Facilitering van de gewelddadige jihad

Summary in English Muslims who do not actively contribute to the violent jihad but who tacitly or openly sympathize with it are vital to the persistence of this kind of terrorism according to some terrorist fighters and scholars. We used interviews and public information in order to examine the accuracy of this claim. The analysis points out that sympathizers are indeed crucial to some preparative terrorist activities, yet not to other. Muslim extremists depend less on sympathizers for making foreign journeys, generating revenues, and communication then they do for recruiting and sponsoring. This conclusion implies that receding of sympathy for the violent jihad will not automatically reduce it

Gender en asiel

Terwijl de aandacht voor de achterstelling van vrouwen in de asielprocedure de afgelopen decennia groeit, blijkt dat juist mannen hierin een kleinere slaagkans hebben. Dit blijkt te maken te hebben met het traditionele gendermigratiepatroon en de hieraan gekoppelde typering van mannen als calculerende gelukszoekers en van vrouwen als slachtoffers van patriarchale overheersing

Peptides, DNA and MIPs in gas sensing. From the realization of the sensors to sample analysis

Detection and monitoring of volatiles is a challenging and fascinating issue in environmental analysis, agriculture and food quality, process control in industry, as well as in ‘point of care’ diagnostics. Gas chromatographic approaches remain the reference method for the analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs); however, gas sensors (GSs), with their advantages of low cost and no or very little sample preparation, have become a reality. Gas sensors can be used singularly or in array format (e.g., e-noses); coupling data output with multivariate statical treatment allows un-target analysis of samples headspace. Within this frame, the use of new binding elements as recognition/interaction elements in gas sensing is a challenging hot-topic that allowed unexpected advancement. In this review, the latest development of gas sensors and gas sensor arrays, realized using peptides, molecularly imprinted polymers and DNA is reported. This work is focused on the description of the strategies used for the GSs development, the sensing elements function, the sensors array set-up, and the application in real cases

Identification of Cannabis sativa L. (hemp) Retailers by Means of Multivariate Analysis of Cannabinoids

In this work, the concentration of nine cannabinoids, six neutral cannabinoids (THC, CBD, CBC, CBG, CBN and CBDV) and three acidic cannabinoids (THCA CBGA and CBDA), was used to identify the Italian retailers of Cannabis sativa L. (hemp), reinforcing the idea that the practice of categorizing hemp samples only using THC and CBD is inadequate. A high-performance liquid chromatography/high-resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) method was developed for screening and simultaneously analyzing the nine cannabinoids in 161 hemp samples sold by four retailers located in different Italian cities. The hemp samples dataset was analyzed by univariate and multivariate analysis with the aim to identify the hemp retailers without any other information on the hemp samples like Cannabis strains, seeds, soil and cultivation characteristics, geographical origin, product storage, etc. The univariate analysis highlighted that the hemp samples could not be differentiated by using any of the nine cannabinoids analyzed. To evaluate the real efficiency of the discrimination among the four hemp retailers a partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) was applied. The PLS-DA results showed a very good discrimination between the four hemp retailers with an explained variance of 100% and low classification errors in both calibration (5%) and cross validation (6%). A total of 92% of the hemp samples were correctly classified by the cannabinoid variables in both fitting and cross validation. This work contributed to show that an analytical method coupled with multivariate analysis can be used as a powerful tool for forensic purposes