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This article, by using general scientific methods, presents the main issues and ways to improve the appropriate technical equipment of state border crossing points, legal responsibilities of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine and the main results of operational activities to combat the illegal movement of radioactive materials and objects across the state border. The article shows the results of international cooperation and the implementation of international technical assistance projects by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine on improving the system of prevention of illicit trafficking of radioactive materials and objects. Furthermore, the article examines the main responsibilities of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine on ensuring radiation safety, which affects the real needs of equipping the state border guard bodies with the necessary technical tools. It is indicated that the detection of suspicious objects at state border crossing points may be limited to detection of exceeding the permissible radiation level without details about its kind with their further transfer to specially authorised state authorities of Ukraine for detailed examination. It is essential to note the need to improve the legal regulation of illegal trafficking of materials and objects that are hazardous radioactive sources across the state border considering negative economic and social consequences to the person, society, state and international community. There is an urgent need for well-defined regulation regarding the radiation materials and objects to prevent their movement across the state border without obtaining a special permit. Taking into account the need to reduce the budget expenditure of the border agency, this article provides recommendations to determine the purpose of the state re-equipment program of state border crossing points with modern tools for detection of radiation sources.

Transport of goods in direct international rail transport between the Slovak Republic, the Russian Federation and Ukraine takes place through the border crossing stations Cierna nad Tisou – Cop and Maťovce – Užhorod. These border crossing points are places on a wide gauge and normal gauge line. In stations, loading, unloading and reloading of wagon consignments from wide-range to normal wagons are carried out. In both border crossing stations there is a change of mode of transport from SMGS to CIM and other services associated with such transport. An important document that significantly affects the functioning of the single railway market is the Customs Code of the European Union and its provisions. The Common Economic Area of the European Union is also a common customs area for all Member States. The attractiveness of rail transport must now lie in modern technologies. which are carried out in stations. One option is to use the resources offered by industry 4.0.

The main aim of this article is to present the threat to the security Polish borders caused by the illegal border crossing. As Poland is found as a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe author wants to verify the scale of illegal border crossing in the last six years. This period includes also the migration crisis. Another issue that is analysed is the criminal law response to illegal border crossing and to the arrangement of illegal border crossing. Article presents Polish criminal law regulations in this area considering also the influence of European Union regulations. The last part refers to the penalties pronounced to those who crossed borders illegally and to those who arranged the illegal border crossing for the others.

This paper takes a reflexive and narrative approach to exploring three academics’ journeys of curriculum transformation at the height of the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall movement in South Africa. Their narratives tell the story of individual and shared border crossings which illustrate how ‘new’ academics transcend limitations and separations between people, knowledge and curricula. Decoloniality in curricular and pedagogical change are explored through the lenses of the three academics and an academic developer supporting their journey. The narratives show that decolonial curricular and pedagogies are about good teaching and a greater understanding of students and their needs. Authors’ reflexive narratives are deeply informed by the contexts in which they are implementing curriculum transformation. This paper is underpinned by the theoretical framework of Archer’s social realism, reflexive curricula, and border crossing. Reflecting on their curriculum transformation journeys, the authors come to realise that openness to learning is the key ingredient required for curriculum change to take place so that higher education can be accessible and relevant to the majority of students.

Today, both Lithuania and Latvia are part of the Schengen Area, which means their citizens can freely travel between these states. The situation was different during the interwar years: the border between these Baltic Republics was strictly guarded, and traveling abroad was more complex. However, the order crossing for local residents of the border area was simplified by the local border traffic regime agreed upon by both countries. This paper aims to explore the evolution of Lithuanian-Latvian local border traffic policy in the interwar period and its impact on locals (primarily on Lithuania’s side). In the first few years after the establishment of the new states, border crossings for residents of Lithuania’s border area were regulated by internal state legislation. Initially, people were devastated by the requirement to cross the border only at sparsely placed border crossing points, the restrictions on trade, and the radical reduction of the border area. After the peaceful settlement of the Lithuanian-Latvian border in 1921, newly signed bilateral treaties began to solve the crucial problems of the locals. However, there were instances of bilateral friction and various incidents; authoritarian state structures also had reservations based on the issue of potentially unfavorable foreign influences. The breakthrough in the diplomatic relations between Lithuania and Latvia in the 1930s saw a new level of liberalization of the local border traffic policy. A positive impact was widely felt among the locals. However, certain economic concerns made this new policy short-lived. In the interwar years, grievances and discontent toward the new border relations were gradually replaced by acceptance and adaptation. Bilateral cooperation made it possible to react to and suit the needs of the people. The overall Lithuanian-Latvian local border traffic regime showed a tendency of liberalization over time, a process which was curtailed by certain political and economic realities and considerations.

