The CPS, policy-making and assisted dying: towards a ‘freedom’ approach

No description supplie

Romola and Politics

It could properly be argued that Romola is George Eliot\u27s most overtly political novel. Unlike Felix Holt or Middlemarch it doesn\u27t directly refer to near contemporary political events, or to those of George Eliot\u27s childhood and youth. Unlike Adam Bede it does not deal with the ramifications of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which cast their long shadow over the Victorian years. Nevertheless, Romola demands that readers respond to a whole range of complex political issues: historical, sexual, feminist, religious and, of course, to a whole range of historical concerns which can be seen as fore-shadowings of the vital events of the modem Italian Risorgimento. Romola is of course primarily an historical novel set in the closing years of the fifteenth century. The opening paragraphs remind us that it opens \u27more than three centuries and half ago, in the mid spring time of 1492\u271 and that Columbus is negotiating his way to setting off on his great voyage towards what were to Europeans the still unknown Americas. Romola opens as dawn breaks over the European continent and we are bidden to see this dawn as akin to the opening of a new historical age which will prove to have an immediate, if indirect and still ill-defined, impact on the world of 1863. The Florentine world, at least, is on a cusp of uncertain developments For the Unseen Powers were mighty. Who knew - who was sure - that there was any name given to them behind which there was no angry force to be appeased, no intercessory pity to be won? (Proem, 7

X-ray observations of the galaxy cluster PKS 0745-191: To the virial radius, and beyond

We measure X-ray emission from the outskirts of the cluster of galaxies PKS 0745-191 with Suzaku, determining radial profiles of density, temperature, entropy, gas fraction, and mass. These measurements extend beyond the virial radius for the first time, providing new information about cluster assembly and the diffuse intracluster medium out to ~1.5 r_200, (r_200 ~ 1.7 Mpc ~ 15'). The temperature is found to decrease by roughly 70 per cent from 0.3-1 r_200. We also see a flattening of the entropy profile near the virial radius and consider the implications this has for the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium when deriving mass estimates. We place these observations in the context of simulations and analytical models to develop a better understanding of non-gravitational physics in the outskirts of the cluster.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, accepted to MNRAS; expanded discussion of analysis and uncertainties, results qualitatively unchange

Minimal Surfaces, Hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and Related Deformation Spaces.

Given a closed, oriented, smooth surface $Sigma$ of negative Euler characteristic, the relationships between three deformation spaces of geometric structures are compared: the space of minimal hyperbolic germs $mathcal{H},$ the space of representations $mathcal{R}(pi_1(Sigma),text{PSL}_2(mathbb{C})),$ and the space $mathcal{M}(X)$ of solutions to the self-duality equations on a rank-2 complex vector bundle over a Riemann surface $Xsimeq Sigma.$ Inside both $mathcal{H}$ and $mathcal{R}(pi_1(Sigma),text{PSL}_2(mathbb{C}))$ lies the space $mathcal{AF}$ of almost-Fuchsian manifolds comprised of quasi-Fuchsian 3-manifolds $Msimeq Sigma times mathbb{R}$ which contain an immersed closed minimal surface whose principal curvatures lie in the interval $(-1,1).$ The structure of these manifolds is explored through a study of the domain of discontinuity of the associated almost-Fuchsian holonomy group. It is proved that there are no doubly degenerate geometric limits of almost-Fuchsian manifolds. Next, the space $mathcal{H}$ is studied through an analysis of a smooth real valued function which records the topological entropy of the geodesic flow arising from a minimal hyperbolic germ. Estimates on this function are obtained which culminate in a new lower bound on the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set of a quasi-Fuchsian group. As a corollary we obtain a new proof of Bowen's theorem on quasi-circles: a quasi-Fuchsian group is Fuchsian if and only if the Hausdorff dimension of its limit set is equal to $1.$ Lastly, we recall a construction of Donaldson which shows how each minimal hyperbolic germ gives rise to a solution of the self-duality equations. In this context, we compare various deformations of a Fuchsian representation $pi_1(Sigma)rightarrow text{PSL}_2(mathbb{R}),$ finally obtaining an explicit formula for a deformation arising from minimal surfaces in terms of Fuchsian and bending deformations. Interestingly, the hyperk"{a}hler structure on the moduli space $mathcal{M}$ of solutions to the self-duality equations makes an appearance here