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This paper summarizes a new scheme, set up initially as a pilot project, which has now become Children and Families Social Services provision, in the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport. The pilot project ran for a 6‐month period, in order to establish whether a day fostering service would be a useful and effective way of working in partnership with birth families. The paper discusses the philosophy behind the Children Act 1989 (England and Wales), and some research findings on the consequences of poor parenting for children, to examine the need for a day fostering scheme. Finally, the scheme itself is described, with an evaluation of the referrals for the 6‐month pilot period, and a discussion of the future of the project.

During the past few years, scholars and activists have increasingly engaged with law as a means to challenge stigma, silence, and disadvantages associated with menstruation. Menstrual items (predominantly in the form of disposable menstrual products) are becoming increasingly prominent in this "legal turn." There have been legislative reforms to provide access to free menstrual items, litigation and legislative reforms to remove taxes on menstrual products, legislative reforms on product safety and environmental sustainability of menstrual items, and water and sanitation hygiene ('WASH') policies and guidelines in the context of international development interventions that focus on access to menstrual items. As regulation of disposable menstrual products assumes greater prominence in legal doctrine, feminist legal scholars are increasingly evaluating the impacts of such laws on menstruators, including in the context of diverse experiences of menstruation and menstrual injustice. But what can disposable menstrual products themselves tell us of law? In this Essay we take an object-informed approach to law in the specific context of disposable menstrual products. What insights about law might these objects provide, and how do these insights deepen our understanding of law's relationship to menstruation, menstruators, and the worlds in which menstruators are situated? What can we appreciate about law's role in defining, as well as recognizing and responding to, the diversity of experiences related to menstruation? How do menstrual items nuance our understanding of agency in relation to menstrual injustice? And what do these objects tell us about the limits and challenges of using law to achieve justice in relation to the embodied experiences of people who menstruate? Part II introduces some key contributions to feminist legal thinking on materiality and objects, which informs our analysis of disposable menstrual products as law's objects. Part III introduces some of the critical threads in scholarship on disposable menstrual products, including how they relate to diversity and materiality of experiences of menstruation. Then, we turn in Part IV to explore what disposable menstrual products tell us about law's role in menstruation, using the recent laws introduced in Scotland as a case study.

The global COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed the underlying structural harms and produced vulnerabilities for people living in closed congregate settings like immigration detention centres ('IDCs') and residential aged care facilities ('RACFs'). This article compares the Australian legal regimes that regulate IDCs and RACFs, conceptualising both as authorising and enabling sites of control, confinement and social isolation. We argue that specific COVID-19 measures have intensified a logic of social exclusion and disposability towards people in IDCs and RACFs. Through comparing recent COVID-19 litigation, the article explores the possibilities and limitations of engaging legal strategies to achieve social reform and legal accountability within both sites of confinement. Ultimately, we suggest that such COVID-19 litigation has the greatest possibility of advancing social justice when it is embedded in a broader politics of de-incarceration and abolition oriented towards political inclusion, public health and building more equitable and just communities.

Insect pests often develop resistance to insecticides, and such resistance represents a serious management problem. Devising methods that concurrently delay resistance and minimize injury by insects to field crops and stored grain has long been a goal of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). A centerpiece of IPM has been the combined use of biological control agents and prudent application of chemical insecticides. Unfortunately, successful application of IPM has remained a challenge. This chapter describes the use of emerging genomic technologies that may lead to a "systems" perspective of IPM for the control of pests of cowpea and other crops. This emerging field, which we refer to as "IPM-omics", builds upon recent advances in genome sequencing technologies and detection of largescale gene polymorphisms, which are becoming economically feasible for pest insect systems. IPM-omics will also need to involve the use of information and communications technologies both to collect critical information on pest populations and to deploy practical IPM solutions. The information obtained on the temporal fluctuations, spatial distribution, and ecological diversification within target, non-target, and natural enemy populations can be overlaid on a geographic information systems (GIS) map to predict pest outbreaks and to decide how to apply control measures. The "systems" perspective of organism communities provided through IPM-omics may also facilitate the effective evaluation, modification, and optimization of IPM strategies. However, any resultant IPM program for crop pests will also require that extension agents, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have the ability to easily access and deploy the IPM research findings through information and communications technologies. Thus, we also outline the need for an online system that facilitates the sharing and peer review of practical IPM outputs. Many of these tools are currently being developed to help farmers manage insect pests of cowpea in West Africa. ; Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade ; United States Agency for International Development ; Peer Review

Insect pests often develop resistance to insecticides, and such resistance represents a serious management problem. Devising methods that concurrently delay resistance and minimize injury by insects to field crops and stored grain has long been a goal of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). A centerpiece of IPM has been the combined use of biological control agents and prudent application of chemical insecticides. Unfortunately, successful application of IPM has remained a challenge. This chapter describes the use of emerging genomic technologies that may lead to a "systems" perspective of IPM for the control of pests of cowpea and other crops. This emerging field, which we refer to as "IPM-omics", builds upon recent advances in genome sequencing technologies and detection of largescale gene polymorphisms, which are becoming economically feasible for pest insect systems. IPM-omics will also need to involve the use of information and communications technologies both to collect critical information on pest populations and to deploy practical IPM solutions. The information obtained on the temporal fluctuations, spatial distribution, and ecological diversification within target, non-target, and natural enemy populations can be overlaid on a geographic information systems (GIS) map to predict pest outbreaks and to decide how to apply control measures. The "systems" perspective of organism communities provided through IPM-omics may also facilitate the effective evaluation, modification, and optimization of IPM strategies. However, any resultant IPM program for crop pests will also require that extension agents, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have the ability to easily access and deploy the IPM research findings through information and communications technologies. Thus, we also outline the need for an online system that facilitates the sharing and peer review of practical IPM outputs. Many of these tools are currently being developed to help farmers manage insect pests of cowpea in West Africa. ; United States Agency for International Development ; Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade ; Peer Review

