The Waiver of Certain Intellectual Property Rights Provisions of the TRIPS for the Prevention, Containment and Treatment of COVID-19: A Review of the Proposal under WTO Jurisprudence

This article is a critical legal analysis of the proposed TRIPS waiver under World Trade Organization (WTO) law. It reviews the existing TRIPS flexibilities and the “August 2003 TRIPS waiver”, highlighting the obstacles to achieving the goals of these legal instruments. It demonstrates that numerous critical TRIPS flexibilities, notably TRIPS Article 31bis, are ineffective, prompting some countries to submit a new waiver proposal to the WTO. It highlights several WTO rules that are also quite ambiguous. This paper argues that a WTO clarification might be an alternative to the new TRIPS waiver proposal if it is ultimately rejected due to a lack of consensus among WTO members. Finally, this article emphasises the importance of adopting a balanced approach that may simplify complicated TRIPS rules, decrease the risk of trade-based retaliation and improve collaboration in knowledge transfer and scaling up the manufacture of and access to lifesaving vaccines, pharmaceuticals and healthcare equipment.

Recognising, assessing and managing chest pain

Chest pain is a common medical symptom that paramedics attend to in the out-of-hospital environment. The causes of chest pain and the signs and symptoms are explained in this article, alongside tools that could be useful in diagnosis, such as clinical risk scores and troponin testing. Finally, pain management strategies that use a balanced approach for optimal patient care are referred to, with some specificity for cardiac chest pain explained.

Adaptation and Sinicization: Contemporary Religious Policy of the CPC Leadership

The article examines the key stages in the evolution of the ideological and political approaches of the CPC leadership to religious activity since the beginning of the 21st century. The main points of the study were the Chinese interpretations of the problems of “adaptation to a socialist society” and “Sinicization.” The author tries to identify the relationship between continuity and innovation in the religious policy of the Chinese authorities, taking into account the historical context of the ongoing changes and responses from religious circles. Based on the methods of discourse analysis, an attempt has been made to demonstrate multi-faceted complexity of the problem of “Sinicization” and to outline the contours of all-embracing balanced approach to the study of this topic. The fi rst part of the article examines the foundations of the policy of directing religion towards “conformity to socialist society” formulated under Jiang Zemin. The second part analyzes the main components of Xi Jinping’s concept of “Sinicization” of religions. Chinese believers are encouraged to interpret religious dogmas in accordance with the requirements of social progress and in the spirit of conformity with the best traditions of Chinese culture. The article examines the main directions of “Sinicization” adopted by offi cially recognized religions, covering the spheres of doctrine and liturgical practice, practical work with believers, and training programs for clergy. It is emphasized that the one-sided reduction of “Sinicization” to the state-sponsored policy of “repression” prevents researchers from looking deeper into historical and cultural aspects of the problem. It is concluded that “Sinicization” of religions will help to prevent socio-political marginalization of religions in the course of deep transformations of modern China.

High-Pressure Processing for Sustainable Food Supply

Sustainable food supply has gained considerable consumer concern due to the high percentage of spoilage microorganisms. Food industries need to expand advanced technologies that can maintain the nutritive content of foods, enhance the bio-availability of bioactive compounds, provide environmental and economic sustainability, and fulfill consumers’ requirements of sensory characteristics. Heat treatment negatively affects food samples’ nutritional and sensory properties as bioactives are sensitive to high-temperature processing. The need arises for non-thermal processes to reduce food losses, and sustainable developments in preservation, nutritional security, and food safety are crucial parameters for the upcoming era. Non-thermal processes have been successfully approved because they increase food quality, reduce water utilization, decrease emissions, improve energy efficiency, assure clean labeling, and utilize by-products from waste food. These processes include pulsed electric field (PEF), sonication, high-pressure processing (HPP), cold plasma, and pulsed light. This review describes the use of HPP in various processes for sustainable food processing. The influence of this technique on microbial, physicochemical, and nutritional properties of foods for sustainable food supply is discussed. This approach also emphasizes the limitations of this emerging technique. HPP has been successfully analyzed to meet the global requirements. A limited global food source must have a balanced approach to the raw content, water, energy, and nutrient content. HPP showed positive results in reducing microbial spoilage and, at the same time, retains the nutritional value. HPP technology meets the essential requirements for sustainable and clean labeled food production. It requires limited resources to produce nutritionally suitable foods for consumers’ health.

