The Historical Evolution of Our National Security Organization

In 1944, a committee of the House known as the Woodring Committee held hearings on the subject—just be­fore the end of the war. Most people date unification discussions from that period. But it will interest you to know that in the preceding twenty-five years there were about thirty suggestions and bills introduced in Congress looking to unification of the army and the navy

A docking model of key components of the DISC complex: death domain superfamily interactions redefined

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116305/1/feb2s0014579301021627.pd

Occupational (Im)mobility in the Global Care Economy: The Case of Foreign-Trained Nurses in the Canadian Context

The twenty-first century has witnessed a number of significant demographic and political shifts that have resulted in a care crisis. Addressing the deficit of care provision has led many nations to actively recruit migrant care labour, often under temporary forms of migration. The emergence of this phenomenon has resulted in a rich field of analysis using the lens of care, including the idea of the Global Care Chain. Revisions to this conceptualization have pushed for its extension beyond domestic workers in the home to include skilled workers in other institutional settings, particularly nurses in hospitals and long-term care settings. Reviewing relevant literature on migrant nurses, this article explores the labour market experiences of internationally educated nurses in Canada. The article reviews research on the barriers facing migrant nurses as they transfer their credentials to the Canadian context. Analysis of this literature suggests that internationally trained nurses experience a form of occupational (im)mobility, paradoxical, ambiguous and contingent processes that exploit global mobility, and results in the stratified incorporation of skilled migrant women into healthcare workplaces

The National Security Implications of HIV/AIDS

Feldbaum and colleagues look at evidence on the links between HIV and national security, and evaluate the risks and benefits of addressing HIV/AIDS as a national security issue

Urban heritages: how history and housing finance matter to housing form and homeownership rates

Contemporary Western cities are not uniform but display a variety of different housing forms and tenures, both between and within countries. We distinguish three general city types in this paper: low rise, single-family dwelling cities where owner-occupation is the most prevalent tenure form; multi-dwelling building cities where tenants comprise the majority and; multi-dwelling building cities where owner occupation is the principal tenure form. We argue that historical developments beginning in the nineteenth century are crucial to understanding this diversity in urban form and tenure composition across Western cities. Our path-dependent argument is twofold. First, we claim that different housing finance institutions engendered different forms of urban development during the late-nineteenth century and had helped to establish the difference between single-family dwelling cities and multi-dwelling building cities by 1914. Second, rather than stemming from countries’ welfare systems or ‘variety of capitalism’, we argue that these historical distinctions have a significant and enduring impact on today’s urban housing forms and tenures. Our argument is supported by a unique collection of data of 1095 historical cities across 27 countries

Some Reflections on Age Discrimination, Referees’ Retirement Ages and European Sports (Law)

Introduction: This paper is the first in a series of reflections on the relationship between discrimination, sport and the law, a body of work that has been motivated in part by the potential impact of the 2000 Equalities Directive upon European sports law, but also by developments in human rights jurisprudence and in the domestic laws of several jurisdictions. The phenomenon of age discrimination in sport, and the social and economic impact thereof, has been far less widely considered than is the case with other forms of sports discrimination (although the literature would miraculously emerge if the subject-matter were more directly concerned with men’s professional football). In contrast, free movement and competition law have impacted significantly upon sports provisions that discriminate on the basis of nationality; it is equally evident that age discrimination in the context of sports employment has not been considered with anything approaching the degree of sophistication that pervades our understanding of discrimination in occupation or employment on the grounds of disability, sexual orientation and religion/belief (the other discriminatory forms that are covered by the 2000 Directive); and our poor understanding of age-related sports discrimination generally stands in marked contrast to our appreciation of how challenges to discrimination on the grounds of sex and race have precipitated far-reaching changes to sports practices. Throughout the EU, with the possible exception of the Irish Republic, age discrimination law is far less advanced than is the case with discrimination which takes any of those other forms, the remedies are weaker and fewer people are aware of them. However, this state of affairs will undoubtedly change under the impact of the Equalities Directive, and even though the provisions themselves (and member states’ transposing of them) attract legitimate criticism, some longstanding practices of sports bodies are now open to challenge

Structural Features of Caspase-Activating Complexes

Apoptosis, also called programmed cell death, is an orderly cellular suicide program that is critical for the development, immune regulation and homeostasis of a multi-cellular organism. Failure to control this process can lead to serious human diseases, including many types of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and autoimmununity. The process of apoptosis is mediated by the sequential activation of caspases, which are cysteine proteases. Initiator caspases, such as caspase-2, -8, -9, and -10, are activated by formation of caspase-activating complexes, which function as a platform to recruit caspases, providing proximity for self-activation. Well-known initiator caspase-activating complexes include (1) DISC (Death Inducing Signaling Complex), which activates caspases-8 and 10; (2) Apoptosome, which activates caspase-9; and (3) PIDDosome, which activates caspase-2. Because of the fundamental biological importance of capases, many structural and biochemical studies to understand the molecular basis of assembly mechanism of caspase-activating complexes have been performed. In this review, we summarize previous studies that have examined the structural and biochemical features of caspase-activating complexes. By analyzing the structural basis for the assembly mechanism of the caspase-activating complex, we hope to provide a comprehensive understanding of caspase activation by these important oligomeric complexes

Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics

Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (U.S.) (grant AI057159)New England Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious DiseasesUnited States. Dept. of Defense (Director of Defense Research & Engineering)United States. Defense Threat Reduction AgencyUnited States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Bifurcated homeland and diaspora politics in China and Taiwan towards the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia

The conventional literature on diaspora politics tends to focus on one ‘homeland’ state and its relations with ‘sojourning’ diaspora around the world. This paper examines an instance of ‘bifurcated homeland:’ the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 1949. The paper investigates the changing dynamics of China's and Taiwan's diaspora policies towards Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. They were affected by their ideological competition, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and the ‘indigenisation’ of Taiwanese identity. Illustrating such changes through the case of the KMT Yunnanese communities in Northern Thailand, this paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, we should understand relations through the lens of interactive dynamics between international system-level changes and domestic political transformations. Depending on different normative underpinnings of the international system, the foundations of regime legitimacy have changed. Subsequently, the nature of relations between the diaspora and the homeland(s) transformed from one that emphasises ideological differences during the Cold War, to one infused with nationalist authenticity in the post-Cold War period. Second, the bifurcated nature of the two homelands also created mutual influences on their diaspora policies during periods of intense competition

Stabbing News: Articulating Crime Statistics in the Newsroom

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime