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Abstract Background and Aim The utility of renal replacement therapy (RRT) before liver transplant (LT) in patients without end‐stage renal disease (ESRD) or advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD‐IV/V) is debatable and lacks data support. We aimed to evaluate the impact of RRT on patients undergoing LT. Methods We used the National Readmission Database (2016–2019) to identify all index hospitalizations undergoing RRT before LT (cases). A matched comparison cohort of similar hospitalizations without RRT before LT was identified (controls) after 1:1 propensity score matching for age, gender, and available comorbidities. Results We matched 364 cases (RRT before LT) to 364 controls (LT without prior RRT). There was no statistical difference in all‐cause inpatient mortality (4.9% vs 3.6% P = 0.4). A significantly greater proportion of cases were associated with ICU admission (40.7% vs 17.0%, P

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a pathological condition wherein lung injury precipitates the deposition of scar tissue, ultimately leading to a decline in pulmonary function. Existing research indicates a notable exacerbation in the clinical prognosis of IPF patients following infection with COVID-19. This investigation employed bulk RNA-sequencing methodologies to describe the transcriptomic profiles of small airway cell cultures derived from IPF and post-COVID fibrosis patients. Differential gene expression analysis unveiled heightened activation of pathways associated with microtubule assembly and interferon signaling in IPF cell cultures. Conversely, post-COVID fibrosis cell cultures exhibited distinctive characteristics, including the upregulation of pathways linked to extracellular matrix remodeling, immune system response, and TGF-β1 signaling. Notably, BMP signaling levels were elevated in cell cultures derived from IPF patients compared to non-IPF control and post-COVID fibrosis samples. These findings underscore the molecular distinctions between IPF and post-COVID fibrosis, particularly in the context of signaling pathways associated with each condition. A better understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms holds the promise of identifying potential therapeutic targets for future interventions in these diseases.

Background and Aim: The utility of renal replacement therapy (RRT) before liver transplant (LT) in patients without end‐stage renal disease (ESRD) or advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD‐IV/V) is debatable and lacks data support. We aimed to evaluate the impact of RRT on patients undergoing LT. Methods: We used the National Readmission Database (2016–2019) to identify all index hospitalizations undergoing RRT before LT (cases). A matched comparison cohort of similar hospitalizations without RRT before LT was identified (controls) after 1:1 propensity score matching for age, gender, and available comorbidities. Results: We matched 364 cases (RRT before LT) to 364 controls (LT without prior RRT). There was no statistical difference in all‐cause inpatient mortality (4.9% vs 3.6% P = 0.4). A significantly greater proportion of cases were associated with ICU admission (40.7% vs 17.0%, P < 0.001) and RRT requirement post LT (100% vs 17%, P < 0.001). There was no difference in 30‐ (hazard ratio [HR] 1.1, 0.4–2.6), 60‐ (HR 0.9, 0.4–1.8), or 90‐day (HR 0.8, 0.4–1.6) inpatient mortality between the groups. Also, 180‐day survival estimates were comparable (P = 0.5). The results were similar in patients with no chronic kidney disease (CKD) and CKD‐III. Conclusion: RRT prior to LT, in patients without advanced CKD or ESRD, was associated with greater instances of ICU stay and need for future RRT. Also, 30‐, 60‐, and 90‐day inpatient mortality rates were similar, and 180‐day survival estimates were comparable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The HALO Trust was founded in 1988 to alleviate suffering among civilians living in hazardous areas. Today, it is the largest humanitarian de-mining charity in the world. Its earliest operations were in Afghanistan. Following the Soviet withdrawal, HALO moved into Kabul where it established a clinic for casualties of war, developed mine risk education and gradually rolled out an innovative mine clearance programme. These interventions helped to transform mine clearance from being a military legacy into a humanitarian priority. Much of the early strategic foresight for HALO extended from the military experience of the former Scottish foot soldier Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Based on semi-structured interviews with key participants and access to private papers and diaries, this article provides a narrative framework for understanding the emergence of humanitarian mine clearance or 'mine action', as it is now termed. Through sometimes fractious dialectical relationships with various United Nations agencies and discreet dealings with Afghanistan's communist government and regional warlords, HALO became a vital implementing partner in the work of refugee resettlement and rehabilitation assistance. Retrieving its history contributes to a clearer identification of the intersections between military expertise, development, humanitarianism and the post-Cold War world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a pathological condition wherein lung injury precipitates the deposition of scar tissue, ultimately leading to a decline in