Environmental context. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are potent greenhouse and stratospheric ozone depleting trace gases. Their atmospheric concentrations are in decline, thanks to global production and consumption controls imposed by the Montreal Protocol. In recent years, the rates of decline of CFC atmospheric concentrations, especially for CFC-11 (CCl3F), are not as large as anticipated under the Protocol, resulting in renewed efforts to estimate CFC consumption and/or emissions to possibly identify new or poorly quantified sources. Australian emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) have been estimated from atmospheric CFC observations by both inverse modelling and interspecies correlation techniques, and from CFC production, import and consumption data compiled by industry and government. Australian and global CFC emissions show similar temporal behaviour, with emissions peaking in the late-1980s and then declining by ~10 % per year through to the present. Australian CFC emissions since 1978 account for less than 1 % of global emissions and therefore make a correspondingly small contribution to stratospheric ozone depletion. The current CFC emissions in Australia are likely from 'banks' of closed-cell foams, and refrigeration–air conditioning equipment now more than 20 years old. There is no evidence of renewed consumption or emissions of CFCs in Australia. The reduction in CFC emissions has made a significant contribution to reducing Australian greenhouse gas emissions.

We present top-down constraints on global monthly N[subscript 2]O emissions for 2011 from a multi-inversion approach and an ensemble of surface observations. The inversions employ the GEOS-Chem adjoint and an array of aggregation strategies to test how well current observations can constrain the spatial distribution of global N[subscript 2]O emissions. The strategies include (1) a standard 4D-Var inversion at native model resolution (4° × 5°), (2) an inversion for six continental and three ocean regions, and (3) a fast 4D-Var inversion based on a novel dimension reduction technique employing randomized singular value decomposition (SVD). The optimized global flux ranges from 15.9 Tg N yr[superscript −1] (SVD-based inversion) to 17.5–17.7 Tg N yr[superscript −1] (continental-scale, standard 4D-Var inversions), with the former better capturing the extratropical N[subscript 2]O background measured during the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaigns. We find that the tropics provide a greater contribution to the global N[superscript 2]O flux than is predicted by the prior bottom-up inventories, likely due to underestimated agricultural and oceanic emissions. We infer an overestimate of natural soil emissions in the extratropics and find that predicted emissions are seasonally biased in northern midlatitudes. Here, optimized fluxes exhibit a springtime peak consistent with the timing of spring fertilizer and manure application, soil thawing, and elevated soil moisture. Finally, the inversions reveal a major emission underestimate in the US Corn Belt in the bottom-up inventory used here. We extensively test the impact of initial conditions on the analysis and recommend formally optimizing the initial N[superscript 2]O distribution to avoid biasing the inferred fluxes. We find that the SVD-based approach provides a powerful framework for deriving emission information from N2O observations: by defining the optimal resolution of the solution based on the information content of the inversion, it provides spatial information that is lost when aggregating to political or geographic regions, while also providing more temporal information than a standard 4D-Var inversion. ; United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Grant NA13OAR4310086) ; United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Grant NA13OAR4310081)

We present top-down constraints on global monthly N2O emissions for 2011 from a multi-inversion approach and an ensemble of surface observations. The inversions employ the GEOS-Chem adjoint and an array of aggregation strategies to test how well current observations can constrain the spatial distribution of global N2O emissions. The strategies include (1) a standard 4D-Var inversion at native model resolution (4° × 5°), (2) an inversion for six continental and three ocean regions, and (3) a fast 4D-Var inversion based on a novel dimension reduction technique employing randomized singular value decomposition (SVD). The optimized global flux ranges from 15.9 TgNyr-1 (SVD-based inversion) to 17.5-17.7 TgNyr-1 (continental-scale, standard 4D-Var inversions), with the former better capturing the extratropical N2O background measured during the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaigns. We find that the tropics provide a greater contribution to the global N2O flux than is predicted by the prior bottom-up inventories, likely due to underestimated agricultural and oceanic emissions. We infer an overestimate of natural soil emissions in the extratropics and find that predicted emissions are seasonally biased in northern midlatitudes. Here, optimized fluxes exhibit a springtime peak consistent with the timing of spring fertilizer and manure application, soil thawing, and elevated soil moisture. Finally, the inversions reveal a major emission underestimate in the US Corn Belt in the bottom-up inventory used here. We extensively test the impact of initial conditions on the analysis and recommend formally optimizing the initial N2O distribution to avoid biasing the inferred fluxes. We find that the SVD-based approach provides a powerful framework for deriving emission information from N2O observations: by defining the optimal resolution of the solution based on the information content of the inversion, it provides spatial information that is lost when aggregating to political or geographic regions, while ...