Regional Italian allele frequencies at nine short tandem repeat loci

An Italian population study was performed on the loci D3S1358, vWA, FGA, TH01, TPOX, CSF1PO, D5S818, D13S317, D7S820 and a portion of the X-Y homologous gene Amelogenin for gender determination using the AmpFlSTR Profiler kit (PE Biosystems, Foster city, CA). This study was done on a population of 618 unrelated Italian individuals from 18 regions in Italy (except for Valle d'Aosta and Sardinia) to determine allele frequencies for each STR locus, and to evaluate STR technology for developing an Italian Offender DNA database.     

Constitutional courts as arbiters of post-conflict territorial self-government: Bosnia and Macedonia

Constitutional and supreme courts frequently end up examining the political and legal questions at the heart of peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions. Where a peace agreement has included territorial self-government (TSG) provisions courts are often endowed with the capacity to adjudicate disputes between state and sub-state levels of government. The effectiveness of courts in fulfilling this role as not been comprehensively examined. This article fills this important gap examining whether the results of existing research on the role of constitutional and supreme courts in resolving disputes in traditional federalism also apply in these particular circumstances. It finds that where TSG is used as a conflict management mechanism judicial review can have centralizing tendencies if this occurs it can largely be attributed to the processes used to select though the devolutionary multinational nature of the states is also relevant.     

A family with unusual Kell genotypes

A family in which kKp^a, kKp^b, KKp^b and K^o are segregating confirms the depressing effect of Kp^a on the products of other Kell genes in cis. The significance of such unusual Kell genotypes in forensic testing is discussed.