pulmonary function. Existing research indicates a notable exacerbation in the clinical prognosis of IPF patients following infection with COVID-19. This investigation employed bulk RNA-sequencing methodologies to describe the transcriptomic profiles of small airway cell cultures derived from IPF and post-COVID fibrosis patients. Differential gene expression analysis unveiled heightened activation of pathways associated with microtubule assembly and interferon signaling in IPF cell cultures. Conversely, post-COVID fibrosis cell cultures exhibited distinctive characteristics, including the upregulation of pathways linked to extracellular matrix remodeling, immune system response, and TGF-β1 signaling. Notably, BMP signaling levels were elevated in cell cultures derived from IPF patients compared to non-IPF control and post-COVID fibrosis samples. These findings underscore the molecular distinctions between IPF and post-COVID fibrosis, particularly in the context of signaling pathways associated with each condition. A better understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms holds the promise of identifying potential therapeutic targets for future interventions in these diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reach expert consensus on a definition for recovery following minor and moderate road traffic crash-related injuries and key factors that influence recovery, and to explore expert perspectives on risk identification methods. A three-round Delphi study was conducted in which 47 experts (insurance representatives, health care professionals and researchers) were consulted. Strong expert agreement (86%) was reached for the definition: "Recovery is multifaceted and includes return to activities of daily living (ADLs), work and social/leisure activities at pre-injury level or at a level deemed acceptable by the individual, with minimal ongoing pain and symptoms, considering physical and mental health and wellbeing". Agreed key factors that influenced recovery included: resilience; coping skills; recovery expectations; pre-existing physical and mental health; workplace support; and, collaboration between the injured individual, treating providers and claim handlers. Expert perspectives on risk identification methods were mixed. An accepted definition for recovery following minor and moderate road traffic crash-related injury was established, which could facilitate communication and engagement between different rehabilitation stakeholders. Strong consensus was achieved on nine key factors that influenced recovery. Further research is needed to evaluate whether injured persons agree with this definition and on the utility of risk identification methods. Expert consensus was established for a definition of recovery following minor and moderate road traffic crash-related injuries and nine key influencing factors. An established definition could facilitate communication and engagement between all rehabilitation stakeholders, which could improve the recovery process of the injured person. Rehabilitation professionals need to be familiar with the role of psychosocial factors, such as recovery expectations, resilience and coping skills, in the recovery process. The use of physical and psychological outcome measures at regular intervals could help to identify risk of poor recovery following minor and moderate road traffic crash-related injuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that middle power theories can be tested by looking at the practice of negotiating multilateral treaties on conventional weapons. Three recent treaties are noteworthy, regulating landmines, cluster munitions and the arms trade. They are noteworthy because they were negotiated through multilateral diplomacy by coalitions of countries often identified as middle powers, and resulted in humanitarian, effects-based regulations. Canada and Australia actively participated in all three and are regularly cited as exemplars of middle powers. On landmines and the arms trade, both behaved as middle power theories would anticipate, embracing multilateralism and seeking a principled outcome. On cluster munitions, neither country conformed to expectations and instead unsuccessfully sought an incremental approach in line with their US ally. These cases therefore offer promising terrain to test claims around middle powers, multilateralism, and principled approaches to world affairs. This article sheds light on these inconsistencies by identifying the contextual changes behind these differing postures through a 'contexts of diplomacy' framework. This article also highlights the strategies and tactics of Canada and Australia. This serves two purposes. First, it helps address some of the issues raised in middle power theories. Second, it helps identify modes of middle power diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article closely examines the significant support of the German government for the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the 1990s. Based on newly released contemporaneous documents from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice, the article demonstrates the important role of the German delegation, led by Hans-Peter Kaul, who would later become an ICC judge, and supported by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Klaus Kinkel, in the negiotating process as a whole. The article argues that reunified Germany resorted to the politics relating to international criminal justice as one important