Crime and its Punishment in Victorian Hong Kong

In 1842, the Treaty of Nanking gave the island of Hong Kong to the British Crown. The new settlement immediately attracted a population of poor Chinese who flocked there in the hope of making a better living than on the mainland. Not surprisingly, crime was rampant on the fringe on the new colonial city, and offenders had to be tracked down and punished. This paper investigates the nature of the crimes committed in Hong Kong during the Victorian period, the evolving panoply of punishments designed to rein them in, and the way in which both the common law and the colonial governments adapted to fight types of criminal activity they had never met before.En 1842, le Traité de Nankin cédait l’île de Hong Kong à la couronne britannique. La nouvelle colonie attira aussitôt une population de Chinois pauvres qui s’y installèrent en grand nombre dans l’espoir d’une vie meilleure qu’en Chine. Comme il fallait s’y attendre, le crime se développa rapidement sur les marges de la cité coloniale, et il fallut repérer et punir les criminels. La présente étude s’attache à recenser et à comprendre la nature des crimes commis à Hong Kong pendant la période victorienne, la panoplie des châtiments destinés à les punir, et la manière dont la common law et les gouvernments coloniaux s’adaptèrent dans leur combat contre des formes de criminalité qu’ils n’avaient auparavant jamais rencontrées

Specificity of the metabolic signatures of fish from cyanobacteria rich lakes

International audienceThe liver metabolomes of fish from cyanobacterial-dominated ponds were investigated. Cyanobacterial metabolites were only be detected in cyanobacterial dominated ponds. The metabolomes of the 2 fish species exhibit similar correlation with cyanobacteria occurrence. Correlations between the levels of some metabolites and phycocyanin or pH were observed. a b s t r a c t With the increasing impact of the global warming, occurrences of cyanobacterial blooms in aquatic ecosystems are becoming a main worldwide ecological concern. Due to their capacity to produce potential toxic metabolites, interactions between the cyanobacteria, their cyanotoxins and the surrounding freshwater organisms have been investigated during the last past years. Non-targeted metabolomic analyses have the powerful capacity to study simultaneously a high number of metabolites and thus to investigate in depth the molecular signatures between various organisms encountering different environmental scenario, and potentially facing cyanobacterial blooms. In this way, the liver metabolomes of two fish species (Perca fluviatilis and Lepomis gibbosus) colonizing various peri-urban lakes of theÎle-de-France region displaying high biomass of cyanobacteria, or not, were investigated. The fish metabolome hydrophilic fraction was analyzed by 1 H NMR analysis coupled with Batman peak treatment for the quantification and the annotation attempt of the metabolites. The results suggest that similar metabolome profiles occur in both fish species, for individuals collected from cyanobacterial blooming lakes compared to organism from non-cyanobacterial dominant environments. Overall, such environmental metabolomic pilot study provides new research perspectives in ecology and ecotoxicology fields, and may notably provide new information concerning the cyanobacteria/fish eco-toxicological interactions