This article is situated in my own work in poetry. It falls into two parts: the first takes off from my own work to explore different practices of bordering; the second part continues that exploration by reference to recent work by Caroline Bergvall and Jeff Hilson. The first section explores my sequence, ‘the war against tourism’. These poems were written between December 2003 and July 2006 in the environment created by the US Patriot Act 2001 and the Homeland Security Act 2002. The Homeland Security Act both foregrounded the protection of borders and introduced ‘homeland’ into US political discourse. The first section will focus on my sequence of site-specific poems (written on flights), which explore ‘homeland security’, refugees, terrorism, profiling, border interrogations and identity. It will consider border-crossings and how identity figures in these poems in the context of mobility. The second section, ‘these deaths are not inevitable’, focuses on Caroline Bergvall’s volume Drift and its engagement with the ‘left-to-die’ boat within a longer history of migration by sea, going back to the Anglo-Saxons bringing their culture to Britain in the fifth century. The article concludes with a brief examination of Jeff Hilson’s conceptual poem, ‘A Final Poem with Full Stops’, and how deaths in the Mediterranean relate to recent treatment of borders, refugees and migrants.

Border crossings are vital to a nation’s safety and security as well as its economic competitiveness. On one hand, borders are intended to ensure the safety of a nation against external threats; on the other, they are needed to ensure the efficient crossing of legitimate people and goods. For Canada and the United States (U.S.), the latter is particularly important considering that the trade between the two countries amounts to $1.8B USD daily. Small changes in border crossing operations could have large economic impacts on both countries. In this study, a new tool is proposed, which combines a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with several empirical transportation datasets to prioritize Canada–U.S. border crossing investments along the entire international boundary, from both countries’ perspectives. Simulation results suggest that reducing wait times at border crossings can have sizable impacts on trade value, gross domestic product (GDP), and welfare. GDP and welfare changes are always positive with maximum values of $11.50 and $3.15M USD per year, respectively. Border crossing improvements affect industries differently, ranging from an increase of $2.09M USD to a decrease of $–0.22M USD in trade value. Analysis results indicate that the Lansdowne, Ambassador, Sarnia, Fort Erie, and Coutts border crossings are the highest priority for Canada to U.S. trade facilitation. Lastly, results suggest that investing in borders that benefit Canada to U.S. trade typically benefits the U.S.’s GDP as well.

Differences in cultural consumption are well recognized as potential forces for changing the cultural identity of consumers. Based on this logic, our hypothesis posits that Chinese readers, who comprise the largest fan community of Japanese comics/anime, are culturally influenced by this foreign product. To examine this hypothesis, we question whether the global values and worldviews of freedom, peaceful coexistence, justice, companionship, and humanity, which are embedded in Japanese comics/anime, influence the values and ideology of Chinese readers. This study was aimed to examine the reading strategies and patterns in legally or illegally imported border-crossing cultural products to assess the potential cultural impact of their consumption on young Chinese readers. Their differences in passion could affect their devotion, their identity, and their worldviews. In this study, focus groups in Japan and China, in-depth interviews, and textual analyses of Japanese comic/amine were conducted to examine the reading, fandom, and cultural impact of comics/anime on Chinese urban youth. The significance of this study is that it explores new models of active reading that affect the long-term shape of and changes in the values and identities of Chinese youth. The findings of this study shed light on whether imported cultural products could transform, change, and dilute the ideologies of the state and nationalism, thereby allowing new and alternative imaginings of values and global citizenship, which are emerging areas of interest in global communication studies.

The article deals with the description of the peculiarities of pedagogical experiment concerning the assessment of the readiness formation of junior inspectors of the border guard service for professional activity at international border crossing points on the basis of grounded criteria, indicators and levels of their formation. Based on the analysis of scientific and pedagogical and methodological literature, study of practice and generalization of their own professional experience, the authors found out that the criteria for readiness formation of junior inspectors of the border guard service for professional activity at international border crossing points are motivational, psychological and activity ones. It was defined that the pedagogical conditions of the readiness formation of junior inspectors of the border guard service for professional activities at international border crossing points, which were developed by the authors and implemented in the process of training at the Main Personnel Training Center of the State Border Guard Service (SBGS) of Ukraine in general positively influenced their level of readiness formation for professional activity at international border crossing points.

