No abstract

Crime and violence threatens the lives of millions of citizens living in Latin America, a region that hosts the infamously high crime capitals of the world. A fundamental feature of this dire condition is institutional corruption and violence. This brief assesses the effectiveness of a gendarmerie policy in Latin America, with perspectives from the military police of Brazil and the recently instated 'National Gendarmerie' in Mexico. These perspectives indicate that although military policing is sufficient to combat large-scale crimes such as drug trafficking, the empirical evidence of continued organised crime and the predisposition to violence has created a backlash threat to civilian security. This policy brief identifies the institutional challenges that prevent a gendarmerie from functioning compatibly within existing fragile democracies of Latin America. In the way it is systematically embedded within government and extrajudicial institutions, organised crime is easily concealable in Latin America, and greatly challenging to scrutinise. This policy brief recommends the professionalisation of the police force, institutional reform to improve accountability of the state, and the reduction of social inequalities as paramount to improving public security. In essence, the dynamic of a monolithic military elite must be destabilised to alleviate social inequalities that trap a particular group of society in an endless cycle of crime and violence.

It is generally well-known that the medical school curriculum is becoming increasingly busy, more so with the COVID-19 pandemic. By itself, urology education will need to adapt to meet the changing circumstances, but it remains uncertain on how best to address this need. In this article, we will discuss several methods that will allow institutions to ease and overcome pressures using modern educational techniques. These methods can be classified based on the aspect of the curriculum they seek to improve, namely core-curricular teaching, anatomy training, virtual reality, and electronic learning opportunities. We anticipate that the implementation of these suggestions will enhance medical school teaching.

Germline epigenetic programming, including genomic imprinting, substantially influences offspring development. Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) plays an important role in Histone 3 Lysine 27 trimethylation (H3K27me3)-dependent imprinting, loss of which leads to placental hyperplasia in mammalian offspring generated by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). In this study, we show that offspring from mouse oocytes lacking the Polycomb protein Embryonic Ectoderm Development (EED) were initially growth restricted, characterised by low blastocyst cell counts and substantial mid-gestational developmental delay. However, this initial delay was remediated by striking late-gestational placental hyperplasia, closely followed by rapid fetal catch-up growth and subsequent overgrowth. Remodelling of the placenta involved expansion of fetal and maternal tissues, including conspicuous expansion of the glycogen enriched cell population in the junctional zone. Genome-wide analyses identified extensive transcriptional dysregulation in affected placentas, including a range of imprinted and non-imprinted genes. Our data demonstrate that altered PRC2-dependent programming in the oocyte elicits complex program of fetal growth restriction followed by placental hyperplasia, which drives catchup growth that ultimately results in perinatal offspring overgrowth.