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This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Mečnikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of "internal colonialism", both Austrian in the Italian-speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.

A partire da una domanda a risposta multipla tratta dai test standardizzati INVALSI per la quinta primaria, investighiamo la concezione di numero razionale sviluppata dagli studenti italiani. Lo scopo di questa ricerca è quello di individuare quali invarianti-operatori emergono dalle risposte degli studenti e quali di questi conducono più facilmente a conclusioni corrette o errate. Vengono anche osservati alcuni errori comuni nella conversione da frazione a decimale (e viceversa). Sono discusse alcune implicazioni per la pratica e la ricerca.

In the wake of the financial turmoil that has characterised recent years, this paper examines the state and adequacy of EU law in dealing with the large scale of over-indebted consumers and their insolvency. Legal responses taken within the context of the overall goal of the integration of the EU retail financial market will be examined, whilst the potential for EU personal insolvency law to stem the ‘dark side’ of such a market in the future will be evaluated. At EU level, the policy and legal measures adopted so far, concentrate on the prevention of behavioural causes of over-indebtedness, but the intertwined situation of consumer defaults and insolvencies has been left to the uncoordinated competence of national legislators. The fragmented EU legal framework, insofar as it attempts to deal with over-indebtedness and personal insolvency legislation, is addressed in the context of the legal instrument of mutual recognition that aims to promote clarity of the procedural and jurisdictional rules in cross-border matters. The most recent case law of the European Courts and its limitations are considered, together with the increasing drive towards further integration of EU markets and the economy that creates a mounting pressure for substantive harmonisation. In the promotion of consumer protection, the challenge will lie in addressing the current and profound diversity of national laws and the impact that harmonisation may have on exclusive national competences over social policies.

As we all are aware, data protection is a complex and multifaceted concept both from a legal and a social point of view, and there is now a considerable body of literature that contributes to the moral, social, political, economic, and jurisprudential debates over its concept. These perspectives are often influenced by national viewpoints and discussions, reflecting local values, traditions, and legal thinking.

UNO STUDIO SUI CASTAGNETI DELL’APPENNINO MODENESE, EFFETTUATO ATTRAVERSO UN APPROCCIO INTEGRATO, DEFINISCE LE PROBLEMATICHE GENERALI DELLA CASTANICOLTURA E APRE LA DISCUSSIONE SULLE FUTURE SCELTE GESTIONALI. TRA LE AVVERSITÀ, PARTICOLARE ATTENZIONE ALLA VESPA DEL CASTAGNO.

The Chapters provides an introduction, context and background of the theme of the book. It also provides an overview of all chapters of the book.

'This is a pre-edited work and has been accepted for publisher in [Business Law Review]' This article compares and analyses the regulatory framework addressing consumer over-indebtedness in the UK, Germany, Greece and Italy against the policy and law of the European Union. It aims to capture the preventive and the curative measures against over-indebtedness in the selected Member States to assess the impact that EU policy and law is having on the internal market and effectively tackle a problem that affects millions of European consumers. The ultimate goal is to identify good practices and major shortcomings that the EU should attend to repair failures that an uncoordinated nature of national regimes could generate in a common market and its side-effects, as well as the economic and social cohesion of its citizens. The paper concludes that if Member States to some extent have harmonised their preventive measures – yet with differences that need attention – the cure of over-indebtedness remains to individual but uncoordinated national initiatives that expose an under resourced strategy at EU level.