means of addressing its new role in international relations. In the same vein, Germany also actively encouraged progress in other domains of public international law at the time, such as climate change and the ban on anti-personnel landmines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Human Rights Council (HRC) can enact and proclaim global human rights standards. To date the impact of local communities on such international standard-setting remains unclear. This study analyzes how local communities gain access to the HRC's mechanisms and investigates whether standard setting “from below” has been taken up by the HRC. As a case study, the research studies the trajectory of the network of organizations that have lobbied for a Declaration on the Rights of Peasants at the HRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, a series of major multilateral treaties were created in the absence of support-and often in the face of sustained opposition-from the United States and other emerging global leaders like China, India, and Russia. These institutions present a puzzle to prominent theories of IR because they fail to encompass predominantly powerful actors regarded as most consequential to the development and enforcement of international rules, raising questions as to their potential efficacy. This paper addresses the prospects for non-great power law in theoretical and empirical terms. I first draw on constructivist conceptions of international law as a social practice to demonstrate how multilateral treaties may generate powerful new social expectations and alter behavior even when they do not correspond to the prevailing distribution of material power in the international system. Treaties are embedded within an international social system composed of legal and non-legal elements, and these structural features generate social pressures that bear on formal members and non-parties alike. I then apply this account to an archetypal-and hard-case, the ban on antipersonnel mines. Contrary to skeptical assumptions, I demonstrate that the Mine Ban Treaty has instantiated a powerful new international social standard which has generated widespread behavioral change among treaty members-challenging accounts that emphasize enforcement by leading states-and non-parties including major military powers like the United States-challenging the view that great powers avoid new institutional developments not to their liking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a novel concept, humanitarian security regimes, and enquires under what conditions they arise and what is distinctive about them. Humanitarian security regimes are driven by altruistic imperatives aiming to prohibit and restrict behaviour, impede lethal technology or ban categories of weapons through disarmament treaties; they embrace humanitarian perspectives that seek to prevent civilian casualties, precluding harmful behavior, protecting and ensuring the rights of victims and survivors of armed violence. The article explores how these regimes appear in the security area, usually in opposition to the aspirations of the most powerful states. The existing regimes literature has mostly taken a functional approach to analyzing cooperation, lacks a humanitarian hypothesis and does not explore the emergence of new regimes in the core area of security. The author argues that in the processes of humanitarian security regime-making, it is the national interest that is restructured to incorporate new normative understandings that then become part of the new national security aspirations. This article intends to fill this gap and its importance rests on three reasons. First, security areas that were previously considered to be the exclusive domain of states have now been the focus of change by actors beyond the state. Second, states have embraced changes to domains close to their national security (e.g. arms) mostly cognizant of humanitarian concerns. Third, states are compelled to re-evaluate their national interests motivated by a clear humanitarian impetus. Three conditions for the emergence of humanitarian security regimes are explained: marginalization and delegitimization; multilevel agency, and reputational concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article dwells briefly on the positivist and critical security studies approaches to classifying practices of humanitarianism, arms control, and disarmament as old and new. It then expands on this classification by focusing on three specific constitutive practices of identity, expertise and security to demonstrate alignments of power forged between state and non-state actors as they navigate possibilities of creating a humanitarian space in the field of arms control and disarmament to reconceptualize practices of arms control and disarmament as a problem of human security. The article argues that these efforts cannot produce a paradigm shift capable of transforming practices of arms control and disarmament unless they are accompanied by a greater degree of reflexivity among the humanitarian actors on their practices as they strive to meet the conditions of acceptance established by sovereign nation-states as the dominant actors in the field of arms control and disarmament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bases of legitimacy in recourse to war have, in recent years, come to turn vitally on meaningful discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Concurrently, the remarkable successes of the