law in the Palestinian Struggle for Justice

Those involved in mobilizing international law to achieve justice for the Palestinians have invoked numerous legal and governance institutions, at both international and national levels. For various reasons, international law has understandably been regarded with a high level of skepticism by many Palestinians, particularly from legitimacy and effectiveness standpoints. However, law has also ignited the Palestinian civic imagination and has led to bold and creative initiatives, including efforts to hold both states and (corporate) non-state actors accountable through legal and other means, and even to construct alternative models for nation building. This introduction to a Special Issue of the Global Jurist on ‘International Law and the State of Israel’ emerges from an international conference that took place at Cork City Hall and at the campus of University College Cork in Ireland in March 2017. Our message for producing this Special Issue and indeed for our colleagues who organized the conference in the first place was simple: while we cannot afford to neglect law in envisioning alternative futures in Israel/Palestine (including statehood), justice always remains a guide

Mutations in the SLC2A9 Gene Cause Hyperuricosuria and Hyperuricemia in the Dog

Allantoin is the end product of purine catabolism in all mammals except humans, great apes, and one breed of dog, the Dalmatian. Humans and Dalmatian dogs produce uric acid during purine degradation, which leads to elevated levels of uric acid in blood and urine and can result in significant diseases in both species. The defect in Dalmatians results from inefficient transport of uric acid in both the liver and renal proximal tubules. Hyperuricosuria and hyperuricemia (huu) is a simple autosomal recessive trait for which all Dalmatian dogs are homozygous. Therefore, in order to map the locus, an interbreed backcross was used. Linkage mapping localized the huu trait to CFA03, which excluded the obvious urate transporter 1 gene, SLC22A12. Positional cloning placed the locus in a minimal interval of 2.5 Mb with a LOD score of 17.45. A critical interval of 333 kb containing only four genes was homozygous in all Dalmatians. Sequence and expression analyses of the SLC2A9 gene indicated three possible mutations, a missense mutation (G616T;C188F) and two promoter mutations that together appear to reduce the expression levels of one of the isoforms. The missense mutation is associated with hyperuricosuria in the Dalmatian, while the promoter SNPs occur in other unaffected breeds of dog. Verification of the causative nature of these changes was obtained when hyperuricosuric dogs from several other breeds were found to possess the same combination of mutations as found in the Dalmatian. The Dalmatian dog model of hyperuricosuria and hyperuricemia underscores the importance of SLC2A9 for uric acid transport in mammals