This article reviews existing methods employed by various countries in the use of administrative data to make adjustments to, or set plausibility ranges around, population estimates or census data. The work was carried out to explore techniques that could be used by the ONS in application with population estimates. An annex also covers benefits and difficulties that have been experienced when producing a register-based census, or population estimates.

Despite the improved international architecture for the prediction, prevention, and punishment of mass atrocities since the Rwandan Genocide 20 years ago, the fate of Sudan’s Nuba people has been overlooked. Since May 2011, the Nuba have been under attack by the Sudanese regime, which has been using the same tactics it employed to devastating effect during the 1990s. However, problematic Arab-Islamic views of the Nuba go back centuries, to the slave trade. The international community’s attention to continuing human rights abuses in the Nuba Mountains has been inconsistent and easily deflected onto low-level hostilities between South Sudan and Sudan. Meanwhile, Sudan has rallied regional leaders, defying the International Criminal Court’s indictment of President al-Bashir. The United States and United Kingdom, guarantors of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), have declined to press Khartoum to fulfill its obligations under the CPA, to enact constitutional reform, or to cease bombing the Nuba for fear that a Sudanese Arab Spring might bring unknown actors to power in Khartoum.

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As discussed in other articles in this issue, chemical emergence may have led to the appearance of life on the pre-biotic earth, but it is even more obviously clear that emergence continues in living systems, producing complex phenomena such as ordering, biorhythms and even, possibly, consciousness. The role of continuing emergence in living systems is reviewed here with special attention to the Peroxidase–Oxidase reaction and neurochemical systems. For the latter, we review the role of subnetwork dynamics in epilepsy and an intriguing new possiblity that calcium waves in fields of astrocytes in the brain may be involved in the spread of epileptic seizures.