Viewpoint Discrimination, Hate Speech Laws, and the Double-Sided Nature of Freedom of Speech

Part of Symposium: Hate Speech and Political Legitimac

Strategies to achieve adequate vitamin A intake for young children: options for Cameroon.

Meeting children's vitamin A (VA) needs remains a policy priority. Doing so efficiently is a fiscal imperative and protecting at-risk children during policy transitions is a moral imperative. Using the Micronutrient Intervention Modeling tool and data for Cameroon, we predict the impacts and costs of alternative VA intervention programs, identify the least-cost strategy for meeting targets nationally, and compare it to a business-as-usual (BAU) strategy over 10 years. BAU programs effectively cover ∼12.8 million (m) child-years (CY) and cost ∼$30.1 m; ∼US$2.34 per CY effectively covered. Improving the VA-fortified oil program, implementing a VA-fortified bouillon cube program, and periodic VA supplements (VAS) in the North macroregion for 3 years effectively cover ∼13.1 m CY at a cost of ∼US$9.5 m, or ∼US$0.71 per CY effectively covered. The tool then identifies a sequence of subnational policy choices leading from the BAU toward the more efficient strategy, while addressing VA-attributable mortality concerns. By year 4, fortification programs are predicted to eliminate inadequate VA intake in the South and Cities macroregions, but not the North, where VAS should continue until additional delivery platforms are implemented. This modeling approach offers a concrete example of the strategic use of data to follow the Global Alliance for VA framework and do so efficiently

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC1 2014-2016)

This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal

Evolution of plant–pollinator mutualisms in response to climate change

Climate change has the potential to desynchronize the phenologies of interdependent species, with potentially catastrophic effects on mutualist populations. Phenologies can evolve, but the role of evolution in the response of mutualisms to climate change is poorly understood. We developed a model that explicitly considers both the evolution and the population dynamics of a plant–pollinator mutualism under climate change. How the populations evolve, and thus whether the populations and the mutualism persist, depends not only on the rate of climate change but also on the densities and phenologies of other species in the community. Abundant alternative mutualist partners with broad temporal distributions can make a mutualism more robust to climate change, while abundant alternative partners with narrow temporal distributions can make a mutualism less robust. How community composition and the rate of climate change affect the persistence of mutualisms is mediated by two-species Allee thresholds. Understanding these thresholds will help researchers to identify those mutualisms at highest risk owing to climate change

Homologous recombination DNA repair defects in PALB2- associated breast cancers

Abstract: Mono-allelic germline pathogenic variants in the Partner And Localizer of BRCA2 (PALB2) gene predispose to a high-risk of breast cancer development, consistent with the role of PALB2 in homologous recombination (HR) DNA repair. Here, we sought to define the repertoire of somatic genetic alterations in PALB2-associated breast cancers (BCs), and whether PALB2-associated BCs display bi-allelic inactivation of PALB2 and/or genomic features of HR-deficiency (HRD). Twenty-four breast cancer patients with pathogenic PALB2 germline mutations were analyzed by whole-exome sequencing (WES, n = 16) or targeted capture massively parallel sequencing (410 cancer genes, n = 8). Somatic genetic alterations, loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of the PALB2 wild-type allele, large-scale state transitions (LSTs) and mutational signatures were defined. PALB2-associated BCs were found to be heterogeneous at the genetic level, with PIK3CA (29%), PALB2 (21%), TP53 (21%), and NOTCH3 (17%) being the genes most frequently affected by somatic mutations. Bi-allelic PALB2 inactivation was found in 16 of the 24 cases (67%), either through LOH (n = 11) or second somatic mutations (n = 5) of the wild-type allele. High LST scores were found in all 12 PALB2-associated BCs with bi-allelic PALB2 inactivation sequenced by WES, of which eight displayed the HRD-related mutational signature 3. In addition, bi-allelic inactivation of PALB2 was significantly associated with high LST scores. Our findings suggest that the identification of bi-allelic PALB2 inactivation in PALB2-associated BCs is required for the personalization of HR-directed therapies, such as platinum salts and/or PARP inhibitors, as the vast majority of PALB2-associated BCs without PALB2 bi-allelic inactivation lack genomic features of HRD

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