Background: Recent data imply young patients (age ≤50 years) undergoing small-bowel (SB) capsule endoscopy (CE) for iron deficiency anaemia (IDA) show higher diagnostic yield (DY) for sinister pathology. We aimed to investigate DY of CE in a large cohort of young IDA patients, and evaluate factors predicting significant SB pathology. Materials and methods: This was a retrospective, multicentre study (2010–2015) in consecutive, young patients (≤50 years) from 18 centres/12 countries, with negative bidirectional gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy undergoing SBCE for IDA. Exclusion criteria: previous/ongoing obscure-overt GI bleeding; age 50 years; comorbidities associated with IDA. Data retrieved: SBCE indications; prior investigations; medications; SBCE findings; final diagnosis. Clinical and laboratory data were analysed by multivariate logistic regression. Results: Data on 389 young IDA patients were retrieved. In total, 169 (43.4%) were excluded due to incomplete clinical data; data from 220 (122F/98M; mean age 40.5 ± 8.6 years) patients were analysed. Some 71 patients had at least one clinically significant SBCE finding (DY: 32.3%). They were divided into two groups: neoplastic pathology (10/220; 4.5%), and non-neoplastic but clinically significant pathology (61/220; 27.7%). The most common significant but non-neoplastic pathologies were angioectasias (22/61) and Crohn’s disease (15/61). On multivariate analysis, weight loss and lower mean corpuscular volume(MCV) were associated with significant SB pathology (OR: 3.87; 95%CI: 1.3–11.3; p = 0.01; and OR: 0.96; 95%CI: 0.92–0.99; p = 0.03; respectively). Our model also demonstrates association between use of antiplatelets and significant SB pathology, although due to the small number of patients, definitive conclusions cannot be drawn. Conclusion: In IDA patients ≤50 years with negative bidirectional GI endoscopy, overall DY of SBCE for clinically significant findings was 32.3%. Some 5% of our cohort was diagnosed with SB neoplasia; lower MCV or weight loss were associated with higher DY for SB pathology. © 2017, © Author(s) 2017.

This article examines the legal framework of consumer credit information systems in the EU in view of a single retail credit market. It puts forward the proposition that positive law is inadequate to strike a balance between legitimate concerns over consumers’ civil liberties, institutional guarantees, and the needs of the credit industry. It suggests that the EU should enact industryspecific legislation, and the new consumer credit directive should represent the appropriate forum for its regulation. So far, however, the proposed directive maintains the status quo and is far from satisfactory, leading to the conclusion that the EU is missing a chance to re-think a regulatory model to support a healthy single consumer credit market in which consumers receive adequate protection.

The chapter examines compliance with the UK Data Protection Act in practice in the area of consumer credit

This paper discusses the role and operations of consumer Credit Bureaus in the European Union in the context of the economic theories, policies and law within which they work. Across Europe there is no common practice of sharing the credit data of consumers which can be used for several purposes. Mostly, they are used by the lending industry as a practice of creditworthiness assessment or as a riskmanagement tool to underwrite borrowing decisions or price risk. However, the type, breath, and depth of information differ greatly from country to country. In some Member States, consumer data are part of a broader information centralisation system for the prudential supervision of banks and the financial system as a whole. Despite EU rules on credit to consumers for the creation of the internal market, the underlying consumer data infrastructure remains fragmented at national level, failing to achieve univocal, common, or defined policy objectives under a harmonised legal framework. Likewise, the establishment of the Banking Union and the prudential supervision of the Euro area demand standardisation and convergence of the data used to measure debt levels, arrears, and delinquencies. The many functions and usages of credit data suggest that the policy goals to be achieved should inform the legal and institutional framework of Credit Bureaus, as well as the design and use of the databases. This is also because fundamental rights and consumer protection concerns arise from the sharing of credit data and their expanding use.

The chapter examines the 1998 Data Protection Act of the United Kingdom and relevant UK case law

The paper examines the over-indebtedness of European consumers in the wake of the economic crisis through the lenses of the latest findings over its nature and causes. It analyses the current policies and law of the EU in the area, questioning their effectiveness and suitability to address a complex multi-dimensional problem that impacts dearly on the lives of those who are affected and carries great social and economic costs for the EU. The private law relationship between lenders and borrowers is contextualised with the study of responsible lending and borrowing policies and their transposition into EU law under the Consumer Credit Directive and the Mortgage Credit Directive. The latest cases involving over-indebtedness are considered. The paper ends by advancing the critique that responsible lending and borrowing are inadequate and insufficient if the problem is to be taken seriously. Instead, it is argued that the time is ripe for hard EU law integrating personal insolvency law with responsible lending and borrowing measures, with the caveats of the political – more than the legal – difficulties of such a proposition, as well as the devils that will lie in the details of its design.

