Suchergebnisse

The overall objectives of meat inspection are to contribute to food safety, animal welfare, and animal health. In the European Union (EU), there is a request for a modernised meat inspection system that addresses these objectives in a more valid, feasible and cost-effective way than does the traditional system. One part of the modernisation deals with the coding system to register meat inspection findings. Although unified standards are set at the EU level for judgement criteria regarding fitness of meat for consumption, different national systems are in force. The question is the extent of the differences and whether there is a basis for harmonisation. To investigate this, information was gathered about the code systems in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Spain. Moreover, meat inspection data covering pigs slaughtered in 2019 were collected. A comparison of the number of codes available, the terminology and the frequencies of the findings registered was undertaken. Codes with a similar meaning were grouped. Hereby, two lists were compiled showing the most common codes leading to total and to partial condemnation. Substantial variations in the percentage of condemned pigs and in the terms used were identified, and possible reasons behind this are discussed. Moreover, a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT)-like analysis was applied to the coding systems. Finally, the reasons for unfitness of meat given in the EU Food Inspection Regulation 2019/627 were compared to the national code lists. The results show the systems in force varied substantially, and each system had its advantages and disadvantages. The diverse terminology observed made it a challenge to compare data between countries. Development of harmonised terminology for meat inspection findings is suggested, enabling comparison of data between abattoirs, regions, and countries, while respecting the national epidemiological situation, the local food safety culture, and the trade agreements in force. ; Peer reviewed

ABSTRATC: In contrast to the increasing aquaculture production of mussels worldwide, production in the European Union (EU) has shown a decreasing trend over the last two decades. Aquaculture production of mussels in the EU peaked in the late 1990s at more than 600 000 tonnes; by 2016, production volume had dropped by 20% to 480 000 tonnes. As mussel production represents more than 1/3 of EU aquaculture production, this decrease is an important contributor to the stagnation of EU aquaculture. Previous studies have suggested diseases, lack of mussel seed (spat), and low profitability as the main causes of the EU mussel production decrease. In this study, we investigate how economic and environmental factors have contributed. Moreover, we examine if the different mussel production techniques (raft, longline, on-bottom, and "bouchot") have been differently affected, by analysing the economic performance and cost structure evolution for the period 2010-2016. We complement these results with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of the EU mussel sector based on expert knowledge.

This paper aims to investigate the concept, context and socio-economic consequences of fiscal competition in the integrated economic space of EMU in completion, to pinpoint the positive and negative factors at work via a case study of the Benelux countries – both founder members of the EU and pioneers of EMU – and to examine the impact on European and international regulations in the field. In particular, it will endeavour to provide a comprehensive interpretation of fiscal policy in the Benelux countries via a comparative approach and from a historical perspective. It will look at the development of respective domestic fiscal policies, driven by national interests and by membership of a Community that is subject to requirements in terms of harmonisation and taxation, but also by constant contact (and frequent clashes) with the multilateral international environment.

Abstract The presence of urban green spaces (UGS) increases the human's contact with nature and provides numerous benefits to the society and the local environment. In this way, analyzing, planning and stimulating the implementation of UGS in cities is a fundamental action to improve the life quality of urban society. In this context, the aim was to analyze the situation and distribution of the green spaces of the universities cities of Lavras, Minas Gerais State (Brazil) and Newark, Delaware (USA). For data collection, researches performed field visits and used aerial photography to survey and analysis before calculating indicators including green area index (GAI) and green space ratio (GSR). The city of Lavras has a GAI of 0.54 m2 inh-1. The GSR value was 0.29%, not meeting the minimum of 5% required by local municipal law. Furthermore, there is a bad distribution of UGSs in the urban framework. However, in Newark, the distribution of UGSs is homogeneous and covers all regions of the city. The calculated GAI was 50.2 m² inh-1 and the GSR has met the 7% minimum required by its Newark Municipal Law. When comparing the two cities, in different countries and conditions it is concluded that Newark (DE) presents UGS indicators, GAI (m² inh-1) and GSR (%), higher than the values obtained in Lavras (MG), indicating the need for Government actions to increase these values.

