Next-generation gene therapy for infectious disease: Advances, challenges, and future directions.

Prospects for implementing the European Code of Cancer Practice: Lessons from Poland.

There is nothing here! Unequal access to services and rural resentment in Spain

Youth unemployment remains a persistent socio-economic challenge in South Africa and is particularly acute within semi-urban and rural District Municipalities. This article examines the effects of youth unemployment in the Nkangala District Municipality in Mpumalanga Province. The study adopts a qualitative research approach based on secondary data drawn from government labour statistics, municipal integrated development plans and recent academic literature. As the study relies exclusively on documentary sources, no human participants were involved and ethical clearance was not required. The findings indicate that elevated youth unemployment in the district contributes to deepening poverty, constrained local economic growth, increased social dependency and weakened community cohesion. Structural factors, including limited industrial diversification, skills mismatches and unequal access to economic opportunities, are identified as key drivers of youth exclusion. The analysis further shows that unemployed youth face heightened exposure to social risks such as substance abuse, criminal activities and long-term disengagement from the labour market. The article argues that effective responses require coordinated municipal planning, strengthened skills development pathways and closer collaboration with the private sector and technical training institutions. The study contributes a district level perspective that demonstrates how national unemployment trends translate into localised development challenges.

This study investigates the perspectives of International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme teachers on the integration of educational technology into differentiated learning. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven experienced IB teachers, and the data were analyzed through descriptive phenomenological methods. Findings show that teachers generally support technology-enhanced differentiated instruction, noting that digital tools help tailor content to individual needs, increase student motivation, and improve academic performance. Participants emphasized that technology diversifies instructional strategies, strengthens deep learning, and encourages collaboration. However, challenges such as unequal access to devices, limited internet connectivity, inadequate technical infrastructure, and gaps in digital competence were identified as barriers to effective implementation. Overall, the study concludes that technology serves not only as a pedagogical support but also as a strategic element in designing inclusive and differentiated learning environments. It recommends ongoing professional development and improved infrastructure to ensure equitable and sustainable technology integration.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has led to significant changes in students learning. The increasing use of application platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI has demonstrated a shift in learning habits, which now emphasize speed and replace the reflective and collaborative approaches that are characteristic of traditional learning. This study aims to analyze how the use of AI can create new social habits among students in Indonesia and its impact on social values, morals, and the education system. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach with a literature review through the analysis of various relevant scientific literature, both national and international. The results show that the repeated use of AI will form a digital habitus that emphasizes efficiency and quick results but weakens students' critical and reflective thinking skills. Furthermore, unequal access to technology deepens educational stratification, while the values of academic honesty and social responsibility are beginning to shift. Therefore, education in the AI era must focus on strengthening ethical digital literacy and the formation of a reflective habitus to ensure that technological development remains aligned with humanitarian values, morality, and academic integrity.

In 1914, seventeen people asked Bogotá’s municipal council to close a sewer, build a canal for a river, and enlarge the street where they lived arguing it was the “most infected place” in the city. Since it was a matter of “life and death,” they offered to cede their properties to help. By analyzing the incomplete paper trail of this unresolved petition, this article examines on the ground political practices to explain why and how people with unequal access to resources participated in Bogotá’s urban renovations during the early twentieth century. Besides detailing why enlargement mattered, the article explores the problems with assigning value, establishing compensations, and determining the differences between public and private gains. It argues that peoples’ participation and practices of autoconstruction were not illegal or peripheral, nor a collective claim to the right to the city, but the core, widespread practice through which Bogotá’s space was produced.

This article offers a critical thematic review of recent scholarship on African diasporic identity in contemporary English-language novels, organized around belonging, memory, and cultural hybridity. Based mainly on works published since 2018, the review identifies several major theoretical and interpretive strategies through which diasporic subjectivities are being constructed, negotiated, and contested through transnational mobility and postcolonial pasts. Rather than treating identity as fixed or unitary, the scholarship links diasporic subjectivities to racialization, class position, linguistic hierarchies, and unequal access to global mobility. The literature is based on racialization, a position in classes, the hierarchizing of languages, and the unequal availability of global mobility. The article critically assesses frameworks, such as Afropolitanism, postcolonial hybridity and suggests recent changes toward more socially oriented analyses, material inequality, gendered embodiment and intergenerational memory. There are still notable weaknesses in the research, such as the focus on a limited literary canon, a lack of narratological analysis, and a lack of research into the political economy of world literary markets. It puts forward interdisciplinary practices which integrate narrative theory, sociolinguistics, and migration studies understand the complexity of developing a diasporic identity in literature and how it is tied to larger systems of cultural and social power. Overall, the review maps key thematic convergences and methodological gaps and indicates the value of combining narrative theory, sociolinguistics, and migration studies to read diasporic identity within broader structures of cultural and social power.

