bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
On the offensive
Authors:   Human Rights Watch
Published: October 2007

Few human rights issues provoke stronger debate than the question of whether, and to what extent, freedom of expression principles protect so-called 'hate speech' Human Rights Watch was prompted to initiate a study of 'hate speech' and freedom i of expression by a number of events, including a resurgence of nationalist and anti-Semitic incidents in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and by an intense i debate in the USA over whether 'hate i speech' provisions in disciplinary codes adopted by a number of colleges and, universities violate constitutional safeguards of free speech. The term 'hate speech' used in its policy paper, excerpted here, encompasses not just oral remarks, but any form of expression regarded as offensive to racial, ethnic and religious groups and other discrete minorities, and to women. The Human Rights Watch policy statement on protection of 'hate speech' that emerged from its study is based on four key principles: A distinction between advocacy and action. Expression should never be punished for its subject matter alone. To punish speech, there must be a direct and immediate connection to illegal action. Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights bars incitement to 'discrimination, hostility or violence'. Human Rights Watch defines those terms as unlawful conduct. Any limitations on expression should be the least restrictive available.
Elegies for a sad land
Authors: Marin Mariana , Doinas Stefan Augustin , Iaru Florin , Dinescu Mircea 
Published: October 2007

Nearly three years after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, Romanian writers enjoy greater creative freedom than before. But a combination of economic hardship and the legacy of a politically oppressive system has seriously affected the publication ofnew literature. The reduction of state subsidies for the Romanian Writers Union, now headed by controversial former dissident poetMircea Dinescu, has led to virtual bankruptcy for all of the Union's publications, many of which, like the weekly Romania Literara, had emerged with secure credentials as publishers of contemporary literature. New independent literary publications have routinely encountered problems with paper supplies, printing costs and distribution — difficulties which have led many to fold during the last 12 months. The country's publishing houses also face difficulties associated with the economic and political changes. Humanitas, a private publisher formed out of the state literary publishing house soon after December 1989, and the main rival to the monopolistic state publishing system, treads a precarious path. One of its senior literary editors admitted in November 1991 that it was impossible to predict the popularity of literary works in the absence of private bookshops and a workable national distribution system. This makes the publication of new or lesser-known authors less likely than ever. The poets published here are all connected with the Romanian Writers Union. Stefan Augustin Doinas is a former dissident writer who was unable, for political reasons, to publish for much of his creative life. Both he andAna Blandiana (see back cover) are founder members of Memoria magazine whose editor, Banu Rădulescu, is profiled on page 35). Memoria has undertaken the delicate task of rediscovering lost or censored writers and documenting the prison experiences of dissidents from Romania's recent past, a difficult task owing to officialsecrecy and mistrust, and one made doubly so by the unofficial threats and physical violence Rădulescu has encountered. The continuing political tensions have influenced writers already marked by a 'culture of censorship', and the poems we publish here reflect the poets' concern with the problematic nature of words in a climate of suspicion and betrayal (compounded, since 1989, by profound uncertainty).Florin Iaru's guide to (former) Eastern European leaders — a pastiche of the folk-tale setting of 'social realism' formerly encouraged in Romanian literature—andMircea Dinescu's oblique poem both point up the absurdity of a situation where what is of real importance is not, nor cannot be, named, and Mariana Marin's Elegy, from an earlier collection, draws on the ambiguous power of language, here used to separate rather than unite the lovers. Stefan Agopian ( see page 40) represents a younger generation of writers exploring new territory in fiction.
Full Moon
Authors: Blandiana Ana 
Published: October 2007

