Human case of West Nile neuroinvasive disease in Portugal, summer 2015

A case of West Nile virus (WNV) infection was reported in the Algarve region, Portugal, in the first week of September 2015. WNV is known to circulate in Portugal, with occasional reports in horses and birds (2004 to 2011) and very sporadically human cases (in 2004 and in 2010). Here we present the clinical and laboratory aspects related to the first human case of West Nile neuroinvasive disease reported in Portugal

Facing the Unborn

(excerpt) An ultrasound video of an unborn child sucking its thumb makes a case against abortion that reason hardly need supplement. But a zygote photographed just after an in vitro conception is not so easily recognizable as a human being or person. Pro-lifers often assume that this difficulty has been overcome by modern science. Since the 1820s, when evidence of ovular fertilization first became known, it has been clear that the life of a human being runs from conception to death

Angry Rats and Scaredy Cats: Lessons from Competing Cognitive Homologies

There have been several recent attempts to think about psychological kinds as homologies. Nevertheless, there are serious epistemic challenges for individuating homologous psychological kinds, or cognitive homologies. Some of these challenges are revealed when we look at competing claims of cognitive homology. This paper considers two competing homology claims that compare human anger with putative aggression systems of nonhuman animals. The competition between these hypotheses has been difficult to resolve in part because of what I call the boundary problem: boundaries between instances of psychological kinds (e.g., anger and fear) cannot be directly observed. Thus, there are distinctive difficulties for individuating psychological kinds across lineages. I draw four conclusions from this case study: First, recent evidence from the neuroscience of fear suggests that one of the proposed homologies involves a straightforward conflation of anger and fear. Second, this conflation arises because of the boundary problem. Third, there is an implicit constraint on the operational criteria that is easy to overlook in the psychological case. In this case, ignoring the constraint is part of the problem. Fourth, this is a clear case in which knowledge of homology cannot be accumulated piecemeal. Identifying homologs of human anger requires identifying homologs of fear

INVESTMENT IN HUMAN CAPITAL - AN INVESTMENT IN FUTURE

The paper aims to study, reveal and understand one of the most important production factor, considered by some as being labor, understood nowadays as human capital. It is important to reveal and to demonstrate that the investment into human capital will have results with a very high return on investment, maybe not so seen in the first years to come just after the investment, but for sure as a big result and a cause for economic development. The investment into human capital can be determined by public or private investment. Either the case the result will be in favor of the national economyinvestment, human capital, economic development, labor flows

Rajabu and others v. Tanzania. A step toward the abolition of death penalty in Africa or a missed opportunity?

The article analyses the recent judgment of the African Court on Human and People Rights in the case of Rajabu and others v. Tanzania. The case concerns five Tanzanian nationals condemned to death by hanging and concerns three different but related objects: Tanzania’s violation of the right to a fair trial, of the right to life and of the right to dignity. The article focuses on the Court's reasoning on the right to life and the right to dignity as opposed to the issue of death penalty. Indeed, the judgment is particularly relevant, as the Court deals with the issue of death penalty or the first time in its history

Institutional Competition, Political Process and Holdup.

We compare the effect of legal and institutional competition for the design of labor institutions in an environment characterized by holdup problems in human and in physical capital. We compare autarky with the two country case assuming that capital is perfectly mobile and labor immobile. We distinguish two cases. In the first one, the political system is free from capture, while in the second, we examine the case where labor captured the institutional design problem. We find that in the former case, a competition of systems reduces welfare while in the latter case it improves the overall outcome.

How Palestinian students invoke the category ‘human’ to challenge negative treatment and media representations

Dehumanization of opponents in conflict has been shown to be a common and damaging feature in the media. What is not understood is how this dehumanization is challenged which is the novel contribution that this research will make. Drawing on focus groups (four focus groups each with four-six participants) conducted in the West Bank in 2015 that discussed media coverage of international conflict, this article demonstrates the ways in which young Palestinian participants attempt to rehumanize themselves in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Discursive analysis demonstrates how this was achieved in a number of ways: categorizing Palestinians as ‘human being’; by directly and explicitly challenging the suggestion that Palestinians are less than human; by drawing the enemy into the category ‘human’; and by embodying the ‘human’. These findings, the first to address the talk of young Palestinians about the reporting of violent conflicts around the world, demonstrate the importance of categorization and how, in this case, the specifics of the use of the (human) category work to rehumanize Palestinians in the face of (claims of) dehumanization