A policy change in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) provides us with a unique opportunity to measure the impact of carbon pricing on aviation, the most climate-intensive mode of transport. We implement a difference-in-differences strategy on a sample based on all flights within Europe from 2010 to 2016 to examine the causal impact of the EU ETS on emissions and supply. We find that the EU ETS reduced emissions by 4.7% in the regulated routes relative to the counterfactual. When we restrict the sample to short-haul flights, routes on which competition from other means of transport may exist (less than 1,000 km), the reduction in emissions is 10.7%. Finally, the reduction in emissions is also high for low-cost airlines (−11%) but it is not statistically significant for network airlines. In sum, the EU ETS has helped to mitigate emission growth by 3 Mt CO2 per year during the period analyzed, but not to reduce absolute emissions in the sector, as needed.

This PhD thesis seeks to contribute towards closing a research gap in the knowledge about the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) as an African Union (AU) and United Nations (UN) authorised peace enforcement operation. In so doing, the study covers the period 2007-2017 and attempts to fulfil three broad objectives. Firstly, it examines the implementation of AMISOM mandate amidst foreign interventions and their underlying implications for the strategic AU-UN partnership. Secondly, the thesis attempts to examine any significant changes towards the implementation of the mandate by assessing the evolution of AMISOM's decade-long presence in Somalia. The analysis focuses on whether AMISOM has morphed into an exercise in self-interest or still pursuing the shared strategic objectives for which it was established. Thirdly, the study confronts the theoretical idea imposed by Western ideologies to export liberal democracy through peacekeeping operations, especially as it relates to regional peace operations. In a sense, it contrasts between liberalism and realism vis-à-vis peacekeeping operations in order to account for the case of AMISOM given the involvement of frontline states whose realist strategy in Somalia has presented a major dilemma. Given the latitude, the study adopts an interdisciplinary and mixed methodology approach in its analysis of foreign interventions and the pursuit of illicit commercial interests in a conflict economy milieu marked by attempts to counter al-Shabaab in Somalia. As a qualitative research, the study relies on primary and secondary data sources including relevant articles and journals, although aspects of quantitative method have also been used where appropriate. ; Esta tese de doutoramento visa contribuir para o preenchimento de uma lacuna de pesquisa no conhecimento sobre a Missão da União Africana na Somália (AMISOM), como uma operação de imposição da paz autorizada pela União Africana (UA) e endossada pelas Nações Unidas (ONU). O âmbito do estudo abrange o período 2007- 2017 e ambiciona cumprir três objetivos principais. Em primeiro lugar, examina a implementação do mandato da AMISOM no meio de intervenções estrangeiras e as suas implicações subjacentes para a parceria estratégica UA-ONU. Em segundo lugar, a tese tenta examinar quaisquer mudanças significativas em relação à implementação do mandato, avaliando a evolução da AMISOM após uma década de presença na Somália. A análise concentra-se em determinar se a AMISOM se transformou num exercício em interesse próprio ou se ainda persegue os objetivos estratégicos comuns para os quais foi estabelecida. Em terceiro lugar, o estudo confronta a ideia teórica imposta pelas ideologias ocidentais para exportar a democracia liberal por meio de operações de manutenção da paz, especialmente no que se refere as operações de paz regionais. Em certo sentido, contrasta entre liberalismo e realismo face às operações de manutenção da paz com vista a contextualizar o caso da AMISOM, dado o envolvimento dos Estados da linha da frente, cuja estratégia realista na Somália apresentou um grande dilema. Dada a latitude, o estudo adopta uma abordagem metodológica interdisciplinar e mista, na análise de intervenções estrangeiras e a prossecução de interesses comerciais ilícitos, num ambiente de economia de guerra marcado por tentativas de conter o "al-Shabaab" na Somália. Tratando-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa, o estudo baseia-se principalmente em fontes primárias e secundárias, incluindo artigos e periódicos relevantes, embora alguns aspectos do método quantitativo tenham sido também aplicados.

1 sheet ([1] p.) ; A proclamation against relieving the King of Spain's rebels. ; Publication date from STC. ; At foot of sheet: Cum priuilegio Regiæ Maiestatis. ; Reproduction of the original in the Bodleian Library.