This chapter applied the intermodal container cargo flow simulation model to Central America. Because it consists of several small countries but has two coastlines with different characteristics in the maritime shipping network, many container flows across national borders can be observed. After confirming that the outputs estimated from the model agreed well with the observed data, three kinds of simulations were examined that focused on La Union port, a new container terminal in El Salvador. The first simulation showed that the model can reproduce well the observed annual container throughput in La Union port if a new service were to call at the port. Then, the future annual throughput for La Union port was forecast for each possible scenario of the liner service network calling at the port, under the condition of the annual throughput in Acajutla port being capped. The annual throughputs were estimated at more than 500,000 TEU in 2030 if La Union port functioned as a regional hub, achieved by maintaining an access channel sufficiently deep (− 13 m or deeper), whilst throughputs would be 250,000 TEU at most if the port remained a feeder and way-port service port. Furthermore, the simulation result indicates that if the cargo-handling tariff in La Union port was increased to almost three times the current level after concluding concession contracts under the private-public partnership scheme, the annual estimated throughputs would decrease by 50,000–100,000 TEU, in comparison with throughputs where an increase in the tariff has not taken place. These are not negligible differences, but the expected amount of increased income would be rather larger because the tariff is assumed to be increased three times its current rate. However, if any barriers to crossing the national borders are eliminated, a tariff increase would more severely affect the container throughput in La Union port.

The borderline—it is the physical and visible distinction between two states (or between integrated groups of states such as the EU), including their respective legal systems. Border crossing points (BCPs) are the points of transfer from one legal system to another, and border control is the process, which confirms that the crossing is in line with the underlying rules and regulations.

Kabak, Ozgur/0000-0002-5542-309X; Topcu, Ilker/0000-0001-9717-7854; Ulengin, Fusun/0000-0003-1738-9756 Kapikule Border Crossing, the second busiest land border crossing point in the world and the busiest in Europe, has become inadequate to process the increasing number of trucks transporting goods between Europe and Turkey. To address this issue, in a previous study, a detailed process analysis was conducted, a simulation model was developed, and several action plans representing improvement strategies were analyzed and ranked in terms of the daily average number of trucks waiting in the queue to enter and leave the border crossing. However, to increase the efficiency of Kapikule Border Crossing, the ranking of the action plans should not be solely based on the average number of trucks but should also be evaluated from a much broader perspective taking into account several objectives that are generally in conflict with each other. Therefore, in this study, we propose a multi-criteria decision support methodology that evaluates these action plans by considering additional attributes; such as investment cost, operations cost, sustainability, border security, and the satisfaction of the beneficiaries, establishing a preference ranking of action plans to improve the capacity of the Border Crossing. Our results have implications for policymakers not only in Turkey but also in the EU. International Transporters' Association We are grateful to the Kapikule Border Crossing authorities and the International Transporters' Association for their support and cooperation throughout the stages of the proposed approach. Special recognition is due to stakeholders, including customs officials (e.g., clerks, veterinarians, and agricultural engineers), truck drivers, and department managers, as well as managers of border-serving companies who participated the steps of determination of attributes, prioritization of attributes, and evaluation of action plans with respect to attributes.

Patients treated with 131I may be identified at security checkpoints at various public facilities. The objective of this survey was to determine the frequency of detection, the spectrum of public facilities, the various methods of management of the situation by security agents, and the spectrum of physician documentation for patients regarding their 131I therapy. Methods: Data were tabulated from a Thyroid Cancer Survivors' Association, Inc., survey emailed to approximately 15,000 associates and available online from December 2013 to December 2014. Responses were tabulated from respondents who reported that they were 18 y old or older, had received at least 1 131I treatment for differentiated thyroid cancer, and were responding regarding their last 131I treatment. Results: Of 621 respondents, 595 reported an attempt to pass through a public facility security checkpoint. Of these 595 patients, approximately 10% (57) were identified as being radioactive. The facility reported by 43 respondents was an airport for 35% (15), border crossing for 33% (14), government building for 19% (8), shopping mall for 7% (3), train station for 5% (2), and steel recycling plant for 2% (1). The security agent's management of the situation reported by 47 respondents included questioning for 81% (38), allowing them to proceed without a change in travel plans for 57% (27), requesting documentation of the therapy for 55% (26), rescanning for 55% (26), calling a member of the treating team for validation for 17% (8), "strip" searching for 4% (2), detaining such that a change in travel plans was required for 6% (3), and prohibiting continued travel for 4% (2). The period of detainment reported by these 47 respondents was less than 30 min for 57% (27), 30 to less than 60 min for 21% (10), 1 to less than 1.5 h for 15% (7), 1.5 to less than 2 h for 2% (1), 2-4 h for 0% (0), and greater than 4 h for 4% (2). Data regarding physician documentation are presented. Conclusion: The detection of radioactivity at a variety of security checkpoints at public facilities after131I therapy occurred in approximately 10% of respondents. Travel inconvenience is not infrequent and may require alteration of travel plans. Physicians should take steps to ensure that patients not only have appropriate documentation of their 131I therapy with them but also have instructions regarding how security agents may verify their 131I therapy.