Marriage equality in the United States has not automatically yielded parenthood equality. Although same-sex couples disproportionately shoulder adoption and foster-care responsibilities, access to front-end services remains uneven. This paper maps the legal gap between marriage and adoption equality, evaluates how institutional design mediates equality in practice, and proposes federal solutions. Methodologically, it conducts doctrinal analysis of constitutional and statutory frameworks (including marriage and parentage recognition, interstate judgment recognition, and Free Exercise constraints after recent Supreme Court decisions), examines spending-clause conditions and 2024 administrative rules in child welfare, and undertakes a comparative case study of California and Texas. The analysis finds that constitutional rules secure marriage and core incidents of parental recognition and that interstate recognition preserves the portability of adoption judgments; however, state control over eligibility, licensing, contracting, and vital-records administration, combined with religious-exemption statutes and contract design, produces unequal access. California's aligned legislative, judicial, and administrative architecture normalizes dual legal parentage and nondiscrimination in practice, while Texas's exemption architecture sustains gatekeeping and reduces system capacity. Data blind spots in federal reporting further blunt oversight. The paper recommends a federal adoption-equality statute tied to funding conditions, generally applicable nondiscrimination contract terms, restoration and modernization of child-welfare data elements, targeted training and audits, and embedded evaluation to convert symbolic equality into operational parity centered on permanency for children.

Technology usage in education has been a subject of scrutiny in recent years, especially after the “forceful” adoption of educational technologies by higher education institutions, which were otherwise largely reliant on traditional face- to-face modes of teaching and learning, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent debates imply that the adoption of educational technologies seemingly presents a paradoxical situation as, on one end of the spectrum, they outwardly promote social inclusion in the process of teaching and learning while, on the other end, they ostensibly evince categorical social inequalities that translate into unequal access to education. This article explores the implications of adopting educational technologies on equality and educating justice in one higher education institution in Lesotho, with emphasis on the concept of social inclusion/exclusion. This article was undergirded by the pragmatic paradigm, with students purposively sampled to generate data through open-ended questionnaires. The Conceptual Framework of Digital Inclusion was used to frame this study. Findings suggest that the adoption of educational technologies perpetuates pre-existing inequalities in education, especially between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in society. This suggests that achieving equality and educating justice in a disparate socio-economic context requires a deliberate and concerted effort from higher education institutions in developing policies and adapting practices that exalt equitable and inclusive use of educational technologies.

Unequal access to cardiovascular care: learning from European experience.

ABSTRACT Part of the broad line of research on inequalities in academia, this article focuses on a more specific but less investigated aspect: men’s and women’s unequal access to university governance positions in the context of neoliberal academia. We assume from the literature on institutional change and gender equality the importance of considering both formal and informal rules. The article empirically analyzes the Italian case study, where a variety of feminization processes have emerged under the umbrella of weak national legislation. Five universities are examined as examples of this variety. Adopting a longitudinal perspective, their apical decision-making bodies are compared in relation to the evolution of their formal rules of access (through the analysis of the statutes) and their feminization processes (through the analysis of their composition). We show that, in the Italian context, paradoxically, the concentration of power in the hands of the rector determined, in the five universities under analysis, an incentive for top-down policies to promote gender equality as an informal practice linked to a search for legitimation. This happened independently of formal rules promoting gender equality in the bottom-up selection of women for apical university decision-making bodies. Therefore, the contribution of this work is twofold: the importance of informal rules in the processes of institutional change is confirmed; however, unlike what is more often highlighted in the literature, it is shown that they are not only a brake on change, since under certain conditions, they can also play a positive role and accelerate the pace of change.

In the current context of digital transformation of public administration, foreign economic activity is taking on new features related not only to technological changes but also to the need for proper legal regulation. Foreign economic activity is one of the most dynamic areas of interaction between business and the state, and customs administration is a key institution through which the rights and obligations of its participants are implemented. The transition to electronic document management, automated solutions and digital platforms is significantly changing the mechanisms of interaction between foreign economic activity entities and customs authorities. The digitisation of customs procedures creates numerous advantages for business: faster customs clearance, reduced costs, minimised corruption risks, and increased transparency of decisions. The modern electronic systems used in Ukraine are designed to ensure the continuity of procedures, the accessibility of services, and the formalisation of relationships in the digital environment. However, along with these positive changes, new legal challenges arise related to the technical vulnerability of IT systems, limited transparency of automated decision-making algorithms, problems with appealing decisions that are not expressed in paper form, and risks of unequal access to digital tools by different market participants. An additional complication arises when innovative approaches to regulation significantly outpace changes in the regulatory framework. As a result, electronic formats do not always have adequate legal support, which creates legal uncertainty on key issues: the scope of rights of entities in the digital environment, the limits of state responsibility in the event of technical failures, and the possibility of effective protection of interests when automated risk management systems are in operation. Digitalisation is significantly transforming the legal conditions for conducting foreign economic activity. It opens up new opportunities, but at the same time requires a profound rethinking of traditional mechanisms for protecting the rights of foreign economic entities, adapting legal instruments to the conditions of electronic interaction, and increasing the resilience of customs control systems in the digital environment.

