The Transatlantic Dimension to the Conflict in Lebanon: Whatever Happened to the Responsibility to Protect?

In this BASIC Paper, Dr. Ian Davis examines the U.S. and U.K. roles and responsibilities in the Lebanon conflict. He supports the call being made by many governments and civil society groups: that a political solution to the twin crises of Lebanon and Palestine must be the international community's urgent priority. Dr. Davis also highlights the importance of international law in coping with the conflict and argues that the international community should be prepared to contribute a sufficient military force with a robust mandate to create a zone of security along the southern border with Israel. He concludes the paper by proposing key principles for a lasting solution to the conflict

New Proposal to Iran: Will It Be Enough to Defuse the Nuclear Crisis?

This BASIC Note assesses the progress of transatlantic diplomacy toward Iran on nuclear issues. On June 6, Iran was presented with a revised package of incentives to persuade it to curb its uranium enrichment program. The authors argued previously that the earlier E3/EU proposal was vague on incentives and heavy on demands. (See BASIC Note, August 11, 2005 at http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Notes/BN050811-IranEU.htm). In this article, the authors suggest that if the June 6 proposal had been offered a year ago (or better still two years ago), much of the recent damage to diplomatic relations between Iran and the West could have been avoided

The ?2-cohomology of hyperplane complements

We compute the l^2-Betti numbers of the complement of any finite collection of affine hyperplanes in complex n-space. At most one of the l^2-Betti numbers is non-zero. <br/

Rural Banking: Designing an Effective Legal Framework for Microfinance

Approximately 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $1 per day. In emerging markets, commercial banks generally serve only ten to twenty percent of the population, excluding eighty to ninety percent of the population from the formal financial sector. Many in this un-banked population could benefit from access to financial services. In most developing countries, rural financial markets are based partially on a foundation of law and partially on a non-legal foundation of extra-legal (and sometimes illegal) activities. These legal and non-legal foundations directly influence the operation of rural financial institutions. This comment will discuss the intersection between rural finance and legal systems. The focus of the paper will be on an emerging legal issue in developing countries: integration of microfinance institutions with the formal legal framework. The comment argues that the benefits of microfinance regulation outweigh the costs and is divided into four sections: The first section is an introduction to microfinance; the second section provides an overview of the issue of microfinance regulation; the third section offers suggestions for specific aspects of a favorable legal framework for microfinance; the final section analyzes an example of an effective microfinance regulation law

A Unified Approach to High-Gain Adaptive Controllers

It has been known for some time that proportional output feedback will stabilize MIMO, minimum-phase, linear time-invariant systems if the feedback gain is sufficiently large. High-gain adaptive controllers achieve stability by automatically driving up the feedback gain monotonically. More recently, it was demonstrated that sample-and-hold implementations of the high-gain adaptive controller also require adaptation of the sampling rate. In this paper, we use recent advances in the mathematical field of dynamic equations on time scales to unify and generalize the discrete and continuous versions of the high-gain adaptive controller. We prove the stability of high-gain adaptive controllers on a wide class of time scales

The Miscible-Immiscible Quantum Phase Transition in Coupled Two-Component Bose-Einstein Condensates in 1D Optical Lattices

Using numerical techniques, we study the miscible-immiscible quantum phase transition in a linearly coupled binary Bose-Hubbard model Hamiltonian that can describe low-energy properties of a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate in optical lattices. With the quantum many-body ground state obtained from density matrix renormalization group algorithm, we calculate the characteristic physical quantities of the phase transition controlled by the linear coupling between two components. Furthermore we calculate the Binder cumulant to determine the critical point and draw the phase diagram. The strong-coupling expansion shows that in the Mott insulator regime the model Hamiltonian can be mapped to a spin 1/2 XXZ model with a transverse magnetic field.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Chemistry of a Dehydrogenase and Di-heme Enzyme Related to Tryptophan Oxidation

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid that is used as a building block to construct proteins, the biosynthetic precursor for several essential molecules, and is modified to serve as a cofactor in some enzymes. This dissertation focuses on two enzymes involved in tryptophan oxidation, AMSDH and MauG. AMSDH is a dehydrogenase in the kynurenine pathway, which is the main metabolic route for tryptophan catabolism. In addition to breaking down tryptophan, the kynurenine pathway is also involved in regulating the innate immune response, NAD biosynthesis, and some neurodegenerative. As such, enzymes of the kynurenine pathway are of fundamental interest for study. This work leveraged a bacterial homologue of human AMSDH to solve its crystal structure in various forms, including several catalytic intermediates. The knowledge gained from the bacterial enzyme was then used to identify and verify human ALDH8A1 as the human AMSDH. MauG is the enzyme responsible for catalyzing the formation of the tryptophan-derived cofactor of methylamine dehydrogenase. It is a diheme enzyme that utilizes hydrogen peroxide perform long-range oxidations on its protein substrate. MauG possesses the remarkable ability to store two oxidizing equivalents as a bis-Fe(IV) species that is stabilized through a type III charge resonance phenomenon. The nature of the charge resonance phenomenon was investigated with exogenous small molecules, radical traps, and temperature dependent studies. Finally, a cryogenic method for generating radicals was developed to study the electronic structure of model compounds similar to the substrate of MauG