Largely missing from public policy discussions on education and border crossing at the U.S. Mexico border are the experiences of transnational students. In this article, we illustrate some of the struggles of transnational students crossing from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México to El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. in pursue of an American education. These students are in K-12 and higher education and their daily commute (or almost daily) entail a start time before sunrise to cross the international port of entry to attend American schools. The majority of these students are U.S. citizens that reside on the Mexican side of the border. In this paper, we provide a glimpse into these students struggles for a U.S. education and discuss some political implications of this phenomena.

Background Exertional rhabdomyolysis is a common condition with potentially life-threatening consequences; early recognition can prevent severe downstream complications. Some migrants and undocumented immigrants who have travelled to the United States have encountered extreme heat or other austere conditions during their journey, many of which have involved long stretches of travel on foot. These factors can combine to put these migrants at risk for rhabdomyolysis. Hospitals near the border of Mexico and the United States commonly encounter patients with adverse medical complications related to the process of border crossing. Case Report We report a patient with exertional rhabdomyolysis complicated by acute kidney injury who presented to a hospital located thousands of miles from the United States–Mexico border. Why Should an Emergency Physician be Aware of This? Undocumented immigrants frequently disperse to disparate metropolitan areas after crossing the border, and therefore medical providers should remain vigilant for the medical complications of this dangerous journey.

In contemporary films like Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009), effects of (post)colonialism, immigration and globalisation transform French spaces into multilingual ones, in which language use is impacted by a complex network of spheres of influence. This article offers a new approach to understanding the place of the language in French films about border-crossing in today’s Europe. It paraphrases terminology from Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet to examine the films Dheepan and Welcome, in which the French language is crucial to migrants’ survival, but in temporary and conditional ways. Finally, the article analyses how French co-exists alongside other languages such as Tamil, English, and Kurdish in such films, and proposes a new term for understanding the use of language by shifting and migrating subjects: the langue de passage.

This paper proposes that not only the size and component of carbon footprints are relevant to environmental policies but the border-crossing frequency associated with carbon footprints also has important policy implications, especially given that the fragmentation of production across national boundaries has been developing quickly in recent years. Based on the World Input Output Database, this paper traces carbon transfer along cross-border supply chains and proposes both the upstream and downstream decomposition of export rebates of the United States and the European Union. The carbon transfer from the United States and the European Union to other countries or regions is mainly through international trade in intermediate products, which may cross national borders multiple times. The multiple rebate revenue reaches 422.14 million dollars, and the problem of multiple rebates is much more serious for the sectors with a greater degree of global production fragmentation, such as the electrical and optical equipment sector. In addition, export rebates are mainly targeted at the carbon emissions that are generated in the electricity generation sector and embodied in exports.

This article discusses a research project about the pedagogical function of popular culture for adult audience members. We used the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy to investigate how American cultural...

The fragmentation of production across national boundaries has become an important feature of the world economy. This present paper adopts the viewpoint that not only the size and composition of carbon footprints are relevant but also the border-crossing frequency associated with these carbon footprints, which is defined as the number of borders a product crosses in a supply chain; this process will affect the spatial accounting of the carbon emissions produced to support the economic activity. The calculation of border-crossing frequencies of carbon footprint is accomplished by decomposing the Leontief inverse matrix derived from the world input–output database. We find that the aggregated average border crossing frequencies of carbon footprints show an increasing tendency, which is influenced by the economic crisis obviously. The policy application focuses on the United States, which we assume to levy carbon tariffs on foreign emissions embodied in imports. We find that the indirect carbon tariff on emissions embodied in international trade take a significant share. The border carbon adjustments are mainly targeted at emissions generated in China, which also pays the greatest share of the tariff burden. The implication of carbon tariffs faces the problem of multiple taxation.