Presenting an analysis of higher education in eight countries in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, Degrees of Dignity works to dismantle narratives of crisis and assert approaches to institutional reform. Drawing on policy documents, media narratives, interviews, and personal experiences, Elizabeth Buckner explores how apolitical external reform models become contested and modified by local actors in ways that are simultaneously complicated, surprising, and even inspiring. Degrees of Dignity documents how the global discourses of neoliberalism have legitimized specific policy models for higher education reform in the Arab world, including quality assurance, privatization, and internationalization. Through a multi-level and comparative analysis, this book examines how policy models are implemented, with often complex results, in countries throughout the region. Ultimately, Degrees of Dignity calls on the field of higher education development to rethink current approaches to higher education reform: rather than viewing the Arab world as a site for intervention, it argues that the Arab world can act as a source for insight on resilient higher education systems. ; This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the top destination for Russian food exports, grains in particular. Focusing on Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, this chapter shows that Russia's food trade with MENA countries is strongly affected by bilateral political relations. Russia banned most food imports from Turkey over a political conflict in 2016. In the same year, improved intergovernmental cooperation with Saudi Arabia resulted in a diversification of Russia's food exports to the Gulf country, and in 2019, Iran's accession to the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) led to increasing food trade with Russia. Food imports in MENA countries are usually managed by powerful state trading enterprises (STEs), which recurrently disapprove food products originating from Russia based on non-adherence to food quality standards. Our analysis shows that Russia is successfully working to open additional destination markets, while simultaneously impeding imports of food products that it aims to produce domestically.

APPROVED ; The work which follows examines the process by which private actors in the digital market are redefining fundamental rights through their contractual terms and practical operation. The argument is allied to works which consider ?digital constitutionalism,? the idea that private actors in the digital market are increasingly displaying constitutional features through their contractual terms and documents. Unlike a majority of work in the area of digital constitutionalism the work does not argue that private actors setting rights based standards represents a positive development. Rather, the work argues that private actors, through their re-definition of public, normative standards are generating a body of rules and practices which have displaced democratically decided rights standards with negative consequences for individual autonomy and the Rule of Law. The work argues that this process has been enabled by three features of EU law and policy. The first is an approach of functional equivalence to laws governing the digital market. In accordance with this approach the digital market has been treated as equivalent to traditional markets and its participants are viewed as requiring no additional or supplementary protections or regulations. Of particular significance in functionally equivalent attitudes to the digital market is the Union?s deference to freedom of contract as part of an ordoliberal attitude to market regulation. While this attitude is now beginning to erode (to some extent) in the context of data protection it remains the dominant regulatory approach of the European Union in the digital market. The second feature, not unrelated to the first, is the Union?s preference for economic rather than socially orientated standards and protections in it policies as well as its secondary laws. As part of this preference, when fundamental rights cross the Rubicon from vertically enforced constitutional protections to horizontally enforceable legislative ones their content is transmuted in a manner which favours their economic over socially oriented aspects. The third feature, is what is referred to within the work as the Union?s brittle constitutionalism ? that is the Union?s hesitant and incomplete articulation of and commitment to rights enforcement. This feature is the result in part of the Union?s ambiguous and at times hostile attitude to the development of fundamental rights policy. The work examines the impact of these trends and the rise of private policy they have generated on the rights to privacy and property under the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

[19] p. ; Signatures: A⁸ B². ; Reproduction of original in the Lambeth Palace Library.

In September 2015, the Volkswagen Group (VW) admitted the use of 'defeat devices' designed to lower emissions measured during VW vehicle testing for regulatory purposes. Globally, 11 million cars sold between 2008 and 2015 are affected, including about 2.6 million in Germany. On-road emissions tests have yielded mean on-road NO[subscript x] emissions for these cars of 0.85 g km[superscript −1], over four times the applicable European limit of 0.18 g km[superscript −1]. This study estimates the human health impacts and costs associated with excess emissions from VW cars driven in Germany. A distribution of on-road emissions factors is derived from existing measurements and combined with sales data and a vehicle fleet model to estimate total excess NO[subscript x] emissions. These emissions are distributed on a 25 by 28 km grid covering Europe, using the German Federal Environmental Protection Agency's (UBA) estimate of the spatial distribution of NO[subscript x] emissions from passenger cars in Germany. We use the GEOS-Chem chemistry-transport model to predict the corresponding increase in population exposure to fine particulate matter and ozone in the European Union, Switzerland, and Norway, and a set of concentration-response functions to estimate mortality outcomes in terms of early deaths and of life-years lost. Integrated over the sales period (2008–2015), we estimate median mortality impacts from VW excess emissions in Germany to be 1200 premature deaths in Europe, corresponding to 13 000 life-years lost and 1.9 billion EUR in costs associated with life-years lost. Approximately 60% of mortality costs occur outside Germany. For the current fleet, we estimate that if on-road emissions for all affected VW vehicles in Germany are reduced to the applicable European emission standard by the end of 2017, this would avert 29 000 life-years lost and 4.1 billion 2015 EUR in health costs (median estimates) relative to a counterfactual case with no recall. ; Germany. Umweltbundesamt (UBA)

