Hotspots

Although trauma is usually examined as an individual experience, it is a collective dynamic. Whole communities are traumatized and dynamics of trauma involve all of us and affect the course of history. An orientation to understanding trauma is needed that is at once personal, communal and political. This paper discusses why understanding the dynamics of trauma is essential for facilitators of conflict resolution in zones of conflict and for post-war reconciliation and community building. It also considers that, in addition to international tribunals and truth commissions, there is a need for community forums throughout society to work with issues of accountability and collective trauma concerning past and current conflicts. Trauma is also relevant to such issues as understanding dynamics of revenge, the silence accompanying atrocity, and historical revisionism. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Abstract: Although there is widespread agreement about conservation priorities at large scales (i.e., biodi- versity hotspots), their boundaries remain too coarse for setting practical conservation goals. Refining hotspot conservation,means,identifying specific locations (individual habitat patches) of realistic size and,scale for managers to protect and politicians to support. Because hotspots have lost most of their original habitat, species endemic,to them,rely on what,remains.

The main objective of this article is to evaluate the effects of the EU-Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016 on the asylum-related rights of the persons who fall within the scope of the Statement. The said evaluation covers the main characteristics of the Statement such as objective, scope, legal nature as well as Its reflections on the practices of Greece and Turkey. This article highlights that the migratory flow in 2015 from Turkey to Greek islands, which paved the way for the Statement, was merely labeled by the EU as an ‘irregular migratory movement’, although the main characteristic of this flow was that the majority of the migrants on the move were likely to be in need of international protection. By focusing on the ‘irregular’ character of the movement, Statement adopted a deterring approach as an extension of the EU’s externalization of migration and asylum policy and assigned two main tasks on Greece and Turkey: remotion by Greece and readmission by Turkey.  The article claims that the Statement’s approach on turning the blind eye to the protection-related character of the migratory flows has not diminished the actual problem. Indeed, the effect of the Statement on the asylum-related practice has exacerbated the need for an effective protection and access to durable solutions. The most significant confirmation of this position can be demonstrated in the recent crisis between Turkish and Greek borders when thousands of migrants including the asylum seekers had to face extremely harsh situations when rushed to the Greek borders following Turkey’s declaration that it wouldn’t prevent the exits from its borders. This incident once more showed that the real solution to the ‘problem’ is not shifting but sharing the physical responsibility with Turkey.

Keywords: EU-Turkey Statement, international protection, asylum, readmission, hotspots, temporary protection.

(By Artemieva I.M.)

Lithosphere thermal structure in Greenland is poorly known and models based on seismic and magnetic data are inconsistent, while growing awareness in the fate of the ice sheet in Greenland requires reliable constraints on geothermal heat flux (GHF) from the Earth's interior in the region where conventional heat flux measurements are nearly absent. The lithosphere structure of Greenland remains controversial, while its geological evolution is constrained by direct observations in the narrow ice-free zone along the coasts. The effect of the Iceland hotspot on the lithosphere structure is also debated. Here I describe a new thermal isostasy method which I use to calculate upper mantle temperature anomalies, lithosphere thickness, and GHF in Greenland from seismic data on the Moho depth, topography and ice thickness. To verify the model results, the predicted GHF values are compared to available measurements and show a good agreement. Thick (200-270 km) cratonic lithosphere of SW Greenland with GHF of ca. 40 mW/m 2 thins to 180-190 km towards central Greenland without a clear boundary between the Archean and Proterozoic blocks, and the deepest lithosphere keel is observed beneath the largest kimberlite province in West Greenland. The NW-SE belt with an anomalously thin (100-120 km) lithosphere and GHF of 60-70 mW/m 2 crosses north-central Greenland from coast to coast and it may mark the Iceland hotspot track. In East Greenland this anomalous belt merges with a strong GHF anomaly of > 100 mW/m 2 in the Fjordland region. The anomaly is associated with a strong lithosphere thinning, possibly to the Moho, that requires advective heat transfer such as above active magma chambers, which would accelerate ice basal melting. The anomaly may extend 500 km inland with possibly a significant contribution of ice melt to the ice-drainage system of Greenland.