Maritime navigation has been challenging for a lot of centuries. International borders have not been clear in case of Sea routes. This affects chiefly fishing community who has to go to deep sea on regular basis. In maritime conditions, finding borders can be tricky given a lot of factors. We design GPS-based location for alerting users from crossing international waters. The users can access their location using GPS and the alert system is activated for border crossing across international waters. Though many solutions have been proposed for specific location based issues, they provide solutions for a specific group of users such as Tamil fishermen at Rameshwaram. The proposed system is not confined to one specific location but to every border on this world. It can be configured to a specific set of borders depending on the state or country etc. The border data can be feed from Internet sources. since these data is subject to change due to various political, geographical and various other reasons, it has to be updated regularly by experts in the field. We use an API called GEOCoder which is on-line/off-line Geo-location API which accurately determines the location.

Introduction East African cross‐border areas are visited by mobile and vulnerable populations, such as men, female sex workers, men who have sex with men, truck drivers, fisher folks and young women. These groups may not benefit from traditional HIV prevention interventions available at the health facilities where they live, but may benefit from services offered at public venues identified as places where people meet new sexual partners (e.g. bars, nightclubs, transportation hubs and guest houses). The goal of this analysis was to estimate availability, access and uptake of prevention services by populations who visit these venues. Methods We collected cross‐sectional data using the Priorities for Local AIDS Control Efforts sampling method at cross‐border locations near or along the land and lake borders of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda from June 2016–February 2017. This bio‐behavioural survey captured information from a probability sample of 11,428 individuals at 833 venues across all areas. Data were weighted using survey sampling weights and analysed using methods to account for the complex sampling design. Results Among the 85.6% of persons who had access to condoms, 60.5% did not use a condom at their last anal or vaginal sexual encounter. Venues visited by high percentages of persons living with HIV were not more likely than other venues to offer condoms. In 12 of the 22 cross‐border areas, male or female condoms were available at less than 33% of the venues visited by persons having difficulty accessing condoms. In 17 of the 22 cross‐border areas, education outreach visits in the preceding six months occurred at less than 50% of the venues where participants had low effective use of condoms. Conclusions Individuals visiting venues in cross‐border areas report poor access to and low effective use of condoms and other prevention services. Availability of HIV prevention services differed by venue and population type and cross‐border area, suggesting opportunities for more granular targeting of HIV prevention interventions and transnational coordination of HIV programming.

Introduction: San Diego has one of the busiest international land border crossings in the world. The epidemiology of prehospital care at the San Diego (California, USA)–Tijuana (Baja California, Me...

This article opens with reflections upon the authors’ formative encounters with world cinema in Poland and the UK, and the importance of television in providing access to a wide variety of ‘foreign’ films. We propose that the process of viewing transnational films exemplifies this encounter with foreignness and that the value of studying transnational films is that their thematic focus upon encounters invites us to reflect upon questions of translation and misrecognition, difference and sameness. Through a close analysis of Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2017), the article discusses the way in which this film explores questions of cultural politics and national identity, migrant experience and exile, and the transnational circulation of texts. We argue that the film, which follows the experiences of a couple who move back and forth across the ‘iron curtain’ in post-WW2 Europe, offers a critique of nationalist ideologies and invites us to recognise ‘foreignness’ as a constitutive component of local and national cultures. Cold War, we suggest, is an exemplary transnational film in so far as it prompts us to recognise how even familiar cultures are repeatedly transected by difference.

We explored the association of international migration with substance use and HIV/STI risk factors among female sex workers (FSW). Using modified time-location sampling, we recruited 266 FSW at the Mexico-Guatemala border. Crude and adjusted logistic regression models were used to evaluate the relation- ships. HIV risks, such as frequent hard drug use and drug use in another country, were greater for migrant compared to non- migrant FSW. However, more migrant versus nonmigrant FSW reported consistent condom use with clients and having a health card. Our study highlights regional patterns of sub- stance use among FSW and risk or protective behaviors related to migration status.

