Secrets of the Astute Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes, Linnaeus, 1758): An Inside-Ecosystem Secret Agent Serving One Health

An ecosystem’s health is based on a delicate balance between human, nonhuman animal, and environmental health. Any factor that leads to an imbalance in one of the components results in disease. There are several bioindicators that allow us to evaluate the status of ecosystems. The red fox (Vulpes vulpes, Linnaeus, 1758) has the widest world distribution among mammals. It is highly adaptable, lives in rural and urban areas, and has a greatly diverse diet. Being susceptible to environmental pollution and zoonotic agents, red foxes may act as sentinels to detect environmental contaminants, climatic changes and to prevent and control outbreaks of emerging or re-emerging zoonosis. This paper aims to compile the latest information that is related to the red fox as a sentinel of human, animal, and environmental health.

Abbot Edmund Ford, secret agent

Hugh Edmund Ford (1851–1930), first abbot of the English Benedictine monastery at Downside in Somerset, had a reputation, especially in monastic circles, as a scholarly and reforming monk. He is much less well known than his contemporary confrères, Cardinal Aidan Gasquet and Abbot Cuthbert Butler, lacking Gasquet’s public profile and Butler’s list of much-respected publications. Ford’s considerable political and diplomatic skills were honed in the promotion of a monastic reform movement which transformed the English Benedictine Congregation. He travelled widely on monastic business and also on account of his always delicate health. More surprisingly, in 1918, he acted as an agent for the British government on a mission to neutral Switzerland, where the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln provided a refuge for many Germans displaced from Rome when Italy entered the Great War in 1915. Ford made use of the various ecclesiastical networks available to him,including the Benedictine Confederation centred on S. Anselmo in Rome and connections made through the school at Downside. This article places Ford in these and other Catholic networks and demonstrates how they were put to use in the Allied cause during the First World War.

Armed with Madness

Increased attention to psychology in the modern novel afforded expanded thematic access to aberrant states of consciousness. In a way, this returned the novel to its prototype in Don Quixote, and rejuvenated awareness of depicted mania in realist novels. Eight novels are profiled here (by Fowles, Fitzgerald, Lowry, Dostoyevsky, Canetti, Mann, Conrad, and Woolf) in order to examine narrative strategies for exploring madness, and implicating the reader’s consciousness as a participatory component of mental aberration. This approach counters Georg Lukács’s contention that depictions of mental aberration violated the novel’s obligation to depict normality. Modernism, he claimed, privileged distortion, but the novelists examined here suggest that the historical pressures of modernity provided distortions exceeding any particular imaginative license. These pressures are acutely rendered in portraits of domesticity in The Secret Agent by Conrad and Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, two among many such reckonings with geo-political trauma casting a shadow over private life.

The Light of the Lux

This chapter talks about Marshal Tito's return to Moscow in early 1935 after having successfully carried out the missions in Vienna and Ljubljana. It recounts Tito's arrival in the Soviet Union in February 1935, after having been co-opted in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and elected to the Politburo. It also analyzes Tito's work in the special “cadre department” of the Communist International (KI), which belonged to the Soviet intelligence apparatus. The chapter describes Tito as a military-trained cadre, a specialist in secret agent activities, organizing secretary, and underground activist. It looks at the structure of the apparatus and communist parties of the Comintern, which are considered as a visible political manifestation.

THE PERILS OF BEING A SPY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CASINO ROYALE (2006) THEME SONG YOU KNOW MY NAME

The present article offers a critical analysis of the Theme Song You Know My Name that accompanies and serves as the title song for the 21st James Bond film Casino Royale (2006). A reboot of the Bond franchise, Casino is credited with introducing more physical and psychological realism to the series compared to previous instalments. As such, the song paints a picture of the constant perils that characterize the life of a secret agent along with the personal sacrifices (s)he needs to make in service of country and the greater good. Moreover, it raises pertinent questions regarding the psychological effects of taking lives, whether in self-defense or for safety and security of the country. The themes of death, killing, failure, betrayal, and the need of sacrifices on part of the agent are explored through an interesting blending or interweaving of ‘voices’ of past and prospective secret agents along with warnings from Fate and Bond’s own reply. The analysis goes on to reveal the depth and richness of meaning in lyrics which at first sight or hearing might be considered devoid of emotional or psychological depth and realism.

Arabidopsis ACINUS is O-glycosylated and regulates transcription and alternative splicing of regulators of reproductive transitions

O-GlcNAc modification plays important roles in metabolic regulation of cellular status. Two homologs of O-GlcNAc transferase, SECRET AGENT (SEC) and SPINDLY (SPY), which have O-GlcNAc and O-fucosyl transferase activities, respectively, are essential in Arabidopsis but have largely unknown cellular targets. Here we show that AtACINUS is O-GlcNAcylated and O-fucosylated and mediates regulation of transcription, alternative splicing (AS), and developmental transitions. Knocking-out both AtACINUS and its distant paralog AtPININ causes severe growth defects including dwarfism, delayed seed germination and flowering, and abscisic acid (ABA) hypersensitivity. Transcriptomic and protein-DNA/RNA interaction analyses demonstrate that AtACINUS represses transcription of the flowering repressor FLC and mediates AS of ABH1 and HAB1, two negative regulators of ABA signaling. Proteomic analyses show AtACINUS’s O-GlcNAcylation, O-fucosylation, and association with splicing factors, chromatin remodelers, and transcriptional regulators. Some AtACINUS/AtPININ-dependent AS events are altered in the sec and spy mutants, demonstrating a function of O-glycosylation in regulating alternative RNA splicing.