The historical occurrence of sawfishes in the Mediterranean Sea has been the subject of active debate over the last decade (Ferretti et al. 2015). The growing consensus among specialists is that sawfishes may have never occurred in the Mediterranean with stable populations (Harrison & Dulvy, 2014). Conversely, extensive literature search, archival and museum data mining, and extinction probability analyses (Ferretti et al. 2015), provided evidence to support the hypothesis that sawfishes (Pristis pristis and Pristis pectinata) once occurred in the Mediterranean with stable populations. These results challenge several tenets of sawfish temperature tolerance, movement, distribution, and population structure. They would expand sawfishes’ historical distribution range in temperate latitudes and thus raise important questions on how these populations might have survived in the Mediterranean Sea. Molecular techniques on historical DNA promise opportunities for characterizing population structure, biogeography and evolution of elasmobranchs (Leone et al. In prep.). As well, isotopic and microconstituent analyses on rostral teeth can provide further information on date, biogeography, movements and habitat use of the individual specimens (Field et al. 2009). To date we have sampled 58 museum specimens of sawfish. Material labelled as Mediterranean had a great uncertainty on acquisition date and location. Other sawfish remains had no info at all on acquisition date, species identity and capture location. This project intends to use genetic and biogeochemical analyses to address this uncertainty, and eventually using the material identified as coming from the Mediterranean to characterize the population and genetic structure of the sawfishes once occurring in the region.

This study investigates the law and practice of arbitration across the European Union and Switzerland. It includes an in-depth examination of the practice and the laws relating to arbitration in each Member State of the European Union and Switzerland, as well as an examination of the involvement of Member States and the European Union in arbitration. While substantial harmony exists across the European Union at both the level of law and practice, the Study finds that arbitration in the European Union is predominantly regional, rather than transnational. It also concludes that investment arbitration is often a beneficial feature of investment agreements, although the terms of such agreements must be carefully designed.

The chapter provides an analysis of EU data protection law and other international laws

Credit Reference Agencies (hereinafter ‘CRAs’) collect a variety of financial information on individuals, producing a so-called ‘Credit Report’ that contains details of the payment and credit history of an individual, his or her financial accounts and the way these have been managed, as well as other information of interest to the credit industry. They have evolved as organisations providing information sharing devices in the financial system in order to meet the problem of asymmetrical information between borrowers and lenders. By providing rapid access to standardised information on potential borrowers, they represent the response to the demands for such type of data from banks and other financial intermediaries. Nowadays, as a result, CRAs represent a very important tool for the assessment of risk-management at the decision-making stage of granting credit, thus becoming one decisive element in such process. Against this background, however, at European level at least, little attention has been paid so far to either privacy concerns or the discriminatory consequences of credit reporting, particularly since its regulation has been left to the general provisions of the EU Data Protection Directive as implemented in national laws. Recently, Italy has enacted pioneering specific legislation on consumer credit information systems. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive examination of the new dispositions adopted by Italian law, in an attempt to investigate whether it could represent an example for the regulation of consumer credit reporting for others, specially when it is analysed within the wider context of the European Union.

Cet article aborde la construction de l’unité nationale telle que les géographes italiens l’ont envisagée à l’âge du Risorgimento, en analysant ce processus dans le contexte de la construction de représentations des identités et imaginaires des différentes nations, qui intéressa beaucoup les géographes européens entre le 19e et le 20e siècle. En travaillant des sources primaires dans le cadre de la circulation internationale des connaissances et en abordant la question de la construction culturelle et épistémologique des objets de la géographie, cet article vise à contribuer à la recherche actuelle sur le nationalisme, les identités et les imaginaires nationaux du point de vue de la géographie culturelle et de l’histoire de la géographie. Développer des interrogations sur comment la géographie a construit l’Italie en tant qu’objet de connaissance, du point de vue à la fois du paysage, de la géographie physique et de l’image de la nation, révèle l’importance de cette discipline dans la construction de réalités sociales et culturelles. L’étude du rôle historique de la géographie dans la construction nationale nous parle non seulement des défis territoriaux du passé, mais aussi des défis présents et futurs.