This paper explores the educational journeys of three tenured, Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) professors who serve at public research-intensive universities as professors of education. We discuss how our journeys in and through Adventist education impact our pedagogy and offer insights that can be helpful to other Christian educators, students, and parents who would like to learn how to navigate a path to a career in higher education. The three of us could be described as somewhat of an anomaly in terms of our identities and positionalities as Black male Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) professors in public universities&mdash, yet we know that there are many other people from the neighborhoods and churches where we grew up who could be doing similar work but for various reasons did not get access to this opportunity. The goal of this critical trio-ethnographic paper is to offer a counter-narrative on Black male SDA education and possibilities, through our personal reflections and analyses of our educational experiences in SDA education that inform the way we engage our students now as SDA and culturally relevant teachers in public universities.

Popular Indian cinema theorized as a national cinema has recently undergone a ‘transnational turn’ within global cinema studies. Judging by the slew of books on ‘Bollywood’ with ‘travel’, ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘border crossing’ in their titles, it would appear that the national is no longer a relevant rubric for Indian popular cinema. Despite the push to disavow the national in favor of transnational cinema studies, acknowledging other nodes connecting the expansive proliferation of films worldwide after digitization, the national cinema framework remains truculently relevant. A transnational approach might speak to a salutary universal cultural humanism in films, but it risks flattening cinematic storytelling, distinctive esthetics, and the particularity of cultural tropes integral to cinema historiography. Challenges to ‘national’ Indian cinema from regional, interregional, and regional–transnational connections strain the national rubric, but they underscore as much as they undercut th...

In South East Europe ( SEE ) the existence of several non-European Union ( EU ) member countries and borders procedures burdens the regional and international land transport with times and costs. ACROSSEE (Accessibility Improved at border crossing for the integration of South East Europe) is an EU co-funded project, concluded recently as a follow-up to SEETAC project (South East Europe Transport Axis Cooperation) that highlighted the need to facilitate border crossings and urged for the improvement of Transport in the SEE region, as integral part of the Trans-European Transport Networks ( TEN-T ). This paper presents the analysis and the formulated proposals and measures for the improvement of border crossings, which could have direct positive effects on transport and trade in the region.

This article is an attempt to bring to international attention the issue of gender in Slovenian cinema and thus, in turn, to force this issue in its domestic context. It proceeds in several steps. First, it sketches the history of film in Slovenia and draws attention to some important female figures and their often ignored, if not suppressed contribution. It also outlines the present climate in Slovenian film culture and points out that gender has not been properly addressed by film scholarship in Slovenia. Next, it considers how the notions of national cinema and transnationalism apply to Slovenian cinema; it argues that contemporary Slovenian cinema seems to be evolving from a transnational to a national cinema. Finally, it demonstrates how its actors, particularly the marginalised women, provide a corrective to this anachronistic course of development. It concentrates on the work of Maja Weiss and her affinity with borders and border-crossing as a case in point.

Those who have to cross “hard” borders face many problems on their way, including arbitrary and unjust treatment by consular and border guard officers, protracted and nitpicking inspections and extortion by customs officers, and huge traffic congestions. This article examines the extent to which various categories of people crossing the European Union-Russian border can self-organize in order to act together and be heard better for solving these and other issues. Tourists, shuttle traders, and truck drivers working for international cargo carriers are taken as three case studies for the research. I argue that all of the three mentioned categories of border crossers are capable of self-organizing in various ways: tourists—by exchanging best practices within thematic networks, shuttle traders—by taking advantage of their ability to gather in their common places of residence and (as well as truck drivers) near checkpoints when traffic congestions arise, truck drivers—also by taking advantage of support from influential business associations. It is also important that the audibility of border crossers’ voices can be seriously amplified by mediators, among which officials, politicians, business structures, and the mass media are the most efficient. At the same time, the capability of these three kinds of border crossers to make their voices heard is very limited, since their interactions are typically weak and instable and since officials are much more powerful.

This article examines the ways in which the Russian-Finnish-Swedish writer Zinaida Linden discusses the question of language, identity and migration in her novel Takakirves-Tokyo (2007), written and published first in Swedish. The theoretical approach is framed by the concept of translingual literature, that is, literature written by writers in other language than their native one. In contrast to the Russian translingual writers in the USA, France or Germany, where the writer chooses the language of the majority, Linden writes in the language of a minority in Finland, Swedish. This choice of language has important consequences for the representation of the translingual writer in the novel. Through writing fiction in Swedish, the writer as if becomes incorporated against her will to Finnish-Swedish literature. The novel’s discussion of the translingual writer’s situation reflects the difficulty of finding a place for her in disciplines connected to national histories, cultures and literatures. The ...

