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As Professor Ahdar's text shows, New Zealand's competition law has undergone an evolution. Views on various practices have changed and this led to academic disagreements. One area, however, has been free from any controversy and that is vertical mergers. The reason is not uniformity of philosophy—but rather more prosaic. New Zealand has not had any cases. This changed with the Vodafone/Sky merger. This article discusses the Commerce Commission's decision to decline the merger and how it is in line with current thinking on vertical mergers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this work is the study of the legislative developments included in the recent Royal Decree-Law 23/2020 of June 23, which approves measures in the field of energy and in other areas for economic recovery. These measures respond to the urgent purpose of trying to alleviate as soon as possible the effects of the serious economic recession caused by the Covid-19 health crisis that has suddenly shaken our country and the entire world. Combining both contexts, namely the climate emergency and the health and economic crisis, the Government proposes energy policy as a major protagonist and engine, the so-called "green lever" of economic and employment recovery, while trying to fulfill with the inescapable international commitments. The Royal Decree-Law under study has been approved within the framework of the parliamentary procedure of the Climate Change Law which has suffered an undesirable delay due to an amendment to the entirety, the Government deciding to accommodate within a Royal Decree-Law the approval of an abundant battery of measures that, due to the urgency in their implementation, had to be agreed as soon as possible in view of the need to put all possible means to promote economic recovery. In general, these are changes and novelties that respond to proposals that are highly demanded by the renewable energy sector, which, in general terms, applauds their adequacy, although, it should be said that these changes come late and out of time, especially taking into account that there are already several autonomous communities that have approved their own Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition. Thus, for example, Catalonia with Law 16/2017 of August 1, developed in the field of renewable energy through Decree-Law 16/2019 of November 26, Andalusia with Law 8/2018 of October 8 and the Balearic Islands with Law 10/2019 of February 22; as well as others such as the Basque Country and Valencia that are processing their draft Climate Change and Energy Transition Law. In the present work, we will analyze in detail the following measures: the new access and connection regulation to avoid speculation based on the technical feasibility and soundness of the projects; the new competitive competition mechanism for renewable energy projects, and auctions, trying to provide these technologies again with a predictable and stable remuneration framework; improving and simplifying the processing of authorization procedures for the construction, expansion, modification and operation of electrical production, transport and distribution facilities; the inclusion of the concept of non-substantial modification of generation facilities that have obtained administrative authorization in such a way that they must only obtain the operating authorization, prior accreditation of compliance with the safety conditions of the facilities and associated equipment; the incorporation of the criteria for the consideration of the same generation facility for the purposes of access and connection permits; the promotion of new business models; measures related to storage, independent aggregators, renewable energy communities, hybridization, high capacity recharging infrastructures (> 250kW), simplified authorization of R+D+i projects, regulatory test benches, simplified authorization of mobile network facilities, optimizing the use of the access capacity granted; improving energy efficiency by adapting the procedure for calculating the savings obligations of each obligated subject to provide the system with greater transparency and predictability for obligated subjects; the reform of the Environmental Assessment Law in order to streamline the procedures related to the scope document and the extensions of the environmental impact assessment and report, equating the regulation of these last two figures and, lastly, to ensure balance and liquidity in the electricity system, a necessary requirement for the continuity of activity and the promotion of new investments and, therefore, the success of the energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish legislation on coasts suffered a deep modification in 2013, with the amendment of Act 22/1988, July 28, on Coasts. Royal Decree 876/2014, October 10, completes and clarifies key issues of the new legal framework. This article explains some of the aspects of Royal Decree 876/2014, October 10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access control is fundamental in protecting information systems but it can also pose an obstacle to achieving business objectives. We analyze this tradeoff and its avoidance in the context of systems modeled as workflows restricted by authorization constraints, including those specifying Separation of Duty (SoD) and Binding of Duty (BoD). To begin with, we present a novel approach to scoping authorization constraints within workflows with loops and conditional execution. We formalize workflows, authorization constraints, and their enforcement using the process algebra CSP and visualize our constraints by extending the workflow modeling