“Hotspots” refer to memories of detailed moments of peak emotional distress during a traumatic event. This study investigates hotspot frequency, and the emotions and cognitions contained in hotspots of memory for trauma, to replicate a previous study in this area (Holmes, Grey, & Young, 2005). Participants were patients receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a specialist outpatient clinic after experiencing a range of traumatic events. The main finding was that, after fear, the most common emotions reported were anger and sadness. Cognitions related to psychological threat to the self were more common than those related to physical threat.

In Kinshasa's phonie houses, radio communication with distant regions within the country is made possible. The article provides an ethnographic description of social life in and around these contemporary phonie houses. An analysis of the management of phonie conversations, which usually take place in the presence of the radio operator and customers, who themselves often participate actively in the radio conversations, provides a deeper insight into how urban residents literally live with the village. This leads to an exploration of different "agents of interference" in Kinshasa's social landscape. These are social roles that bridge between different worlds, but often embody risk and danger. As a result, the emphasis in the analysis is primarily on interference, a technical and social experience familiar to many, not only in Kinshasa, but anywhere long-range connectivity is lived.

The fight against 'illegal entry' and 'human smuggling' is one of the core priorities of the European Union's border policies. Smugglers are considered criminals exploiting human beings and putting their lives at risk. In widespread discourses and EU documents, people facilitating border crossings are equated with human traffickers. This leads to the draconian punishment of those labelled as smugglers, justified through both border security policies and alledgedly humanitarian concerns to protect human lives. 

This report shows the impact of these policies at the EU-external border in Greece. It analyses how EU and Greek policies and laws hit exactly those who they supposedly aim to protect: the people convicted are marginalized and excluded from society, often refugees themselves, who are forced to steer a boat from Turkey to the Greek Islands to seek asylum or whose socio-economic situation forces them to do so.

The analysis follows the fate of 48 people from their arrest to the court room. All of them were convicted in trials failing even basic standards of fairness. In most cases they are sentenced to life-long imprisonment and incarcerated as scapegoats of the failed European migration policy.

Development organizations often do not have time to perform security fortification on every file in a product before release. One way of prioritizing security efforts is to use metrics to identify core business logic that could contain vulnerabilities, such as database interaction code. Database code is a source of SQL injection vulnerabilities, but importantly may be home to unrelated vulnerabilities. The goal of this research is to improve the prioritization of security fortification efforts by investigating the ability of SQL hotspots to be ...

The EU-Turkey Deal is a central reaction to the 2015 flight-migration into Europe. In the context of the Deal, the boundary between voluntariness and force is blurred, forming the condition of possibility of expulsion. The overlapping of two different forms of migration management approaches, the EU-Turkey Deal and the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programme create a grey zone of indistinction. Within this grey zone, access to rights is systematically made impossible. "Voluntary return" enables the bypassing of legal guarantees certified by the Geneva Refugee Convention drawing on the paradigm of alleged individualized freedom of choice. The central effect of this grey zone is the lack of accountability of any agency participating in the deportations labelled as voluntary.

The marine environment provides significant benefits to many local communities. Pressure to develop coastal waterways worldwide creates an urgent need for tools to locate marine spaces that have important social or ecological values, and to quantify their relative importance. The primary objective of this study was to develop, apply and critically assess a tool to identify important social-ecological hotspots in the marine environment. The study was conducted in a typical coastal community in northern British Columbia, Canada. This expert-informed GIS, or xGIS, tool used a survey instrument to draw on the knowledge of local experts from a range of backgrounds with respect to a series of 12 social-ecological value attributes, such as biodiversity, cultural and economic values. We identified approximately 1500 polygons on marine maps and assigned relative values to them using a token distribution exercise. A series of spatial statistical analyses were performed to locate and quantify ...