Age-Differentiated Leadership and Healthy Aging at Work: Evidence from the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Little is known about the relative influence of age-differentiated leadership on healthy aging at work. Likewise, the age-conditional influence of age-differentiated leadership is understudied, and especially so in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a three-wave longitudinal study, we examined the role that age-differentiated leadership plays in the prediction of work ability, as measured three times over six months (n = 1130) during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany (i.e., December 2019, March 2020, and June 2020). The results suggest that although there were no systematic changes in work ability on average, there was notable within-person variability in work ability over time. Additionally, we find that a balanced approach to age-differentiated leadership that considers the needs of both older and younger employees matters most and complements the positive influence of leader–member exchange for predicting within-person variability in work ability. We also find that older employees’ work ability benefits from an approach to age-differentiated leadership that considers older employee’s needs, whereas younger employees’ work ability especially benefits from leader–member exchange and a balanced approach to age-differentiated leadership. Overall, these results provide initial support for the idea that an age-differentiated approach to leadership is important when considering healthy aging at work.

Evenimentele din 1992 în manualul de istorie din școlile transnistrene / The events of 1992 in the history textbook of Transnistrian schools

After the 1991 separatist region of Transnistria developed its own education system, provided with normative acts, including curriculum and textbooks. History education is part of the official discourse and focuses on Transnistrian interests. In many cases, textbooks are based on Soviet historiography, and Western neighbors are treated as enemies. The author of the present article analyzes, in particular, Chapter IX of the textbook for the ninth grade, which deals with the formation of the separatist republic and the Dniester War of 1992, which is described by the authors of the textbook as “Moldova’s military aggression against the Transnistrian people.” The facts presented in this textbook are unilateral, trying to demonstrate the “aggression of Moldova” on the districts on the left bank of the Dniester. Although, at the end of the topic, the authors consider that this military conflict was “a bloody war”, they insist more on the “sufferings, losses and victims” of the inhabitants of this region. There is a total lack of critical, comparative, and balanced approach to these sensitive events for the recent history of the Republic of Moldova.

Jihad as an Individual Duty (farḍ al-ʻayn) in the Ideology of Circassian Sultans (1382–1517)

This article is devoted to the study of the development of the theory and practice of jihad during the rule of the Circassian sultans in Egypt and Syria (1382–1517). The purpose of the study is to trace the development of key aspects of jihad, to identify features of its perception in the Mamluk state. An essential feature of the theory of jihad in the Mamluk period is the interpretation of jihad as farḍ al-ʿayn (the individual duty of every Muslim). While studying the theory of jihad, the authors rely on a holistic and balanced approach justified in the papers of M. Bonner and D. Cook and their interpretation of the concept of jihad, which has a centuries-old history of development and a sophisticated, multi-layered set of meanings. Another methodological basis of the present paper was the concept of minimalism and maximalism, developed by Yusef Waghid. The source base for the study of jihad theory is the works of Ibn al-Nahhas (d. 1411), a prominent philosopher of the Mamluk era. The interpretation of jihad as an individual duty of every Muslim, substantiated by Ibn al-Nahhas, was the foundation of the volunteer movement that developed in Egypt and Syria in the 15th century. The doctrine of jihad where the concepts of justice (al-‘adl) and truth (al-ḥaqq) play a key role, was used by the Mamluks and then by the Ottomans as a powerful ideological tool to manipulate the minds of Muslims. The relevance of the study is that the findings are not only true for the Middle Ages but are directly related to the present.

Cities and Countryside: An International Law Perspective

Cities, as spaces of socio-cultural organization and economic interaction among people, have always played a dominant role in the development and implementation of international law. Today, a new strand of legal scholarship focuses on cities and local communities as competitors and partners with the nation State in a new project of modernization and democratization of international law. This paper looks at this new trend against the background of the historical narrative of cities in the development of international law. At the same time, it calls attention to the fact that half of humanity still lives and works in rural areas, in the vast countryside of the world. Rural communities have been the servants of the city since the beginning of time. Today, their dignity and rights are beginning to be recognized by acts of the United Nations such as the 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2018 Declaration on the Rights of Peasants. Yet, these people remain a disadvantaged and vulnerable class. A true modernization and democratization of international law requires that we keep a balanced approach to the legal recognition of the voices and rights of urban communities and those of the people who work and live in the countryside of the world.