After Poland’s accession to the EU, the Polish-Russian border became the EU external border. This significantly changed its nature and started the new type of cross border relation. Since 2012, when the Small Border Traffic (SBT) zone came into force, the border has changed its blockade function and started instead to be treated as a resource. The fundamental loosening of the border crossing regime reduced the social and functional distance between Poland and Kaliningrad, and in a broader sense between EU and Kaliningrad. This paper will try to show how small but meaningful initiative, the SBT, has had an impact on cross-border region. The present paper will describe the relationship between larger geopolitical actors and how they affect local border relations. The aim of this paper is to present phenomenon of new visa regime at the Polish-Russian border. The paper likewise describes the impact of the SBT on local communities and their economies, as well as national relations between adjacent coun...

Most radiation portal monitors (RPMs) use the max count rate (MCR) or the single interval test (SIT) methods for detecting the illicit transport of radioactive material. Point source detection using matched filtering for discriminating naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) from radioactive materials of concern was proposed in the literature for border crossing radiation portal monitoring. We show in this work that it is possible to increase the sensitivity of a radiation portal monitor by fusing the data produced by SIT with that produced by an improved version of the matched filtering technique.

Introduction HIV care and treatment in cross‐border areas in East Africa face challenges perhaps not seen to the same extent in other geographic areas, particularly for mobile and migrant populations. Here, we estimate the proportion of people with HIV found in these cross‐border areas in each stage of the HIV care and treatment cascade, including the proportion who knows their status, the proportion on treatment and the proportion virally suppressed. Methods Participants (n = 11,410) working or socializing in public places in selected East Africa cross border areas were recruited between June 2016 and February 2017 using the Priorities for Local AIDS Control Efforts method and administered a behavioural survey and rapid HIV test. This approach was designed to recruit a stratified random sample of people found in public spaces or venues in each cross border area. For participants testing positive for HIV, viral load was measured from dried blood spots. The proportion in each step of the cascade was estimated using inverse probability weights to account for the sampling design and informative HIV test refusals. Estimates are reported separately for residents of the cross border areas and non‐residents found in those areas. Results Overall, 43% of participants with HIV found in cross‐border areas knew their status, 87% of those participants were on antiretroviral therapy (ART), and 80% of participants on ART were virally suppressed. About 20% of people with HIV found in cross border areas were sampled outside their subdistrict or subcounty of residence. While both resident and non‐resident individuals who knew their status were likely to be on ART (85% and 96% respectively), people on ART recruited outside their area of residence were less likely to be suppressed (64% suppressed; 95% CI: 43, 81) compared to residents (84% suppressed; 95% CI: 75, 93). Conclusions People living in or travelling through cross‐border areas may face barriers in learning their HIV status. Moreover, while non‐residents were more likely to be on treatment than residents, they were less likely to be suppressed, suggesting gaps in continuity of care for people in East Africa travelling outside their area of residence despite timely initiation of treatment.

Developing effective screening processes in border crossings, in order to identify violators within large groups of mostly innocent people, is an important and difficult task, as it is not possible nor effective to screen every passenger with the same intensity required to detect a violator. Profiling has been applied for several decades as a tool to deal with this task, but there is still no proof of its usefulness. Our main motivation is to study whether profiling is indeed helpful, and if so, how it should be used so as to maximize its effectiveness. We consider an interaction that takes place in some crowded border crossing, where passengers can be affiliated into different groups. We offer a sequential game-model with three players: a defender, who acts first and decides on a screening process, an attacker, who acts second and may recruit a passenger as a violator, and the recruited passenger, who acts last and may choose not to violate, as it has its own private violating motivation. We study variants of the base game, which differ by the choice of screening policy (an announced profiling, an unannounced profiling, no-profiling), the attacker's knowledge of the screening policy, and the costs of recruiting passengers of different groups. These variants help us to answer the extremely challenging social and strategic questions regarding the controversy over the need of profiling.

We analyze the macroeconomic and trade impacts of reducing wait times by adding one customs officer at each of the twelve major land freight crossings of the U.S. The change in wait time stemming from staffing changes is first estimated on the basis of primary data and then translated into changes in freight costs through a logistical model. The transportation cost changes are then fed into a multi-country computable general equilibrium model. We find that adding one customs officer at each land border crossing would, on average per crossing, generate an increase in U.S. GDP of $350 thousand and 3.58 additional jobs.