This paper addresses the construction of national unity by Italian geographers in the age of the Risorgimento, analysing this process within the context of the international emergence of national representations, identities and imaginaries which was similarly accompanied by geographers elsewhere during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Based on primary sources, focusing on European circulation of knowledge, and drawing on the study of the cultural and epistemological construction of the geographical objects, this paper contributes to current research on nationalism, identities and national imagination from the standpoint of social, cultural and historical geography. Interrogating how geography constructed objects of cultural identity in Italy, initially through landscape and morphologic analysis, and finally in the geographical invention of the Italian nation, reveals the importance of this discipline for constructing social reality. The study of the role of geography historically in nation-building can shed light both on territorial challenges of the past, and those potentially to come.

OBJECTIVES To report the 96 week results on efficacy, safety and bone mineral density (BMD) in subjects with HIV-1 that were virologically suppressed and treated with atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy versus atazanavir/ritonavir triple therapy. METHODS MODAt is a prospective, multicentre, open-label, non-inferiority, randomized, 96 week trial (NCT01511809) comparing efficacy of atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy versus atazanavir/ritonavir triple therapy. Treatment success was defined as no occurrence of confirmed viral rebound (two consecutive HIV-RNA >50 copies/mL) or discontinuation for any cause of the ongoing regimen. RESULTS The 96 week treatment success was 64% in the atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy arm and 63% in the triple-therapy arm (difference 1.3%, 95% CI: -17.5 to 20.1). In the atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy arm, no PI- or NRTI-associated resistance mutations were observed at virological failure and all patients re-suppressed after re-intensification. In the monotherapy arm, treatment failure was more frequent in patients coinfected with hepatitis C virus [64% versus 28% (difference 35.4%, 95% CI: 3.7-67.2)]. Drug-related adverse events leading to discontinuation were 3 (6%) in the atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy arm and 11 (21.5%) in the triple-therapy arm (P = 0.041). The 96 week adjusted mean percentage change in total proximal femur (not at lumbar spine) BMD was +1.16% and -1.64% in the atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy arm and the triple-therapy arm, respectively (P = 0.012). CONCLUSIONS The 96 week analyses suggested that long-term efficacy of atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy was inferior as compared with atazanavir/ritonavir triple therapy, particularly when administered in subjects coinfected with hepatitis C virus. In the atazanavir/ritonavir monotherapy arm, reintroduction of nucleosides, as needed, was always effective with no new resistance mutation; monotherapy was also associated with a lower incidence of adverse events and improvement in femur BMD.

© The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.The novel class of bis-arylaminoacenaphthylenes (Ar-BIANH2) was employed for the preparation of zirconium and yttrium complexes to be used as catalysts for cyclohydroamination of a number of primary and secondary aminoalkenes. The complex [(2,6-iPr2C6H3-BIAN)Zr(NMe2)2(η1-NHMe2)] was isolated and completely characterized, including X-ray diffraction analysis. Despite its easy and almost quantitative isolation, it showed only moderate catalytic performance in the intramolecular hydroamination, irrespective of the cyclization precursor used. On the other hand, in situ generated YIII complexes obtained using the same class of ligands were found to be very active, leading to the hydroamination of substrates including those normally reluctant in undergoing cyclization such as those featuring an internal non-activated C...C double bond. Electron donating substituents and especially steric hindrance on the ligand improve the performance of the catalysts, allowing us to decrease the catalyst loading to 1 mol% in the latter case.

Les ouvrages géographiques d’Élisée Reclus, parmi les plus lus en Europe dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, constituent à cette époque l’une des sources principales, pour les spécialistes comme pour le public cultivé, où trouver des renseignements sur l’Ailleurs extra européen. Comme Reclus n’a pas été seulement un célèbre géographe, mais aussi l’un des protagonistes de la naissance du mouvement socialiste et anarchiste international, son œuvre scientifique nous aide à connaître les orientations de l’opinion publique progressiste, européenne et française, à l’époque coloniale. Nous interrogeons ici son œuvre et ses archives à la lumière des débats qui concernent le rôle de la France dans la colonisation et la position de ce géographe hétérodoxe, sur son approche du colonialisme français, en nous focalisant sur le cas emblématique de l’occupation de l’Algérie.