Ana Blandiana's career as a poet began with the publication of First Person Plural in 1964. Since then, she has published 11 volumes of poetry, as well as prose, fiction, translations and children's fiction. Over the years, she has become equally celebrated for her writing and for her criticism of the Ceausescu regime, the latter resulting in a ban in 1988 on the publication of her work, and her virtual house arrest. Her importance in the Romanian literary scene is expressed by the editors of her first collection published in English (The Hour of Sand, Anvil Press 1990): 'Literature is a collective refuge, a way of survival. In the strategies of this survival, Blandiana has been a model of unswerving consciousness.' Since the fall of Ceausescu in December 1989, she has published little new work, but has devoted herself to politics, being a founder member of the umbrella democracy movement, the Civic Alliance, which is allied to the political party of the same name (the main rival to the ruling National Salvation Front). 'The open window' is her first new story to be published since December 1989. It first appeared in Romania Literara (Bucharest).
Death, lies and videotape
Authors: Eïd Bassem 
Published: October 2007

Nidal Tamimi, a 23-year-old Palestinian, was shot dead by soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces at a checkpoint in the West Bank town of Hebron on 22 October 1994. According to Israeli sources, Nidal Tamimi was shot while trying to stab a soldier. Eyewitnesses, however, say he was unarmed, that he was shot while on the ground, that a knife had been placed next to his body as he lay dead. The killing of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories by Israeli soldiers is not unusual. What gives the death of Nidal Tamini particular significance is that the whole episode was captured on videotape. It provided conclusive evidence that allegations, always denied, of summary execution by the IDF, do occur. Even so, it took the outrage of the foreign media, persuaded by the tape to report what has become a commonplace in the Occupied Territories, to persuade the Israeli government to open an inquiry. Bassem Eïd, a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem, tells the story of the investigation that unearthed the evidence.
Interview: Constantin Costa-Gavras: Politics and propaganda
Authors: Sampson Sally , Vidal-Hall Judith 
Published: October 2007

Costa-Gavras is one of a select band who have made political cinema into big box-office and stayed independent on the way. Films like Z, Missing and Betrayed, each of which tackled a hot political issue of their day, would, he thinks, have some difficulty getting through the US studio system today. Z (1969), a powerful indictment of the rule of the Colonels in Greece, and banned for many years in that country, is shown regularly today in memory and warning. Missing (1982), a big budget, big star movie, brought the horror of the disappeared in 1970s Latin America to a huge US audience. Betrayed (1989), a fiction built round disturbing factual material supplied by an unsuspecting FBI, was, say commentators, prophetic of the rise and rise of America's right-wing militias. At a time when mainstream political cinema is all but dead in the USA, the Greek film-maker, who is as much at home in Paris as in the studios of Paramount or Gaumont, draws the lines between propaganda, politics and the militant tendency; and points to the current political horizon
The case of Abu Zaid
Authors: Nasr Abu Zaid  
Published: October 2007

THE POLITICS of the interpretation of the Quran lie at the heart of the Abu Zaid case. In the eyes of orthodox Islam, the Quran is the eternal word of God. As it always existed, it was never created. That this eternal text should have been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in seventh-century Arabia has no bearing on the meaning of the Quran, which is a book to be read literally and holds true for all times. Consequently there is no tradition of textual criticism of the Quran analogous to those for the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. However, this orthodox view has been challenged by Islamic scholars over the centuries. A rationalist school emerged in the ninth century under the Abbasid Empire, known as the Mu'tazilites, whose doctrines fused notions of social justice with a purified, spiritualised monotheism. They argued for a created Quran by distinguishing between God's essence, which they held to be eternal and beyond human understanding, and His word, which is created and accessible to reason. While the Mu'tazilites were marginalised after two decades, their thought remained influential down to the present, as evinced in the writings of Abu Zaid himself. Here he sets out the evolution of his scholarship from the beginning of his career as a graduate student to his most recent scholarly works. Abu Zaid has applied contemporary methods of textual criticism to his study of the Quran, contextualising the book in its historical setting. This challenge to orthodoxy, he argues, has been used as a pretext by those who perhaps had more personal reasons to seek his downfall.
More hidden histories
Authors: Butalia Urvashi 
Published: October 2007

