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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges to urban cultural heritage management conservation in the historical city of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq. The paper focusses on the roles and interactions of stakeholders and the issues that confront the decision-making processes that underpin the management of historic city towns. Design/methodology/approach: A case study methodology is utilised for this research. It involves documentary analysis and interviews with stakeholders who are part of the management of the historic city centre of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq. The findings from this case study are analysed in a systematic way before being discussed in the context of the literature on urban cultural heritage management. Findings: The research shows that although there is a shared vision of the need to preserve and conserve urban cultural heritage, the management process is a contentious one. Stakeholders have different ideas as to how to achieve conservation goals which leads to increasing conflicts among stakeholders. This situation is compounded by the limited financial resources available to local government agencies, political interference in the work of implementation agencies and the lack of capacity in local government to enforce rules and carry out conservation projects. There are also significant power differentials among stakeholders in the decision-making process which often means that local residents are excluded from the process of conserving their built urban heritage. Practical implications: This research can help practitioners who are in charge of urban cultural heritage management in dealing with stakeholder conflicts. The paper offers insight into a number of sources of stakeholder conflicts and on ways to overcome these in the planning process. Originality/value: The originality of research lies in the novelty of the case study area. This research highlights the issues of built heritage conservation management and planning practices in an area – Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan-Iraq – that is geographically less represented in the extant literature. The research also identifies some of the key sources of conflict in urban heritage conservation projects and provides an insight into the roles of stakeholders in the management of smaller locally-dependent historic city centres.

Experiential and active learning exercises can benefit students in sociology courses, particularly, courses in which issues of inequality are central. In this paper, we describe using hunger banquets—an active learning exercise where participants are randomly stratified into three global classes and receive food based upon their class position—to enhance students' knowledge of global hunger and inequality. The nonprofit Oxfam America has made hunger banquets popular, but they are usually large public events. We provide ways of simplifying these exercises so that they can be conducted in sociology classrooms and incorporate sociological concepts. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of students' learning and engagement in three hunger banquets found that students had increases in perceived knowledge of the amount, severity, and causes of global hunger.

This study examines the recidivism covariates of 610 released inmates who were confined in a supermax unit in 2004. Follow-up data (an average of 66 months from prison release in 2004) were collected for each inmate to assess the recidivism covariates of those who re-engaged in crime after prison release. The findings show that when compared with ex-supermax inmates who did not recidivate, those who did were younger, more likely to be serving time for a drug offense, and had a history of prior incarcerations and disciplinary infractions while incarcerated. Time to recidivate, however, was significantly predicted by gang membership, length of sentence, and prior substance abuse history. The implications of this research are discussed.

IntroductionSince the introduction of HAART the desire to become a mother in women with HIV has become a viable option due to the drastic reduction in vertical transmission. The aim of this study was to look at the epidemiology, clinical characteristics, and safety of antiretroviral drugs and rate of vertical transmission in our cohort in the Munster region, Ireland.MethodsWe retrospectively reviewed all pregnant women with HIV who attended the ID clinic from January 2002 to April 2012. Patients' demographics, pertinent laboratory data, and pharmacy records were reviewed and statistically analysed.Results105 HIV‐positive women, with a total of 165 pregnancies, were seen from January 2002 to April 2012 at Cork University Hospital: 46 patients were previously known to be HIV‐infected at their first pregnancy and 59 were diagnosed during antenatal screening (median of 32 week gestation at diagnosis). The median age at the time of pregnancy was 32 and the HIV transmission was 90% sexual: 39 women were from Europe/Asia and 66 were African; only two women were HCV co‐infected and one was HBV co‐infected. Of the patients diagnosed with HIV prior to pregnancy, 13 were on treatment, all of whom had no detectable virus at the start and during pregnancy. The median CD4+ at the start of pregnancy was 490 cells/µl. The median weeks of gestation at the start of HAART was 28 before 2006 and 20 after 2006, in accordance with National Guidelines. The HAART regime used was in line with current Guidelines. 18 pregnancies ended in miscarriage before week 12 gestation and 2 pregnancies resulted in intrauterine death at 28 weeks. 145 pregnancies progressed to delivery at full term but 10 infants were born before the 37th week, with one baby born at 23 weeks: 63 had SVD and 82 underwent C‐section, of whom 12 emergency C‐section due to prolonged membrane rupture. Most of the C‐sections were planned due to obstetric reasons. 2 infants were born HIV+: in one case the mother was a late presenter at 38 of gestation; and in other the mother had poor compliance with viral load detectable at the time of labour. The overall number of pregnancies per year has been stable over the ten years (average of 14 pregnancies per year).ConclusionThe use of cART with high level of adherence and a close clinical management during pregnancy has shown to dramatically reduce the vertical transmission of HIV in our cohort.

Climate change is an important environmental problem and one whose economic implications are many and varied. This paper starts with the presumption that mitigation of greenhouse gases is a necessary policy that has to be designed in a cost effective way. It is well known that market instruments are the best option for cost effectiveness. But the discussion regarding which of the various market instruments should be used, how they may interact and what combinations of policies should be implemented is still open and very lively. In this paper we propose a combination of instruments: the marketable emission permits already in place in Europe for major economic sectors and a CO2 tax for economic sectors not included in the emissions permit scheme. The study uses an applied general equilibrium model for the Spanish economy to compute the results obtained with the new mix of instruments proposed. As the combination of the market for emission permits and the CO2 tax admits different possibilities that depend on how the mitigation is distributed among the economic sectors, we concentrate on four possibilities: cost-effective, equalitarian, proportional to emissions, and proportional to output distributions. Other alternatives to the CO2 tax are also analysed (tax on energy, on oil and on electricity). Our findings suggest that careful, well designed policies are needed as any deviation imposes significant additional costs that increase more than proportionally to the level of emissions reduction targeted by the EU.