The economies of Canada and the United States, closely linked for many years, began a formal process of tighter integration with the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (1989) and North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). Due to the ease of border crossing, American and Canadian consumers took advantage of exchange rate variations to engage in cross-border shopping, implying a movement toward unified markets in the border regions. This process of integration was interrupted by tighter border controls after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In this paper, we investigate the disruption of normal patterns of day tripping across the US-Canadian border. Using seasonally adjusted monthly data for the period 1994~2011, we show a robust relationship between the exchange rate and the flow of day trippers in each direction, implying cross-border shopping to be a major motive for day trippers. Using dummy variables to represent the security measures enacted in September 2001, and the stricter documentation required after January 2008, we show that both sets of measures significantly reduced cross-border trips and thickened the border.

Outbreak-associated communications for travelers and clinicians may be a more effective approach to the international control of communicable diseases., In response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) pandemic of 2003 and the influenza pandemic of 2009, many countries instituted border measures as a means of stopping or slowing the spread of disease. The measures, usually consisting of a combination of border entry/exit screening, quarantine, isolation, and communications, were resource intensive, and modeling and observational studies indicate that border screening is not effective at detecting infectious persons. Moreover, border screening has high opportunity costs, financially and in terms of the use of scarce public health staff resources during a time of high need. We discuss the border-screening experiences with SARS and influenza and propose an approach to decision-making for future pandemics. We conclude that outbreak-associated communications for travelers at border entry points, together with effective communication with clinicians and more effective disease control measures in the community, may be a more effective approach to the international control of communicable diseases.

Background The World Health Organization (WHO) launched the “End TB Strategy”, which aims to reduce tuberculosis (TB) mortality by 95% by 2035, Brazil has made a commitment to this, however, one challenge is achieving the goal in the border region, where the TB situation is more critical. The proposal was to analyse the spatial mortality due to TB and its socio-economic determinants in the general population, around the border areas of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, as well as the temporal trend in this region. Method This ecological study considered the cases of TB deaths of residents of Foz do Iguaçu (BR), with its units of analysis being the census sectors. The standardized mortality rate was calculated for each area. Socioeconomic variables data were obtained from the 2010 Demographic Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The scan statistic was applied to calculate the spatial relative risk (RR), considering a 95% confidence interval (CI). Spatial dependence was analysed using the Global Bivariate Moran I and Local Bivariate Moran I (LISA) to test the relationship between the socioeconomic conditions of the urban areas and mortality from TB. Analysis of the temporal trend was also performed using the Prais-Winsten test. Results A total of 74 cases of TB death were identified, of which 53 (71.6%) were male and 51 (68.9%) people of white skin colour. The mortality rate ranged from 0.28 to 22.75 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. A spatial relative risk area was identified, RR = 5.07 (95% CI 1.79–14.30). Mortality was associated with: proportion of people of brown skin colour (I: 0.0440, p = 0.033), income (low income I: − 0.0611, p = 0.002; high income I: − 0.0449, p = 0.026) and density of residents (3 and 4 residents, I: 0.0537, p = 0.007; 10 or more residents, I: − 0.0390, p = 0.035). There was an increase in the mortality rate in people of brown skin colour (6.1%; 95% CI = 0.029, 0.093). Conclusion Death due to TB was associated with income, race resident density and social conditions. Although the TB mortality rate is stationary in the general population, it is increasing among people of brown skin colour.

In recent years the Customs Service has been introducing several innovative electronic services (e-services) for clients (entrepreneurs, forwarders). One of the proposed solutions is the system of eBooking TRUCK, which enables clients electronic reservation of the date of customs for the trucks leaving Poland. The article presents basic information regarding this improvement, the aim of which is primarily shortening the time of truck spent on customs clearance (eliminating or reducing queues on the border crossings) and improving the work organisation of customs services. There is presented the concept of the eBooking TRUCK system, the premises of its implementing, the scope of data transmission by the entrepreneurs, the scope of handling notification by the customs officers, architecture of system and the ways of clients communication within the system (SMS, e-mail, CB radio, information panels, infokiosks). At the end, there is presented a description of implementing actions based on the pilot programme carried out from 5th October 2015 at Koroszczyn border crossing point (Customs Chamber in Biala Podlaska, Polish-Belarus border) and Grzechotki (Customs Chamber in Olsztyn, Polish-Russian border).