Collaborative Pacific Halibut, Hippoglossus stenolepis, Bycatch Control by Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT—Bycatch mortality of Pacific halibut, Hippoglossus stenolepis, in nontarget fisheries is composed primarily of immature fish, and substantial reductions in yield to directed halibut fisheries result from this bycatch. Distant-water bottomtrawl fleets operating off the North American coast, beginning in the mid 1960’s, experienced bycatch mortality of over 12,000 t annually. Substantial progress on reducing this bycatch was not achieved until the of extension fisheries jurisdictions by the United States and Canada in 1977. Bycatch began to increase again during the expansion of domestic catching capacity for groundfish, and by the early 1990’s it had returned to levels seen during the period of foreign fishing. Collaborative action by Canada and the United States through the International Pacific Halibut Commission has resulted in substantial reductions in bycatch mortality in some areas. Methods of control have operated at global, fleet, and individual vessel levels. We evaluate the hierarchy of effectiveness for these control measures and identify regulatory needs for optimum effects. New monitoring technologies offer the promise of more cost-effective approaches to bycatch reduction

Restructuring the social agenda: economic, social and fiscal preconditions

Summary Introduction The crisis which began in 2007 and deepened dramatically in 2008 has exposed deep rifts in the architecture of the European monetary union. Harsh austerity policies which were first imposed on countries in Eastern Europe, and subsequently on the countries in the euro area periphery, are now beginning to be implemented in countries of the European core. The crisis is highlighting the deeply undemocratic construction of the EU, as the Commission assumes ever greater powers to control national budgets, without any serious oversight by the European Parliament. At the same time, the position of the core countries of the North, and in particular Germany, has been strengthened in relation to the countries of the periphery. But Germany’s economy, which has depended on stagnant wages and a rising export surplus, cannot be a model for the whole EU. In the face of global climate change, the EU’s approach to the Rio+20 conference in July 2012 contributed to its failure to reach any serious agreement

Sacred welcomes: How religious reasons, structures, and interactions shape refugee advocacy and settlement

This special section explores the role of religious ideas and religious associations in shaping the response of states and non-state actors to asylum-seekers and refugees. It brings together insights from anthropology, law, history, and political theory to enrich our understanding of how religious values and resources are mobilized to respond to refugees and to circumvent usual narratives of secularization. Examining these questions within multicultural African, European, and North American contexts, the special section argues that religion provides moral reasons and structural support to welcome and resettle refugees, and constitutes a framework of analysis to better understand the social, legal, and political dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in contexts of migration

No sign (yet) of intergalactic globular clusters in the Local Group

We present Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) imaging of 12 candidate intergalactic globular clusters (IGCs) in the Local Group, identified in a recent survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) footprint by di Tullio Zinn & Zinn. Our image quality is sufficiently high, at ∼0.4–0.7 arcsec, that we are able to unambiguously classify all 12 targets as distant galaxies. To reinforce this conclusion we use GMOS images of globular clusters in the M31 halo, taken under very similar conditions, to show that any genuine clusters in the putative IGC sample would be straightforward to distinguish. Based on the stated sensitivity of the di Tullio Zinn & Zinn search algorithm, we conclude that there cannot be a significant number of IGCs with MV ≤ −6 lying unseen in the SDSS area if their properties mirror those of globular clusters in the outskirts of M31 – even a population of 4 would have only a ≈1 per cent chance of non-detection

Book Review: Management: Current Practices And New Directions

Book Review: Management: Current Practices And New Direction