The doctrine of the margin of appreciation as a tool of relativisation of freedom of religion.

The objective of the paper is to determine the implications for the interpretation of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights resulting from the Court’s affording to national authorities the wide margin of appreciation when deciding whether in a given case there is a need to limit the exercise of freedom of religion. The use of the doctrine of margin of appreciation in such cases is justified both by the lack of an all-European consensus as to the proper model of relations between the state and religious communities and by divergences of views and traditions concerning the importance and impact of religion in the society. In consequence, the Court holds that restrictions on freedom of religion on grounds of the principle of secularism, which in some countries has a rank of a constitutional principle of the political system, are compatible with the Convention. This is the case eve where establishing a link between the restriction of this kind with any of the legitimate aims outlined in Article 9.2 of the Convention is highly disputable, if not impossible. Moreover, the excessive use of the doctrine of margin of appreciation in this context makes the protection level of freedom of religion contingent on prevailing ( not always rational and free from prejudice )views and attitudes towards some forms of manifestation of religious beliefs. This outcome, however, is difficult to reconcile with values underlying the Convention and the need for minority protection

You Won't be My Neighbor: Opposition to High Density Development

Virtually every city in the United States bans multifamily homes in at least some neighborhoods, and in many cities most residential land is restricted to single family homes. This is the case even though many metropolitan areas are facing skyrocketing housing costs and increased environmental degradation that could be alleviated by denser housing supply. Some scholars have argued that an unrepresentative set of vocal development opponents are the culprits behind this collective action failure. Yet, recent work suggests that opposition to density may be widespread. In this research note, I use a conjoint survey experiment to provide evidence that preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous. Across every demographic subgroup analyzed, respondents preferred single-family home developments by a wide margin. Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability.

Excision Margin and Survival in Patients with High-Risk, Primary Cutaneous Melanoma: A Retrospective Study Based on Surveillance Epidemiology and End Result (SEER) Database

<b><i>Objectives:</i></b> The optimal excision margin of primary cutaneous melanoma greater than 2 mm in thickness is still a controversial topic. The aim of the present study was to compare the long-term survival between narrow and wide excision margins in the surgical excision of patients with high-risk primary melanoma. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We chose the patients with primary melanoma of the skin thicker than 2 mm in The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. Patients were divided into a narrow margin group (1–2 cm) and a wide margin group (&#x3e;2 cm) according to the resection margin information. The primary outcome was overall survival and disease-specific survival. <b><i>Results:</i></b> From 2004 to 2015, a total of 2,772 patients diagnosed as having melanoma of the skin were recruited into this study and were assigned to the narrow margin group (<i>n</i> = 1996) and the wide margin group (<i>n</i> = 776). A total of 1,098 patients died during the follow-up, and 681 of these were due to melanoma. There were 779 deaths in the narrow margin group and 319 deaths in the wide margin group (HR: 0.96, 95% CI: 0.84–1.10, <i>p</i> = 0.26). A total of 490 melanoma-specific deaths were reported in the narrow margin group and 191 were reported in the wide margin group (HR: 1.01, 95% CI: 0.85–1.19, <i>p</i> = 0.91). <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Wider excision margin greater than 2 cm did not provide any additional therapeutic benefits compared to narrow excision margin between 1 and 2 cm. A 2-cm margin is adequate and safe for high-risk primary melanoma of the skin thicker than 2 mm.

Wearing religious symbols at work in the ECtHR’s judgments

Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience and religion are essential human rights which are protected, among others, by the ECHR. The number of the European Court of Human Rights’ decisions on wearing religious symbols (in a form of a Christian cross, a Muslim veil or a headscarf) at work remains small. Nevertheless, some interpretation guidelines can be identified in particular on how to ensure that an interference with Article 9 of the 1950 Convention has to be proportionate and “necessary in a democratic society”. Owing to a lack of European-wide consensus on states’ approach to religion, a state exercises a wide margin of appreciation. Nevertheless, a state always has to take into account rights of the others, in particular those who are dependent on (e.g. patience at hospital) employees or are prone to an impact of employees (e.g. pupils and students). Thus, dress codes confirming a secular nature and religious neutrality of a State not always violates Article 9 of the ECHR. Rules apply mainly to public bodies, but a state liability may also be found to private company’s cases. Details of each employment contract and of the employee’s conduct have to be always analysed. The dress code rules applied to man and women and irrespective to their religion, so the Court has not declared it to be discriminatory because of sex or religion of employees.

Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor of the nose with coincidental HIV infection: Management challenges in limited resource setting

Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor (MPNST) is an uncommon soft-tissue sarcoma, with origin from the peripheral nerves or somatic tissues associated with nerve sheath. This tumor rarely affects the nose. The clinicopathological presentations vary from one case to another and depend on cells of origin. Hence, the diagnosis is often difficult. We report a 36-year-old woman who presented in our facility with progressive nasal swelling, facial deformity, and mucopurulent rhinorrhea of 3 years duration. Examination revealed a significant facial disfigurement. She was also found to be seropositive. Computerized tomography scan of paranasal sinuses showed an expansile, subtle enhancing, predominantly low-density mass, with area of air density within it, completely occupying the nasal cavity. No calcific focus, lytic or sclerotic surrounding bones changes seen. Her tumor was resected under general anesthesia with a wide margin, and regional vital structures were preserved. The histological/immunohistochemistry revealed MPNST. She had adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy 2 weeks after surgery. However, a nodule was seen on the floor of the nose few days after completion of radiotherapy, which was biopsied, and histological report was positive for malignancy. The persistence of the malignancy and HIV hampered her facial reconstruction. Also, limited finance hampered procurement of the nasal prosthesis. She was followed up for 1 year before she was lost.