movement to ban antipersonnel landmines and the follow-on ban on cluster munitions have likewise been predicated on this same arbiter of legitimacy, marking specific kinds of weapons as bad for their inherent indiscriminacy. This article begins by exploring sources of popular expectations that make official claims to discriminacy seem plausible. In particular, the role of popular representation is considered for its foregrounding of the technological feats of precision-guided munitions in ways that mystify ethico-political questions about their use. It is argued that this, more than any objective properties of weapons themselves, has been the truly revolutionary aspect of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The implications of/in this for/by disarmament advocacy of the sort exemplified in the civil society campaign to ban landmines are weighed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the Human Security Network (HSN) within the context of Canadian foreign policy. Launched as a bilateral Canadian-Norwegian initiative in 1998, the HSN now encompasses twelve like-minded middle and smaller powers from across the globe. While Canada's human security agenda and Ottawa's activism in other multilateral forums have been extensively treated in the Canadian foreign affairs literature, scant scholarly attention has been dedicated to the HSN generally or as an instrument of Canadian foreign policy specifically. The authors assert, based on interviews with Canadian and other HSN diplomats, that although human security remains an important policy concern for Ottawa, the HSN itself no longer serves as a major diplomatic reference point and that Canada may even withdraw from the very forum that it co-founded. This dramatic development has less to do with the 2006 government changeover and more with macro trends within the HSN itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I want to approach the theme of “globalization and Japan” from the standpoint of constitutional studies. Constitutions and constitutionalism are important means of reining in political power, and in the modern sovereign state system, constitutions and constitutionalism have been conceived on the level of single states. However, as many scholars have observed, one can see the global spread of power in, for example, the worldwide deployment of the US military using overseas bases throughout the world, and the worldwide activities of transnational corporations based in the US, Europe, and Japan. In sum, this is the global spread of military and social power. It is urgent that we rein in this global power. Although controlling power through single-state-level constitutions and constitutionalism is perhaps still the most important priority, we must also consider the possibilities of global constitutionalism or regional constitutionalism now when power is spreading globally. This paper will explore global constitutionalism, which is now the subject of vigorous discussion for those concerned with global governance. Finally, the paper will link global constitutionalism with the pacifism in Japan's constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of “governmentality.” In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landmines are indiscriminate weapons of mass terror that detrimentally affect human beings, the ecological system they live in, the regional economy, and political stability. Despite the extensive nature of the impacts, the land mine crisis is almost exclusively advocated on the basis of human rights principles. A comprehensive framework that considers environmental degradation as a principal aftermath of the global landmine crisis is critically missing from the broader matrix of variables around which the anti-landmine movement converges. This article discusses the current humanitarian framework of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines; its shortcomings to address the interconnected impacts of landmines on the environment and attempts to describe what an inclusive, environmentally sensitive framework would have to incorporate to address the overall landmine impacts effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the establishment of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines organizations for the mobilization of nongovernmental organizations and governments. History of arms control and movement to ban antipersonnel landmines; Characterization of landmines as indiscriminate; Success of the movement to ban antipersonnel landmines.

A Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices is a natural next step on the multinational nuclear arms control agenda. Despite interest among key states and excessive stockpiles of fissile material, a formalized cut-off has yet to materialize. A new pragmatic approach for negotiating an FMCT patterned after the recent Mine Ban Treaty is presented as a potential model. Sweden, together with the other countries of the New Agenda Coalition, is identified as a possible candidate to take the lead and host an alternative FMCT negotiation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a comparative case study of the protest against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the campaign to ban landmines in an effort to examine the implications of a global civil society and the World Wide Web for nongovernmental organization (NGO) activity in the contemporary era. Examination of the campaigns against MAI and landmines; Role of NGO in globalization.