Introduction: Symposium: Law, Religion, and Lautsi v. Italy

This symposium offers a rare opportunity to see three of the finest minds in Law and Religion scholarship from both sides of the North Atlantic at work. Held at the University of Maine on March 23, 2012, the symposium featured a keynote address by Professor Joseph Weiler of New York University Law School. Professor Weiler’s remarks were occasioned by a 2011 decision of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECHR”) in Strasbourg, Lautsi v. Italy, upholding the constitutionality of the display of the crucifix in Italian public school classrooms under the European Convention of Human Rights (“the Convention”). The principal respondents were Pierre-Henri Prélot of the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France and William Marshall of the University of North Carolina School of Law. The dialogue between these three great students of European and American constitutional law taps into some of the most urgent and controversial issues on the church/state horizon

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation

This article exmaines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinciton between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the quesiton in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a cirtical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century

Development of reference transcriptomes for the major field insect pests of cowpea: a toolbox for insect pest management approaches in West Africa

Cowpea is a widely cultivated and major nutritional source of protein for many people that live in West Africa. Annual yields and longevity of grain storage is greatly reduced by feeding damage caused by a complex of insect pests that include the pod sucking bugs, Anoplocnemis curvipes Fabricius (Hemiptera: Coreidae) and Clavigralla tomentosicollis Stål (Hemiptera: Coreidae); as well as phloem-feeding cowpea aphids, Aphis craccivora Koch (Hemiptera: Aphididae) and flower thrips, Megalurothrips sjostedti Trybom (Thysanoptera: Thripidae). Efforts to control these pests remain a challenge and there is a need to understand the structure and movement of these pest populations in order to facilitate the development of integrated pest management strategies (IPM). Molecular tools have the potential to help facilitate a better understanding of pest populations. Towards this goal, we used 454 pyrosequencing technology to generate 319,126, 176,262, 320,722 and 227,882 raw reads from A. curvipes, A. craccivora, C. tomentosicollis and M. sjostedti, respectively. The reads were de novo assembled into 11,687, 7,647,10,652 and 7,348 transcripts for A. curvipes, A. craccivora, C. tomentosicollis and M. sjostedti, respectively.Functional annotation of the resulting transcripts identified genes putatively involved in insecticide resistance, pathogen defense and immunity. Additionally, sequences that matched the primary aphid endosymbiont, Buchneraaphidicola, were identified among A. craccivora transcripts. Furthermore, 742, 97, 607 and 180 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were respectively predicted among A. curvipes, A. craccivora, C. tomentosicollis and M.sjostedti transcripts, and will likely be valuable tools for future molecular genetic marker development. These results demonstrate that Roche 454-based transcriptome sequencing could be useful for the development of genomic resources for cowpea pest insects in West Africa

Etiology of severe childhood pneumonia in the Gambia, West Africa, determined by conventional and molecular microbiological analyses of lung and pleural aspirate samples.

Molecular analyses of lung aspirates from Gambian children with severe pneumonia detected pathogens more frequently than did culture and showed a predominance of bacteria, principally Streptococcus pneumoniae, >75% being of serotypes covered by current pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. Multiple pathogens were detected frequently, notably Haemophilus influenzae (mostly nontypeable) together with S. pneumoniae

Impact of hepatitis B and delta virus co-infection on liver disease in Mauritania: a cross sectional study.

OBJECTIVES: Mauritania is a highly endemic region for hepatitis B (HBV) and delta (HDV) viruses. No data are available on HDV\u27s impact on the severity of liver disease in consecutive HBV-infected patients in Africa. This study evaluated the degree of liver fibrosis in a cohort of chronic HBV carriers. METHODS: Three-hundred consecutive HBV-infected Mauritanian patients were checked for HDV infection via the detection of anti-HDV antibodies (Ab) and viral RNA. HBV- vs. HBV/HDV-infected patients were compared by physical examination, biological analyses, and the APRI (aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio index) and FibroMeter tests for determination of liver fibrosis. RESULTS: More than 30% of the patients had anti-HDVAb. Among these, 62.2% were HDV-RNA positive. Co-infected patients were older (>8-years) than HBV-mono-infected patients. They had more liver tests abnormalities and clinical or ultrasound signs of liver fibrosis. APRI and FibroMeter scores were also significantly increased in these patients. In multivariate analysis, beyond HDVAb, male gender and HBV-VL >3.7 log IU/mL were the only markers linked to significant liver fibrosis. CONCLUSIONS: In Mauritania, HDV co-infection worsens liver disease, both clinically and biologically, as confirmed by the APRI and FibroMeter tests. These tests may be useful for the management of delta hepatitis, which is a major health problem in Mauritania