How Democracy Works within a Populist Party: Candidate Selection in the Alternative for Germany

Does the demand for more direct democracy by populist parties have any implications for their internal decision-making? To answer this question, a novel large-scale research project analyses the 2017 candidate selection of all Bundestag parties, including the populist Alternative for Germany. Some 1,334 individual nominations of seven parties are compared using quantitative indicators along three dimensions of intra-party democracy (IPD): competition between aspirants for candidacy, inclusion of members and nomination-related communication. It shows that the AfD is living up to its promise of practising grassroots democracy: in all results it ranks at the top by a wide margin. A new populist organizational model seems to have emerged following neither the classic hierarchical and leader-oriented mode of many other European right-wing populist parties nor the delegate assembly mode typical of German parties. Our further development of IPD concepts, newly elaborated measuring methods and surprising empirical evidence improve the understanding of democratic decision-making in populist parties.

Reaction of the Byelorussian Exarchate and the Roman Catholic Church to the August 2020 post-election protests in Byelorussia

In August 2020, the presidential elections took place in Byelorussia, which, according to official data, were won by A. G. Lukashenko by a wide margin. The announcement of the preliminary election results provoked a protest reaction of the opposition forces, who declared the results to be falsified and mobilized part of the Byelorussian population for mass street protests. The authorities deemed these actions illegal and used force to suppress them. This gave the opposition and protesters grounds to criticize the authorities with renewed vigor, accusing them of violence and infringement of political freedoms. The representatives of the Orthodox Church (the Byelorussian Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate) as well as of the Roman Catholic Church in Byelorussia reacted to the situation in the country, which caused a significant resonance in Byelorussia itself and abroad. The Byelorussian Exarchate did not support any of the conflicting sides, whereas Metropolitan Pavel, patriarchal exarch, unambiguously advocated the soonest cessation of the civil confrontation. At the same time, a few representatives of the clergy of the Byelorussian Exarchate publicly took the side of the protestors, including Archbishop Artemy of Grodno, but their statements were supported neither by the Synod of the Exarchate nor by the absolute majority of its bishops. The Roman Catholic Church, which has considerably smaller congregations in Byelorussia, also called for an end to the confrontation, but at the same time was much more immersed in the political agenda, poorly concealing its support for the opposition and protesters; the head of the Byelorussian Catholics at that time, Metropolitan T. Kondrusievicz, indirectly sympathized with the opposition as well. Despite the actual difference in the two churches' attitudes to the political situation, they both similarly appealed to spirituality and faith as a means of overcoming the conflict.

Populating Web-Scale Knowledge Graphs Using Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction and Validation

In this paper, we propose a fully automated system to extend knowledge graphs using external information from web-scale corpora. The designed system leverages a deep-learning-based technology for relation extraction that can be trained by a distantly supervised approach. In addition, the system uses a deep learning approach for knowledge base completion by utilizing the global structure information of the induced KG to further refine the confidence of the newly discovered relations. The designed system does not require any effort for adaptation to new languages and domains as it does not use any hand-labeled data, NLP analytics, and inference rules. Our experiments, performed on a popular academic benchmark, demonstrate that the suggested system boosts the performance of relation extraction by a wide margin, reporting error reductions of 50%, resulting in relative improvement of up to 100%. Furthermore, a web-scale experiment conducted to extend DBPedia with knowledge from Common Crawl shows that our system is not only scalable but also does not require any adaptation cost, while yielding a substantial accuracy gain.

Disentangled Face Attribute Editing via Instance-Aware Latent Space Search

Recent works have shown that a rich set of semantic directions exist in the latent space of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which enables various facial attribute editing applications. However, existing methods may suffer poor attribute variation disentanglement, leading to unwanted change of other attributes when altering the desired one. The semantic directions used by existing methods are at attribute level, which are difficult to model complex attribute correlations, especially in the presence of attribute distribution bias in GAN's training set. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (IALS) that performs Instance-Aware Latent-Space Search to find semantic directions for disentangled attribute editing. The instance information is injected by leveraging the supervision from a set of attribute classifiers evaluated on the input images. We further propose a Disentanglement-Transformation (DT) metric to quantify the attribute transformation and disentanglement efficacy and find the optimal control factor between attribute-level and instance-specific directions based on it. Experimental results on both GAN-generated and real-world images collectively show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods proposed recently by a wide margin. Code is available at https://github.com/yxuhan/IALS.

Melatonin as a Novel Supplement to COVID 19 Therapies

The COVID-19 disease continues its rampage on the human population all over the world. The pathogenesis mechanisms involve various inflammatory and altered immune responses and oxidative processes, leading to complications like cytokines storm and death in vulnerable cases. Therefore, in this review, we summarize current evidence on melatonin therapy for viral infections with focus on possible underlying mechanisms of melatonin actions. Since this pandemic crisis elapses time, researchers worldwide are busy trying new solutions to overcome the heavy toll of the COVID-19 illness morbidity and mortality. One such drug with growing recognition is melatonin. Melatonin is a well-known anti-inflammatory and antioxidant molecule which helps in promoting adaptive immunity. Melatonin improves sleep and anxiety and also can prevent fibrosis. It is a readily available over-the-counter medication that can be manufactured easily in bulk, hence inexpensive to a patient from a developing nation like India. It can be orally administered and has a wide margin of safety. This article reviews the various facets, merits, demerits, and rationale of the re-use use of molecule melatonin, which is yet to be recognized.