Comments on Draft General Comment 37 on Article 21 ICCPR: The Right of Peaceful Assembly

This report seeks to inform the drafting of General Comment 37 on article 21 ICCPR, the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. It compiles key principles elaborated in the Committee’s freedom of assembly jurisprudence and relevant declarative statements in the Committee’s Concluding Observations on State reports. The report seeks to identify both the issues and themes that General Comment 37 might most usefully address, and further topics that might benefit from further clarification. The report thus seeks to provide the Human Rights Committee with a resource during the drafting of General Comment 37

Account of Pegu and the Voyage to Cambodia and Siam in 1718 by Alexander Hamilton, edited by Michael W. Charney

Captain Alexander Hamilton collated an account of his voyage to Cambodia and Siam in 1718 with accounts of his experiences in Pegu and elsewhere on earlier travels, as well as information he had gathered about certain other locations (such as Arakan) in his A New Account of the East Indies (Edinburgh, 1727). While the original account also included accounts of parts of the Malay world and “Cochinchina,” these have been excluded from the following text. The account begins with a brief account of Chittagong and concludes with eastern mainland Southeast Asia. Edited for the SBBR by Michael W. Charney

Spot sampling of nutrient concentrations in the Puarenga catchment, Rotorua

The Centre for Biodiversity and Ecology Research was approached by Tūhourangi Tribal Authority for assistance with measuring water quality in streams in the Puarenga Stream catchment. Water sampling was subsequently undertaken on 18 July 2011 and samples were analysed to determine concentrations of total and dissolved fractions of nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen and phosphorus are both essential plant nutrients which, when present in excess, can cause eutrophication and associated water quality decline of freshwaters. High concentrations of dissolved forms of nitrogen can also be toxic to aquatic organisms. Excessive nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations are typically the result of pollution due to human activities, although groundwater in the Central Volcanic Plateau region can have elevated concentrations of phosphorus arising from natural geological sources. This report summarises the methods used, presents the results and places measured concentrations in context by drawing comparisons with both guideline and regional mean values

Global isoform-specific transcript alterations and deregulated networks in clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

Extensive genome-wide analyses of deregulated gene expression have now been performed for many types of cancer. However, most studies have focused on deregulation at the gene-level, which may overlook the alterations of specific transcripts for a given gene. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is one of the best-characterized and most pervasive renal cancers, and ccRCCs are well-documented to have aberrant RNA processing. In the present study, we examine the extent of aberrant isoform-specific RNA expression by reporting a comprehensive transcript-level analysis, using the new kallisto-sleuth-RATs pipeline, investigating coding and non-coding differential transcript expression in ccRCC. We analyzed 50 ccRCC tumors and their matched normal samples from The Cancer Genome Altas datasets. We identified 7,339 differentially expressed transcripts and 94 genes exhibiting differential transcript isoform usage in ccRCC. Additionally, transcript-level coexpression network analyses identified vasculature development and the tricarboxylic acid cycle as the most significantly deregulated networks correlating with ccRCC progression. These analyses uncovered several uncharacterized transcripts, including lncRNAs FGD5-AS1 and AL035661.1, as potential regulators of the tricarboxylic acid cycle associated with ccRCC progression. As ccRCC still presents treatment challenges, our results provide a new resource of potential therapeutics targets and highlight the importance of exploring alternative methodologies in transcriptome-wide studies