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The article comments on a case related to human rights in Northern Ireland. An application was brought by the accused alleging that her detention was a deprivation of liberty contrary to Article 5(3) of the European Convention on Human Rights. It states that the law on bail in the nation was governed by the common law. It also notes that the reasons given by the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal did not mention issues related to the liberty or presumption of innocence of the accused.

Constructed wetlands (CWs) have been used to treat agricultural effluents with varying success especially with respect to their operational efficiency in winter and ability to retain phosphorus. Dirty water (DW) from dairy farms is a mixture of manure contaminated runoff and milk parlour washings with a highly polluting biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) < or =3000 mg/L. The initial performance a CW of a 1.2 ha horizontal flow CW consisting of five ponds in series designed to treat DW from a dairy unit was assessed over four years. Ponds were earth-lined and shallow (0.3 m) with a water residence time of 100 days and planted with five species of emergent macrophytes. In comparison to CW inflow, annual reductions were as follows: BOD 99%, P 95% and N 92.8%. Coliforms were reduced by a 10(-5) factor to natural levels. From May to October there was little CW discharge due to evaporative losses. Final effluent quality was poorest in February but remained within a regulatory effluent standard for BOD of 40 mg/L. If the CW had only four ponds (25% less surface area) effluent would have failed the BOD standard in three years.

One hundred and eighty new women patients attending a sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic answered the Eysenck personality questionnaire (EPQ) which measures psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism, and a tendency to "fake good". These personality scores were correlated with the patients' attendance or non-attendance for their first review appointments. The results showed that the mean psychoticism scale scores of the 41 non-attenders was significantly higher than that of the 139 who kept their first appointment. This relation was confirmed using point biserial correlations. The mean scores of non-attenders on the other three EPQ scales were not significantly different from those of attenders, and none of the correlations between the other EPQ scales and this behavioural criterion was significant. The psychoticism scale is tentatively recommended for identifying women patients who may need special counselling about the importance of keeping their first review appointment.