OFFICIALLY, Partition has been forgotten in India, its painful memories put aside. No mention is made of it in government documents, and its enormous, long-term human costs do not figure in histories of the subcontinent. Unofficially, however, these histories live on, inside families and communities, and are told and retold: people recall the time when, suddenly, neighbour turned upon neighbour, friends became foes, boundaries were suddenly set up, and whole lifetimes of sharing had to be put aside and new, hostile identities assumed. Communities separated into 'them' and 'us', religion became the marker of identity, borders were suddenly drawn across villages and communities. These are the many hidden histories of Partition, the things history books don't tell us about. In the 10 years or so that I have been working on Partition, it is these histories that I have listened to, these that have led me to realise how this cataclysm affected the lives of ordinary people, those who live on the margins of society — women, children, the poor, untouchables. In each of the stories I listened to, there was a different telling, a different experience. There are hundreds of such histories: histories that tell us that Partition was not only about being Hindu and Muslim, it was about being a harijan [untouchable], a woman, a child; about love and sharing, about friendships. Only when we begin to listen to the stories of Partition's survivors shall we begin to understand: only through the cracks in the official version do we find the human actors who are the real stuff of any history.
Babel: Widows of Tajikistan
Authors: Sharipova Muborak , Tadjbakhsh Shahrbanou 
Published: October 2007

The human toll of the Tajik civil war is not yet fully known. In the short period of fighting between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1993, up to 50,000 may have died and 500,000 fled to neighbouring Afghanistan or became internally displaced. One undisputed factor is the war's heavy toll on the lives of women. In just one war-torn southern region, more than 20,000 households are now headed by women. Many lost their husbands to war, others to the crime that is now endemic in Tajikistan. Tajikistan is a patriarchal society in which women living without men are accorded little respect. When they marry, Tajik women marry into their husband's families, moving in to live with the in-laws. The death of their husbands makes them, in a sense, internally displaced persons.
Scope and utility of hydrogen exchange as a tool for mapping landscapes
Authors: Jaswal Sheila S. , Miranker Andrew D. 
Published: October 2007

AbstractThe ability to determine conformational parameters of protein‐folding landscapes is critical for understanding the link between conformation, function, and disease. Monitoring hydrogen exchange (HX) of labile protons at equilibrium enables direct extraction of thermodynamic or kinetic landscape parameters in two limiting extremes. Here, we establish a quantitative framework for relating HX behavior to landscape. We use this framework to demonstrate that the range of predicted global HX behavior for the majority of a set of characterized two‐state proteins under near‐native conditions does not readily span between both extremes. For most, stability may be quantitatively determined under physiological conditions, with semiquantitative boundaries on kinetics additionally determined using modest experimental perturbations to shift HX behavior. The framework and relationships derived in the simple context of two‐state global folding highlight the importance of understanding HX across the entire continuum of behavior, in order to apply HX to map landscapes.
Case–control study on cigarette smoking and the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma among Japanese
Authors: Hara Megumi , Tanaka Keitaro , Sakamoto Tatsuhiko , Higaki Yasuki , Mizuta Toshihiko , Eguchi Yuichiro , Yasutake Tsutomu , Ozaki Iwata , Yamamoto Kyosuke , Onohara Shingo , Kawazoe Seiji , Shigematsu Hirohisa , Koizumi Shunzo 
Published: October 2007

