Hydroelectric Power Production in Costa Rica and the Threat of Environmental Disaster Through CAFTA

CAFTA’s ratifcation threatens Costa Rica’s environmental integrity by permitting foreign investors virtual free reign to destroy its precious waterways through environmentally unsound methods of hydroelectric power production. While CAFTA contains provisions that appear to protect the environments of the Central American signatory states, it also contains provisions similar to NAFTA’s Chapter 11, which foreign investors have used to weaken environmental laws by suing those states that have dared to enforce them. This Note explores existing environmental laws in Costa Rica governing hydroelectric power production, including its privatization. It also discusses and compares NAFTA’s Chapter 11 to CAFTA’s Chapter 10 in order to illustrate the threat to Costa Rica’s waterways through private hydroelectric power production. This Note then argues that, in order to preserve its waterways, Costa Rica must not ratify CAFTA. Alternately, it argues that if Costa Rica does ratify CAFTA, the state should consider adopting both preventative and remedial measures to weaken its blow

The Trafficking of Persons into the European Union for Sexual Exploitation: Why It Persists and Suggestions to Compel Implementation and Enforcement of Legal Remedies in Non-Complying Member States

Trafficking in persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation is a global scourge that affects all corners of the planet, including the European Union (E.U.). Since 1997, the E.U. has made great strides toward conquering trafficking within its borders, and yet this modern day slave trade continues to flourish. This Note follows the progression of Community legislation targeting trafficking from 1997 through today, and analyzes Member States’ compliance with those laws as well as patterns of concern. Because current legislation focuses primarily on penalization and victim’s protections, this note argues that the E.U. must pass legislation requiring Member States to take preventative action as well. It also argues that the E.U. must use its judicial powers to more effectively fight trafficking for sexual exploitation by punishing those Member States who still fail to comply with existing Community legislation

Acari of Canada

Summaries of taxonomic knowledge are provided for all acarine groups in Canada, accompanied by references to relevant publications, changes in classification at the family level since 1979, and notes on biology relevant to estimating their diversity. Nearly 3000 described species from 269 families are recorded in the country, representing a 56% increase from the 1917 species reported by Lindquist et al. (1979). An additional 42 families are known from Canada only from material identified to family- or genus-level. Of the total 311 families known in Canada, 69 are newly recorded since 1979, excluding apparent new records due solely to classification changes. This substantial progress is most evident in Oribatida and Hydrachnidia, for which many regional checklists and family-level revisions have been published. Except for recent taxonomic leaps in a few other groups, particularly of symbiotic mites (Astigmata: feather mites; Mesostigmata: Rhinonyssidae), knowledge remains limited for most other taxa, for which most species records are unpublished and may require verification. Taxonomic revisions are greatly needed for a large majority of families in Canada. Based in part on species recorded in adjacent areas of the USA and on hosts known to be present here, we conservatively estimate that nearly 10,000 species of mites occur in Canada, but the actual number could be 15,000 or more. This means that at least 70% of Canada’s mite fauna is yet unrecorded. Much work also remains to match existing molecular data with species names, as less than 10% of the ~7500 Barcode Index Numbers for Canadian mites in the Barcode of Life Database are associated with named species. Understudied hosts and terrestrial and aquatic habitats require investigation across Canada to uncover new species and to clarify geographic and ecological distributions of known species

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead