Uncertain opportunities: Chinese investors establishing investments in New Zealand

Abstract: Despite the signing of a comprehensive free trade agreement between New Zealand and China and significantly deepening trade relations, there exists a discernable lag in the investment relationship between the two countries. This paper identifies that the operation and interaction of the two legal instruments governing the conditions of entry of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) into New Zealand – the New Zealand–China Free Trade Agreement (NZCFTA) and the New Zealand Overseas Investment Act 2005 – partially explain this disparity. These legal instruments offer an interesting illustration of the way in which international investment agreements (IIAs) interact with domestic law, managing the contention between investor rights and host state public interests. However, it is clear that the rights and obligations created by these legal instruments are not well understood by Chinese investors and New Zealand commentators alike, as illustrated by the recent Crafar farms saga. This paper seeks to clarify those rights and obligations, arguing that greater transparency and predictability in the operation of the legal instruments is necessary in order to encourage higher levels of Chinese FDI in New Zealand. This is particularly important in the New Zealand– China relationship as Chinese investors are still relative newcomers in the establishment of overseas investments and face in New Zealand a culturally different regulatory scheme from that operating in China

Necessary and practical: A national law obligation to public international commercial arbitral awards

The confidentiality attaching to arbitral proceedings and awards remains of uncertain scope globally. The weight of current opinion appears, however, to be in favour of greater transparency, and as part of this, a number of scholars and commentators have made a strong case for the sanitised publication of arbitral awards by arbitral institutions. This paper goes a step further, and makes the case for a national law obligation to publish awards. It does so on the basis that there are significant public interests in the making available of certain information contained within arbitral awards; interests for which institutions have little or no incentive to provide. The paper uses New Zealand as an example, considering both the desirability of publication at the national level, and to the extent publication is desirable, how a mechanism to facilitate publication should be designed. It suggests a “statement of arbitral jurisprudence”, to be published annually by the Ministry of Justice, as the most appropriate way forward

Symptoms of neglect: Trust claims under the Limitation Act 2010

New Zealand's limitation legislation was overhauled with the enacting of the Limitation Act 2010. Despite this comprehensive reform, the way in which trust claims are best to be addressed appears to have been largely overlooked in the reform process. Consequently, the multitude of historic issues that have plagued statutory provisions dealing with trust claims endure in the 2010 Act, with the few changes to the structure of drafting compounding these problems. This paper explores the policy considerations at work, and, by way of example, undertakes a thorough analysis of the exception for fraudulent breaches of trust in light of these policy considerations to illustrate some of the new problems that are bound to arise in practice. Given the numerous and significant difficulties, and the substantial implications for parties seeking to rely on these provisions, this paper argues that a broad reconsideration of the way in which trust claims are dealt with in the 2010 Act is urgently needed

Circular frame fixation for calcaneal fractures risks injury to the medial neurovascular structures: a cadaveric description

Aim: There is a risk of iatrogenic injury to the soft tissues of the calcaneus and this study assesses the risk of injury to these structures in circular frame calcaneal fracture fixation. Materials and Methods: After olive tip wires were inserted, an L-shaped incision on the lateral and medial aspects of 5 formalin fixed cadaveric feet was performed to expose the underlying soft tissues. The calcaneus was divided into zones corresponding to high, medium and low risk using a grading system. Results: Structures at high risk included the posterior tibial artery, posterior tibial vein and posterior tibial nerve on the medial aspect. Soft tissue structures on the lateral side that were shown to be at lower risk of injury were the small saphenous vein and the sural nerve and the tendons of fibularis longus and fibularis brevis. Conclusion: The lateral surface of the calcaneus provides a lower risk area for external fixation. The risk of injury to significant soft tissues using a circular frame fixation approach has been shown to be greater on the medial aspect. Clinical Relevance: This study highlights the relevant anatomical relations in circular frame fixation for calcaneal fractures to minimize damage to these structures

Designing signaling environments to steer transcriptional diversity in neural progenitor cell populations

Stem cell populations within developing embryos are diverse, composed of many different subpopulations of cells with varying developmental potential. The structure of stem cell populations in cell culture remains poorly understood and presents a barrier to differentiating stem cells for therapeutic applications. In this paper we develop a framework for controlling the architecture of stem cell populations in cell culture using high-throughput single cell mRNA-seq and computational analysis. We find that the transcriptional diversity of neural stem cell populations collapses in cell culture. Cell populations are depleted of committed neuron progenitor cells and become dominated by a single pre-astrocytic cell population. By analyzing the response of neural stem cell populations to forty distinct signaling conditions, we demonstrate that signaling environments can restructure cell populations by modulating the relative abundance of pre-astrocyte and pre-neuron subpopulations according to a simple linear code. One specific combination of BMP4, EGF, and FGF2 ligands switches the default population balance such that 70% of cells correspond to the committed neurons. Our work demonstrates that single-cell RNA-seq can be applied to modulate the diversity of in vitro stem cell populations providing a new strategy for population-level stem cell control

The Tragedy of the Spanish Inquisition

Paul van K. Thomson examines the heresies within the Church that gave rise to the various Catholic inquisitions

Comparative genomics of Shiga toxin encoding bacteriophages

Background Stx bacteriophages are responsible for driving the dissemination of Stx toxin genes (stx) across their bacterial host range. Lysogens carrying Stx phages can cause severe, lifethreatening disease and Stx toxin is an integral virulence factor. The Stx-bacteriophage vB_EcoP-24B, commonly referred to as 24B, is capable of multiply infecting a single bacterial host cell at a high frequency, with secondary infection increasing the rate at which subsequent bacteriophage infections can occur. This is biologically unusual, therefore determining the genomic content and context of 24B compared to other lambdoid Stx phages is important to understanding the factors controlling this phenomenon and determining whether they occur in other Stx phages. Results The genome of the Stx2 encoding phage, 24B was sequenced and annotated. The genomic organisation and general features are similar to other sequenced Stx bacteriophages induced from Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC), however 24B possesses significant regions of heterogeneity, with implications for phage biology and behaviour. The 24B genome was compared to other sequenced Stx phages and the archetypal lambdoid phage, lambda, using the Circos genome comparison tool and a PCR-based multi-loci comparison system. Conclusions The data support the hypothesis that Stx phages are mosaic, and recombination events between the host, phages and their remnants within the same infected bacterial cell will continue to drive the evolution of Stx phage variants and the subsequent dissemination of shigatoxigenic potentia