The meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars consisted of a business session followed by a scientific session containing nine talks. The titles of the talks and their presenters are listed below. We plan to publish a series of articles containing summaries of these talks in Issue No. 40 of the Be Star Newsletter. This report contains an account of the announcements made during the business session, an update on a forthcoming IAU Symposium on active B stars, a report on the status of the Be Star Newsletter, the results of the 2009 election of the SOC for the Working Group for 2009-12, a listing of the Working Group bylaws that were recently adopted, and a list of the scientific talks that we presented at the meeting.

The formal origin of the IRWG occured at the Buenos Aires General Assembly, following a Joint Commission meeting at the IAU GA in Baltimore in 1988 that identified the problems with ground-based infrared photometry. The situation is summarized in Milone (1989). In short, the challenges involved how to explain the failure to achieve the milli-magnitude precision expected of infrared photometry and an apparent 3% limit on system transformability. The proposed solution was to redefine the broadband Johnson system, the passbands of which had proven so unsatisfactory that over time effectively different systems proliferated, although bearing the same JHKLMNQ designations; the new system needed to be better positioned and centered in the atmospheric windows of the Earth's atmosphere, and the variable water vapour content of the atmosphere needed to be measured in real time to better correct for atmospheric extinction.

The meeting started at 14h00. The president welcomed the participants to the business meeting of C27, and acknowledged the members of the Organizing Committee. Special thanks were expressed to the outgoing members: Conny Aerts, Peter Martinez, and Seetha Somasundaram.

The Business Meeting of IAU Commission 16 was held at the General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro on August 13, 2009. The meeting was called to order at 9:15am by Commission President, Régis Courtin, with 12 members present. Commission 16 now has 312 members, up from 271 at the last General Assembly. It is now the third largest Commission in Division III, after Commission 15 and Commission 51.

The business meeting started at 11h00, in the presence of 18 members, with a brief summary of the activities and achievements of the Working group during the triennium 2006-2009.

Astronomy in Brazil grew to around 500 astronomers in the last 30 years and is producing around 200 papers per year in refereed journals. Brazilian astronomers are participating in several international collaborations and the development of instrumentation is on the rise.

The meeting was attended by 5 members of the WG (E. Bowell, G. Consolmagno, R. Courtain, R. Lopez, R. Schulz) one Task Group member (J. Watanabe), and several guests from the CSBN and CBAT. It was decided at the beginning of the meeting that the attending members of the WGPSN would discuss matters, provide their opinion or vote, and then ask the other 8 formal members to do the same via email. As a consequence the following discussed items have been agreed by majority vote of the WG members.

We have for this General Assembly 25 new applications for C20 membership, which represents about 10% increase with respect to the total number of members. We are very satisfied with the increase rate of our commission membership, which reflects the high degree of activity in our field. Nevertheless we note that there are not many people involved in the commission business.

During the last business meeting of the WG on PN during the GA09, several topics were addressed. The renovation of the WG members was discussed. We agreed that members will be renewed during the PN IAU symposiums, and that the maximum duration of the term will be 10 years. It was decided that the next IAU PN Symp will be held in Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, in 2011. It seemed appropriate to hold the symposium in the Canary Islands in recognition of the new 10.4m GTC telescope recently inaugurated on La Palma and its importance to the field of planetary nebulae.

Division VII provides a forum for astronomers studying the Milky Way Galaxy and its constituents. Several meetings directly relevant to his subject were held at the General Assembly in Rio: IAU Symp. 262 Stellar Populations, IAU Symp. 265 Chemical Abundances in the Universe, IAU Symp. 266 Star Clusters, Joint Discussion 5 Modeling the Milky Way in the Era of Gaia, and Special Session 5 The Galactic Plane. Division VII therefore did not organize a separate science session at Rio, but business meetings were held for both the Division and for Commissions 33 and 37.

During the commission business session, the past President presented the new Organizing Committee which was selected by the OC through a e-mail vote conducted during the months before the Rio de Janeiro General Assembly. The new OC will consist of Ignasi Ribas (President), Mercedes Richards (Vice President), and Slavek Rucinski (Past President) with the members: David Bradstreet, Petr Harmanec, Janusz Kaluzny, Joanna Mikolajewska, Ulisse Munari, Panos Niarchos, Katalin Olah, Theo Pribulla, Colin Scarfe and Guillermo Torres.

The program of IAU scientific meetings is one of the most important means by which the IAU pursues its goal of promoting astronomy through international collaboration. A large fraction of the Union's budget is devoted to the support of these IAU scientific meetings. The IAU Executive Committee (EC) places great emphasis on maintaining high scientific standards, coverage of a balanced spectrum of topics, and an appropriately broad and international flavour for the program of IAU meetings. In that respect, the ICSU rules on non-discrimination in the access of qualified scientists from all parts of the world to any IAU meeting apply. The ICSU rules on non-discrimination are described in the document “Freedom, Responsibility and Universality of Science”, available on <http://www.icsu.org/Gestion/img/ICSU_DOC_DOWNLOAD/2205_DD_FILE_Freedom_Responsibility_Universality_of_Science_booklet.pdf.>

The President of the IAU, Dr. Catherine Cesarsky, welcomed the delegates and members to the 2nd session of the XXVII General Assembly. The delegates confirmed the agenda of the meeting as in the Program Book. The President invited the General Secretary, Dr. Karel A. van der Hucht, to present the first item.

The past President of Division XII, Malcolm Smith, took the chair of the business meeting of C50, in the absence of the past President of C50, Richard Wainscoat. He described the procedure of the election in 2006 of the then-time vice-president of C50, Richard Wainscoat, as President of C50, after the untimely deatch of the then-time C50 President, Hugo Schwarz. He also described the procedure for electing the incoming OC members and officers.

This report is on activities of the Division at the General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro. Summaries of scientific activities over the past triennium have been published in Transactions A, see Melrose et al. (2008), Klimchuk et al. (2008), Martinez Pillet et al. (2008) and Bougeret et al. (2008). The business meeting of the three Commissions were incorporated into the business meeting of the Division. This report is based in part on minutes of the business meeting, provided by the Secretary of the Division, Lidia van Driel-Gesztelyi, and it also includes reports provided by the Presidents of the Commissions (C10, C12, C49) and of the Working Groups (WGs) in the Division.

The business meeting of Division X in the IAU 2009GA took place in three sessions during the day of August 6, 2009. The meeting, being well attended, started with the approval for the meeting agenda. Then the triennium reports were made in the first session by the president of Division X, Ren-Dong Nan, and by the chairs of three working groups: “Historic Radio Astronomy WG” by Wayne Orchiston, “Astrophysically Important Lines WG” by Masatoshi Ohishi, and “Global VLBI WG” by Tasso Tzioumis (proxy chair appointed by Steven Tingay). Afterwards, a dozen reports from observatories and worldwide significant projects have been presented in the second session. Business meeting of “Interference Mitigation WG” was located in the third session.

The IAU Commission 19 meeting during the XXVII IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro was held on Wednesday 5 August 2009, sessions 3 (14:00–15:30) and 4 (16:00–17:30). It was attended by about 40 participants. The meeting was split into three sessions.