Emerging epidemiologic data suggest that cigarette smoking may increase the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), yet considerable controversies (e.g. inconsistent dose–response relationships) still exist with this association. We examined whether smoking was associated with HCC risk in a case–control study including 209 incident HCC cases and two different control groups (256 hospital controls and 381 patients with chronic liver disease [CLD] without HCC). Comparison of HCC cases with CLD patients, but not with hospital controls, demonstrated a significantly increased risk of HCC for current smokers. After adjustment for sex, age, heavy drinking history and hepatitis virus markers, odds ratios (and 95% confidence intervals) for former and current smokers relative to never smokers were 1.0 (0.6–1.7) and 2.5 (1.4–4.6), respectively, against CLD patients, as compared with 0.8 (0.3–2.3) and 1.8 (0.6–5.1), respectively, against hospital controls. In terms of pack‐years during lifetime, dose–response relationship was not evident against either control group (P trend = 0.43), but it became clearer for more recent cigarette use among CLD patients. For example, regarding cumulative cigarette consumption during the last 5 years, adjusted odds ratios (and 95% confidence intervals) for 1–4 and 5+ pack‐years relative to no use were 1.9 (1.1–3.6) and 2.8 (1.5–5.2) (P trend = 0.003), respectively. These results suggest that cigarette smoking may play a crucial role in the late stage of HCC development and that CLD patients may benefit from their earliest smoking cessation. (Cancer Sci 2008; 99: 93–97)
Apoptotic pathway induced by transduction of RUNX3 in the human gastric carcinoma cell line MKN‐1
Authors: Nagahama Yumi , Ishimaru Mika , Osaki Mitsuhiko , Inoue Toshiaki , Maeda Akihiro , Nakada Chisato , Moriyama Masatsugu , Sato Kenzo , Oshimura Mitsuo , Ito Hisao 
Published: October 2007

The human runt‐related transcription factor 3 gene (RUNX3) is considered to be a candidate tumor suppressor gene in gastric carcinoma. However, the role of RUNX3 in the regulation of cell proliferation remains unclear. In the present study, we constructed an adenoviral vector encoding human RUNX3 cDNA under the control of a Tet‐responsive promoter (Ad‐Tet‐FLAG‐RUNX3), which regulates the expression of RUNX3 in the presence or absence of doxycycline. A recombinant adenoviral expression vector encoding LacZ (Ad‐Tet‐LacZ) was used as a negative control. The effect of the transduction of RUNX3 on cell growth was examined using the Tet‐On system in a human gastric carcinoma cell line, MKN‐1. Exogenous RUNX3 expression was induced successfully by Ad‐Tet‐FLAG‐RUNX3, but not Ad‐Tet‐LacZ, in the presence of doxycycline in the MKN‐1 cells. At 72 h after infection, the proliferative activity in RUNX3‐expressing cells was 55% or less of that of the control cells. Flow cytometry revealed that the sub‐G1 peak was increased in cells expressing RUNX3 (34.11%), indicating that the inhibition of cell growth was due to apoptosis, which was confirmed based on Hoechst 33258 staining, the release of cytochrome c from mitochondria into the cytosol, and detection of cleaved caspase‐3 by western blotting in MKN‐1 cells. Comprehensive analysis using a cDNA microarray showed that RUNX3 upregulated 17 apoptosis‐related genes (including FADD, TRAF6, caspase‐2, ING1, ING4, Calpain 10, and DNase1) and downregulated 135 apoptosis‐related genes (including FLIP, PEA15, TXN2, HSPD1, IKK, and TIAL1) in MKN‐1 cells. Pathway analyses to generate functional networks of the genes suggested that promotion of the formation of the death‐inducing signaling complex and activation of the mitochondria‐mediated pathway were associated with RUNX3‐induced apoptosis. In conclusion, our findings suggest that exogenous RUNX3 expression suppressed cell proliferation by inducing apoptosis via the death‐receptor mitochondria‐mediated pathway in MKN‐1 cells. (Cancer Sci 2008; 99: 23–30)
Latitudinal gradients in niche breadth: empirical evidence from haematophagous ectoparasites
Authors: Krasnov Boris R. , Shenbrot Georgy I. , Khokhlova Irina S. , Mouillot David , Poulin Robert 
Published: October 2007

