Women in the driving seat: Eastern European immigrant women's citizenship,participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women's social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women's accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children's as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.     

Nondestructive Methods for Recovery of Biological Material from Human Teeth for DNA Extraction

The extraction of DNA from human skeletal remains applied to forensic, and evolutionary studies do not exclude risks, which are to be evaluated when working with unique specimens that could be damaged or even destroyed. In the present study were evaluated several nondestructive methods for recovering DNA instead of the most currently used pulverization method. Three different procedures to access inside the dental pieces (occlusal perforation, cervical perforation, and cervical cut) have been compared with the aim of recovering as many cell remains as possible to carry out a DNA extraction. Given the DNA quantitation results, a method was proposed that consists of a cervical cut to facilitate the access to the pulp cavity and a subsequent filing of the root canals down to the apex of the dental root. This methodology allows the recovery of both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, with the minimum deterioration for the dental pieces.     

Covenant of Mayors: Reasons for Being an Environmentally and Energy Friendly Municipality

The Covenant of Mayors (CM) is the mainstream European movement involving local authorities who voluntarily commit to increase energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources within their territories with the aim of reducing CO₂ emissions and meet the European Union objectives by 2020. One country that has a greater number of signatories of this agreement is Spain. This article analyzes which factors influence the decision of Spanish local authorities to join the ever‐growing movement. An empirical model is formulated to describe the behavior of Spanish local governments, this being a binary choice model which is a function of various political, economic, and technical factors. Among the prominent factors that influence this decision are population, availability of renewable energy, fiscal and environmental stress, citizens’ political preference, the contagion effect of neighboring municipalities, the existence of covenant coordinators, and finally, economic motivations.     

Has machine learning rendered simple rules obsolete?

European Journal of Law and Economics - Epstein (Simple rules for a complex world, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995) defended the superiority of simple legal rules over complex,...     

Reflections on CIA Analysis: Is it Finished?

Despite the CIA's improved analytical tradecraft and increased resources, the future of its analytic mission remains in doubt. Post-9/11 improvements have been coupled with a continued focus on current intelligence priorities that minimize attention to the development of strategic research and deeper knowledge. Simply increasing the number of analysts has not produced deeper expertise. The CIA's traditional recruitment and training methods, as well as its rewards and promotion system, encourage analysts to avoid concentrating on any single area of regional or functional expertise in favor of moving around the agency to build a successful career. A continued reliance on risk-avoidance security practices also restricts analysts' contact with non-government and foreign experts who often have needed political and cultural knowledge of intelligence topics. To rectify these inadequacies, the CIA's analytic directorate needs to develop incentives for analysts who wish to develop more strategic analysis and remove the security barriers to closer collaboration with experts outside the US government. Developing cross-agency analytic collaboration would also maximize expertise and would benefit from intelligence community-wide training programs similar to what the US military does at its senior service colleges.     

Puerto Rico: National security,economic growth and colonialism

Abstract

Puerto Rico's significance for the US state and imperialism has gradually deteriorated. In the context of recent global changes and new developments in the US political economy the logic that justified colonial control cannot be sustained. However, an array of counteracting political and economic forces are conspiring to overcome the altered material and geopolitical conditions that make evident the need for Puerto Rico's decolonization.

Colonialism has given rise to an array of forces that impedes any changes in Puerto Rico's formal political status. Where once the US state, corporate capital and the dominant political forces in Puerto Rico were in relative agreement on sustaining the colonial enterprise, a new constellation of competing forces has emerged. Within Puerto Rico proponents for the status, quo and those who agitate for statehood have reached virtual electoral parity. Monopoly “capital, primarily in Pharmaceuticals, dominates the local economy. However, it is challenged by North American unions and their congressional allies who seek to rescind the lucrative fiscal policies that account for these firms exorbitant profits. Agencies of the US state and congressional committees are at odds on what needs to be done to sustain an unmanageable, increasingly expensive and anachronistic colony.

This essay presents a framework for examining the array of forces and conditions that continue to erode the colonial relation and that explains colonialism's fragility in the current period of global readjustment.