New Zealand was the first English-speaking nation in the world to make corporal punishment of a child illegal. In New Zealand, ranked among the worst in the OECD countries for child maltreatment death, the incidence was five times higher among children below the age of 1 compared to Sweden, where corporal punishment has been forbidden since 1979. (The Swedish Corporal Punishment Ban was passed in 1979 – 10 years before the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.) There are still supporters of corporal punishment who continue to advocate against the law. Patrick Kelly reviews the present situation in New Zealand (see pp. 14–20). Guidelines for the care of extremely preterm infants have been issued by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the United Kingdom. Donovan Duffy and Peter Reynolds have studied how these recommendations have been implicated. Nearly half of all paediatricians would deny parental request for comfort care, which is against the recommendations by the Nuffield Council. The authors conclude that there is a lack of awareness of national recommendations and local guidelines (see pp. 42–46). Paracetamol is widely used to suppress fever in infants as well as adults. Alarm reports have been presented showing increased childhood allergy and asthma after paracetamol treatment. Egil Bakkeheim et al. have now studied the effect of paracetamol exposure in pregnancy and until 6 months of age in infants. Maternal paracetamol use as well as paracetamol to infants increases the risk of childhood allergy more than twofold. Girls seem to be more affected (pp. 12–13). See also commentary by Göran Wennergren, who suggests that paracetamol should nevertheless be given when there is a clear indication, e.g. when the child has fever affecting the general condition or needs pain relief. He thinks that causality is still uncertain. The discovery of water channels was a typical serendipity finding by Peter Agre, who was studying blood corpuscles for other reasons. This finding was a real shift of paradigm and also resulted in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. See review by Rolf Zetterström (pp. 143–146). Aquaporins can now also be determined in the urine of infants. The levels were found to be lower after treatment with prostaglandin inhibitor ibuprofen, although there was no correlation with urinary osmolality. See article by Yanhong Li et al. (pp. 56–66). Acta Paediatrica is one of the oldest paediatric journals. It was founded in 1921. However, this issue is the first one of volume 100. This is because of the fact that many academic theses and proceedings were published as supplements of Acta Paediatrica. The journal was originally Scandinavian with contributions merely from the Nordic countries but since 1992, it is now a truly international journal. Some articles of great clinical impact published in Acta Paediatrica will be summarized in coming issues of the journal. See the editorial by Rolf Zetterström, Editor-in-Chief 1965–2005 (pp. 3–4).