AbstractAim We searched for relationships between latitude and both the geographic range size and host specificity of fleas parasitic on small mammals. This provided a test for the hypothesis that specialization is lower, and thus niche breadth is wider, in high‐latitude species than in their counterparts at lower latitudes.Location We used data on the host specificity and geographic range size of 120 Palaearctic flea species (Siphonaptera) parasitic on small mammals (Soricomorpha, Lagomorpha and Rodentia). Data on host specificity were taken from 33 regions, whereas data on geographic ranges covered the entire distribution of the 120 species.Methods Our analyses controlled for the potentially confounding effects of phylogenetic relationships among flea species by means of the independent‐contrasts method. We used regressions and structural equation modelling to determine whether the latitudinal position of the geographic range of a flea covaried with either the size of its range or its host specificity. The latter was measured as the number of host species used, as well as by an index providing the average (and variance in) taxonomic distinctness among the host species used by a flea.Results Geographic range size was positively correlated with the position of the centre of the range; in other words, fleas with more northerly distributions had larger geographic ranges. Although the number of host species used by a flea did not vary with latitude, both the mean taxonomic distinctness among host species used and its variance increased significantly towards higher latitudes.Main conclusions The results indicate that niche breadth in fleas, measured in terms of both its spatial (geographic range size) and biological (host specificity) components, increases at higher latitudes. These findings are compatible with the predictions of recent hypotheses about latitudinal gradients.
Embryo Production in Superovulated Goats Treated with Insulin Before or After Mating or By Continuous Propylene Glycol Supplementation
Authors: Souza AL , Galeati G , Almeida AP , Arruda IJ , Govoni N , Freitas VJF , Rondina D 
Published: October 2007

ContentsSeventeen adult and cyclic Moxoto goats were synchronized using 60 mg MPA vaginal sponge for 11 days and 50 μg cloprostenol, 48 h before sponge removal, and superovulated with 120 mg pFSH i.m. in decreasing doses at 12 h intervals for three consecutive days. In seven goats, 0.2 IU/kg BW/day of long acting insulin was subcutaneously injected at same time as pFSH, and in the other five goats, the same dose of insulin was injected for three consecutive days starting 24 h after mating. Finally, five goats were supplemented with an oral dose of 80 ml/goat/day of propylene glycol continuously during the experiment. The animals were flushed at 7 days after mating and the embryos were classified based on International Embryo Transfer Society criteria. Blood samples were collected every 3 days for insulin assay. Administration of insulin raised the insulin levels of the goats (p < 0.05), whereas in the group treated with propylene glycol, insulin rate was different only between FSH treatment and after mating (p < 0.05). Similar rates of recovery for total (80.05 ± 9.78%) or transferable structures (61.03 ± 15.13%) were obtained. Treatment was not influenced (p > 0.05) by responsiveness to superovulation, which averaged 64%. By contrast, insulin treatments were shown to increase the number of embryos considered excellent with respect to goats supplemented with propylene glycol (p < 0.05). When insulin was given before mating, a strong relationship (r = 0. 90) (p < 0.05) between number of transferable embryo and ovulations was observed in the animals. In conclusion, superovulated goats treated with low doses of exogenous insulin resulted in an enhancement in embryo quality, which was related to changes in circulating insulin concentrations.
Systematic review of the use of financial incentives in treatments for obesity and overweight
Authors: Paul‐Ebhohimhen V. , Avenell A. 
Published: October 2007

SummaryNine studies met the criteria for inclusion in this systematic review of randomized controlled trials of treatments for obesity and overweight involving the use of financial incentives, with reported follow‐up of at least 1 year. All included trials were of behavioural obesity treatments. Justification of sample size and blinding procedure were not mentioned in any study. Attrition was well described in three studies and no study was analysed on an intention to treat basis. Participants were mostly women recruited through media advertisements. Mean age ranged from 35.7 to 52.8 years, and mean body mass index from 29.3 to 31.8 kg m−2. Results from meta‐analysis showed no significant effect of use of financial incentives on weight loss or maintenance at 12 months and 18 months. Further sub‐analysis by mode of delivery and amount of incentives although also non‐statistically significant were suggestive of very weak trends in favour of use of amounts greater than 1.2% personal disposable income, rewards for behaviour change rather than for weight, rewards based on group performance rather than for individual performance and rewards delivered by non‐psychologists rather than delivered by psychologists.