The issues of medical plant conservation have been the focus of many formal and informal discussions at national and international forums, seminars, workshops, conferences and congresses in the last 10 years. Caribbean and Central American countries are adopting common policies on medicinal plant conservation and establishing collaborative projects and appropriate agreements for research programs in order to achieve a new status for the protection of medicinal plant diversity. This paper for the most part reports on the the TRAMIL Program (Scientific Research on Medicinal Plants in the Caribbean Basin) coordinated since 1982. TRAMIL has focused on conserving traditional community knowledge of folk remedies, and providing scientific validation of safety and efficacy needed to encourage national health policies that include traditional medicine in primary health care programs.

This study used Monte Carlo methods to generate simulations that considered the effort distribution to determine the locations of significant aggregations of cetacean sightings inside the northern Pelagos Sanctuary (north-western Mediterranean Sea). For three years, monitoring has been conducted from five motor vessels covering about 30,050 km. The most frequently encountered species were the striped dolphin Stenella coeruleoalba representing 64.7% of all sightings, the fin whale Balaenoptera physalus (17.0%), Cuvier's beaked whale Ziphius cavirostris (9.9%), Risso's dolphin Grampus griseus (4.3%) and the sperm whale Physeter catodon (2.2%). Sightings' positions and effort coverage were distributed over a grid of 5′ longitude and 5′ latitude. Spatial concentrations of sightings were analysed according to the distribution of effort to identify ‘hotspots’ (locations where the species occurred at a significantly greater frequency than expected), and ‘coldspots’ (locations w...

Focusing on Italy in the years of the ‘migration crisis’ between 2013 and 2017, this article explores how migration, crime groups and the domestic politics of migration control became entangled in times of crisis. Departing from previous theoretical discussions, it builds a framework that combines crime groups’ actions with domestic political processes in host countries and explores how the crime-migration nexus shaped – and was shaped by – Italian migration policymaking. The article contends that in the context of crisis the nexus took on new forms and that Italian migration politics and policies served to foster rather than counter the phenomenon, in a continuous interplay between criminal practices and policy choices.

To describe spatial and temporal profiles of Road Traffic Injuries (RTIs) on different road networks in Vellore district of southern India. Using the information in the police maintained First Information Reports (FIRs), daily time series of RTI counts were created and temporal characteristics were analysed with respect to the vehicle, road types and time of the day for the period January 2005 to May 2007. Daily incidence and trend of RTIs were estimated using a Poisson regression analysis. Of the reported 3262 RTIs, 52% had occurred on the National Highway (NH). The overall RTI rate on the NH was 8.8/100 000 vehicles per day with significantly higher pedestrian involvement. The mean numbers of RTIs were significantly higher on weekends. Thirteen percentage of all RTIs were associated with fatalities. Hotspots are major town junctions, and RTI rates differ over different stretches of the NH. In India, FIRs form a valuable source of RTI information. Information on different vehicle p...

A high-resolution global tomographic inversion of P-wave traveltimes has been undertaken utilizing an a priori model. The results image cylindrical slow velocities in the upper and lower mantle beneath many current hotspot locations. Locations at which such plume-like features are ...

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) was established by the Conference of Parties in 2002 to decrease the loss of plant diversity, reduce poverty and contribute to sustainable development. To achieve this overarching goal, the GSPC has established a series of targets, one of which is to ensure that plant diversity is well understood, so that it can be effectively conserved and used in a sustainable manner. Brazil hosts more than 46,000 species of plants, algae and fungi, representing one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth, and playing a key role in the GSPC. To meet the GSPC goals of Target 1 and facilitate access to plant diversity, Brazil committed to preparing the List of Species of the Brazilian Flora (2008–2015) and the Brazilian Flora 2020 (2016–present). Managing all the information associated with such great biodiversity has proven to be an extremely challenging task. Here, we synthesize the history of these projects, focusing on the multidisciplinary and collaborative approach adopted to develop and manage the inclusion of all the knowledge generated though digital information systems. We further describe the methods used, challenges faced, and strategies adopted, as well as summarize advances to date and prospects for completing the Brazilian flora in 2020.