language BPMN. Afterwards, we consider enforcement's effects on business objectives. We identify the notion of obstruction, which generalizes deadlock within a system where access control is enforced, and we formulate the existence of an obstruction-free enforcement mechanism as a decision problem. We present complexity bounds for this problem and give an approximation algorithm that performs well when authorizations are evenly distributed among users. We provide tool support for our constraints in an extension of the modeling platform Oryx and report on the performance of our algorithms' implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) impacts all health-care professionals, including speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The administration simplification section of HIPAA includes specific regulations designed to protect the privacy of an individual's health records. These privacy regulations are not designed to impede upon essential health-care practices, but do require that covered providers take reasonable steps to limit the use and disclosure of protected health information. Important aspects of the privacy regulations include the development of facility- or practice-specific privacy policies, the development of a privacy manual, staff training on privacy policies and procedures, and the drafting and posting of a notice of privacy practices. In addition, authorization forms are mandated for instances of use and disclosure of public health information not related to treatment, payment, or health-care operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Objective To assess whether some pediatric Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) patients denied authorization for payment of emergency department (ED) services do not meet established nonemergent triage criteria and thus might be at risk for poor outcomes. Design A consecutive case surveillance. Setting and participants A Chicago inner city university-based ED with a total patient volume of 42 000 patient visits per year, of which 30% are pediatric. Managed care is approximately 20%. Participants who were denied authorization for payment of ED services by their HMO were age 0–16 and subsequently left the ED without treatment. Variables studied Data were collected from the ED nurse's triage notes. Chief complaint, vital signs, and focused examination were used to categorize patients as emergent, urgent, or nonemergent based on previously published pediatric emergency department triage criteria. Results A total of 83 pediatric HMO patients between 0 and 16 years of age were denied authorization for payment of ED services and subsequently left the ED without treatment in the study period. Of these, only eight patients (9.6%) met criteria to be categorized as nonemergent, and 75 (90.4%) met criteria to be categorized as emergent or urgent. Of these 75 patients, 17 (22.7%) had abnormal vital signs as the sole criteria for the emergent/urgent categorization, 16 (21.3%) had chief complaints considered emergent, and 42 (56.0%) had chief complaints considered urgent. One patient was not categorized into either group because he had left the ED before his HMO's authorization decision was rendered. Conclusion The results suggest that many of our pediatric HMO patients denied payment for ED services are being placed at risk for poor outcomes. The results highlight the haphazard nature of telephone authorization by HMOs and question the safety of this triage practice. The patients who are denied authorization for payment of ED services and subsequently leave... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Beirut Port explosion (04 August 2020), and its disastrous consequences urge the shedding of light on the national legal framework governing the practices involving chemical materials in Lebanon. • Management of chemical and dual use materials used at several sectors Lebanon. • Implementation of international treaties and conventions specially those related to chemical safety and security issues. • Weakness and suggestions for upgrading the current related legal and administrative system. In the fourth of August 2020, around 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at Beirut Port were exploded causing about 220 deaths and 6500 injuries, in addition to the displacement of 300,000 Lebanese citizens from their destroyed homes. The disastrous consequences of this blast at social, economic, security and political scales, earned great interest at national, regional and international levels. The explosion caused severe stagger to the Lebanese Government that resign after few days. The catastrophic event urged to shed the light on the legal texts and international treaties and conventions that governs the use of chemical materials specially the hazardous ones. This paper aims to highlight the current legal framework and the implementation of relevant international conventions, specially the Chemical Weapons Convention, in managing the import, use and storage of hazardous materials in Lebanon, through deep review of available national texts that governs the work and roles of concerned ministries and institutes. This study will be considered as a basement for a gap analysis that need to be undertaken for enhancing chemical safety and security in the country by strengthening the used procedures for import, export and trade and to poster interagency coordination scheme since the practices cited above are decisions related to different national stakeholders (Ministries of Environment, Industry, Defense, Interior and Municipalities, Trade and Economy, Public Health, Agriculture and security institutes). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]