In its 2009 decision in Infopaq (C-5/08), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) achieved a landmark result: the de facto, horizontal harmonization of the originality requirement. After that, nothing could stay the same. After providing an overview of the harmonization process in the copyright field over the past 30 years or so and, with that, the environment in which Infopaq came to be, this chapter considers Infopaq and the expansive effect of subsequent case law on other copyright subsistence requirements. The analysis also notes how the eventual outcome of Cofemel (C-683/17), insofar as works of applied art are concerned, is perfectly in line with such a jurisprudence. The chapter further considers the legal and institutional difficulties that such a string of CJEU decisions has given rise to and is yet to resolve before concluding that further questions are likely to be posed to the CJEU in the not too distant future. In other words: the construction of EU copyright is far from over.

The work needed to mechanically drive molten metal into a porous solid preform when producing a composite material by infiltration can significantly exceed the energy change required for thermodynamically reversible infiltration. We measure, by quantitative metallographic analysis of partially infiltrated, particle- or fiber-based non-metallic preforms, the evolution with saturation of the three interfaces present during the process. Results show that irreversible energy losses in the infiltration of alumina preforms by molten copper, aluminium or aluminium-tin alloy cannot be ascribed to the creation of liquid meniscus surface area at intermediate metal saturation. This result agrees with similar observations in soil science and gives experimental confirmation of predictions from a recent simulation of capillarity-dominated metal infiltration [Acta Mater., vol. 210, 2021, 116831]. ; This work was chiefly sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS), Project No. 200021 149899. J.M. Molina-Jordá acknowledges funding from the Spanish "Agencia Estatal de Investigación" (AEI) and the European Union (FEDER funds) through grant MAT2016-77742-C2-2-P.

Solar cells with the structure ZnO/CdS/Cu2ZnSnSe4/Mo/glass were studied by photoluminescence (PL) before and after irradiation with a dose of 1.8 × 1015 cm−2 and then 5.4 × 1015 cm−2 of 10 MeV electrons carried out at 77 K in liquid nitrogen bath. The low temperature PL spectra before irradiation revealed two bands, a broad and asymmetrical dominant band at 0.94 eV from the CZTSe layer and a lower intensity high energy band (HEB) at 1.3 eV, generated by defects in the CdS buffer layer. Analysis of the excitation intensity and temperature dependencies suggested that the dominant band is free-to-bound (FB): the recombination of free electrons with holes localised at acceptors whose energy levels are affected by potential fluctuations of the valence band due to high concentrations of randomly distributed charged defects. Irradiation did not induce any new band in the examined spectral range (from 0.5 μm to 1.65 μm) but reduced the intensity of both bands in the PL spectra measured at 77 K without warming the cells. The higher the dose the greater was the reduction. After this the cells were warmed to 300 K and moved to a variable temperature cryostat to measure temperature dependencies of the PL spectra. After irradiation the red shift rate of the FB band with temperature rise was found to increase. Electrons displace atoms in the lattice creating primary defects: interstitials and vacancies. These defects recombine during and shortly after irradiation forming secondary defect complexes which work as deep non-radiative traps of charge carriers reducing the PL intensity and increasing the rate of the temperature red shift. Irradiation did not affect the mean depth of the band tails estimated from the shape of the low energy side of the dominant PL band. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd ; European Commission, EC ; European Regional Development Fund, FEDER: TK141 ; Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation: АААА-А18-118020290104-2 ; The research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (topic "Spin" № АААА-А18-118020290104-2 ) and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund, Project TK141 .