Article 19 TFEU's unanimity requirement shares a striking similarity with a two-century old debate on voting and minority rights between the ‘father’ of the US Constitution, James Madison, and the ‘rebellious son’, John C. Calhoun. Madison made majority voting a necessary condition for impartial lawmaking and minority protection in multistate unions. Conversely, Calhoun sought to maintain the racial status quo through advocating for a competing unanimity-based structure. Minority protection in Article 19 TFEU aligns with Calhoun's model. This Article reassesses Article 19 TFEU through the foundational principles of constitutionalism underlying the US debate and shows their continued relevance for contemporary case law and minority protection in the EU. Particularly, it demonstrates, first, that Article 19 offends the impartiality principle of nemo judex in causa sua—no person should judge their own cause—which has long been a leitmotiv in Western constitutional theory. Second, it illustrates that unanimity causes de jure and de facto ramifications for ethnic and religious minorities in the EU. Last, the Article provides a theoretically grounded and comparatively informed argument to aid ongoing attempts for treaty amendment.

The two widely used dichotomies of floor/ceiling and centralization/decentralization often fail to capture the full interactions of rights in multilevel constitutional systems such as the EU or the US. This article offers a comprehensive yet straightforward classification linking rights to the division of power between the center and component states. The typology comprises three overarching categories: plurality, partial and full centrality. These categories are broken down into further subcategories and illustrated through comparative examples from the EU and the US. The typology reveals mezzanine structural levels which go unnoticed when analysis is confined to existing dichotomies. The purpose of the typology is, first, to facilitate more accurate comparisons of the EU and the US’s composite systems and make commonalities and divergences easier to identify. Second, through the ensuing clarity, it aids the normative inquiry into what level of government—the center or the state—is better suited to regulate different types of rights and to what extent. Thirdly, it reconnects the EU-US comparison with comparative constitutionalism’s Aristotelian pedigree of utilizing robust categorization as a necessary cognitive tool for maintaining rationally ordered analyses.

Biosynthesized Zincite nanoparticles have been successfully demonstrated by a completely green process mediated aqueous extract of rosemary leaves acting as both reducing and stabilizing agents and zinc nitrate hexahydrate as the precursor. The synthesis was free of solvents and surfactants to adhere to green chemistry principles and the impartation of environmental benignity. To achieve our objective, structural and optical investigations of ZnO annealed at 500°C for 2hrs were carried-out using complementary techniques. High resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) revealed the self-assembled, highly agglomerated quasi-hexagonal shaped NPs and the average particle size was found to peak at 15.62 ± 0.22 nm. Selected area electron diffraction (SAED) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) exhibited several diffraction rings with clear diffraction spots confirming their polycrystallinity and the purity of ZnO NPs with a wurtzite structure. Furthermore, the energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) substantiated the presence of Zn and O in the sample and attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) illustrated the Zn-O chemical bonds. From UV-Vis-NIR, the optical band gap was amounted to 3.2 eV and photoluminescence (PL) emission spectrum to 2.9eV with high surface defects and oxygen vacancies. Through these results, the use of rosemary leaves extract is hereby shown to be a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative to synthesize Zincite nanoparticles (ZnO NPs).

A red algal species, Polyneura bonnemaisonii (Delesseriaceae, Rhodophyta), is described for the first time in the Atlantic Ocean of Morocco. This is also the first reference of the occurrence of this species in Africa. This species was collected in the lower intertidal to subtidal zones, from Hyayda (north-west of Morocco). The Moroccan specimen is studied in detail and compared with other closely related species. Habitat, geographic distribution, description and illustration of the macroscopic and microscopic characters are presented and discussed in this work.

Background: Adherence to treatment is a complex and poorly understood phenomenon. This study investigates the relationship between older depressed patients’ adherence to antidepressants and their beliefs about and knowledge of the medication.

Methods: Assessment was undertaken of 108 outpatients over the age of 55 years diagnosed with depressive disorder and treated for at least four weeks with antidepressants. Adherence was assessed using two self-report measures: the Medication Adherence Rating Scale (MARS) and a Global Adherence Measure (GAM). Potential predictors of adherence investigated included sociodemographic, medication and illness variables. In addition, 33 carers were interviewed regarding general medication beliefs.

Results: 56% of patients reported 80% or higher adherence on the GAM. Sociodemographic variables were not associated with adherence on the MARS. Specific beliefs about medicines, such as “my health depends on antidepressants” (necessity) and being less worried about becoming dependant on antidepressants (concern) were highly correlated with adherence. General beliefs about medicines causing harm or being overprescribed, experiencing medication side-effects and severity of depression also correlated with poor adherence. Linear regression with the MARS as the dependent variable explained 44.3% of the variance and showed adherence to be higher in subjects with healthy specific beliefs who received more information about antidepressants and worse with depression severity and autonomic side-effects.

Conclusions: Our findings strongly support a role for specific beliefs about medicines in adherence. Challenging patients’ beliefs, providing information about treatment and discussing side-effects could improve adherence. Poor response to treatment and medication side-effects can indicate poor adherence and should be considered before switching medications.

Secondary school pupils and their parents were investigated using the scaled version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ–28) and by a questionnaire designed to study attitudes involved in inter-generational conflict in psychiatric patients. Parent-pupil and interparental conflict in answers to the attitude questionnaires were taken as measures of inter-generational and intra-generational conflicts respectively. The former significantly exceeded the latter. Parent-student conflict was higher when the students involved were females, Kuwaiti, or had less educated fathers. The tendency of the number of reported GHQ symptoms to be higher in members of families with higher inter-generational conflict did not reach statistical significance. There is an apparent discrepancy between this finding and the prominence of inter-generational conflict in clinical material.