This paper highlights the contradictions between the narrow scope for state action under neoliberalism and the robust institutional and logistical mechanisms required to effectively implement policies. The COVID-19 pandemic threw this contradiction into sharp relief, as governments around the world struggled to respond to an unprecedented crisis using diminished administrative machinery and crumbling infrastructure, the result of decades of state retrenchment. In Ghana, market-oriented reforms, accompanied by the erosion of state capacity and unequal access to public utilities, undermined the implementation of the social relief packages introduced during the pandemic. Drawing on secondary data sources such as policy documents, news articles, and published reports, this paper highlights the paradox of attempting to pursue pro-poor social policies using a public sector weakened by market-oriented reforms. It was found that the impact of the utility subsidies was regressive, despite the pro-poor policy intent, reflecting decades of failed neoliberal attempts to improve access to basic services for the poorest. In contrast to scholars who attribute this regressive outcome to problems of targeting, we argue that the central lesson is not about efficiency of delivery but the necessity of rebuilding social infrastructure through assertive state intervention. Yet, in the context of pervasive public distrust of the state and the ideological hegemony of market solutions, the difficulties encountered in implementing these policies have paradoxically been invoked to justify further narrowing of the scope for state action.

The 2023 FIGO staging update for endometrial cancer moves beyond anatomy to integrate histology and molecular classification. This review outlines the new framework, illustrates its application through radiologic-pathologic case vignettes, and highlights how multidisciplinary input guides staging and therapy. Major revisions include separate substages for aggressive histologies, depth-based divisions incorporating LVSI, and molecularly driven categories such as POLE-abnormal and p53-abnormal tumors. Although these refinements sharpen prognostic accuracy, unequal access to advanced testing and interpretive variability remain obstacles to uniform implementation.

Cities that specialize in healthcare are reshaping the global urban landscape, offering advanced medical services while facing challenges of equity and inclusion. This study examines how residents, healthcare professionals, and policymakers perceive these transformations across five internationally recognized medical hubs, Vancouver, Seoul, Yazd, London, and Bangalore. By using a comparative qualitative design supported by computational text analysis, we explored how people describe and evaluate the changing role of healthcare in their cities. A total of 100 semi-structured interviews were analyzed through sentiment analysis and topic modeling to identify emotional orientations and recurring themes. Findings reveal a dual narrative. participants expressed strong satisfaction with care quality, specialization, and global recognition, yet voiced concerns about infrastructural strain, unequal access, and cultural displacement. Thematic clusters highlighted four key areas shaping these perceptions. economic development, governance, cultural identity, and operational challenges. Overall, public trust and perceived fairness emerged as central to how specialized healthcare cities are experienced and legitimized. The study concludes that successful health city planning must integrate technical excellence with equity, transparency, and cultural sensitivity to ensure socially sustainable urban healthcare futures.

The Pediatric Nephrology Standard of Care is essential for the diagnosis,monitoring, and management of children with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Earlydetection of kidney changes is essential since many conditions can be silent,but have a major impact on the child's growth and development. The Standard ofCare structure includes neonatal screening, assessment of predisposingconditions for kidney disease, calculation of the estimate of renal function andclassification of the CKD stage to propose drug and nondrug therapeuticinterventions. Challenges such as shortage of specialists, need for screeningsand unequal access to services reinforce the importance of robust publicpolicies and training programs. Personalized protocols are recommended to delayprogression to Renal Replacement Therapy. In September 2024, the ClinicalGuidelines and Therapeutic Protocol (CGTP) for CKD in adults was launched. Inthis Opinion article, a group of Pediatric Nephrologists comment on theperspectives for creating a CGTP for children and adolescents with CKD.

The Pediatric Nephrology Standard of Care is essential for the diagnosis, monitoring, and management of children with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Early detection of kidney changes is essential since many conditions can be silent, but have a major impact on the child's growth and development. The Standard of Care structure includes neonatal screening, assessment of predisposing conditions for kidney disease, calculation of the estimate of renal function and classification of the CKD stage to propose drug and nondrug therapeutic interventions. Challenges such as shortage of specialists, need for screenings and unequal access to services reinforce the importance of robust public policies and training programs. Personalized protocols are recommended to delay progression to Renal Replacement Therapy. In September 2024, the Clinical Guidelines and Therapeutic Protocol (CGTP) for CKD in adults was launched. In this Opinion article, a group of Pediatric Nephrologists comment on the perspectives for creating a CGTP for children and adolescents with CKD.

Vocational training and employment support for persons with disabilities (PWDs) are essential solutions for ensuring social security, enhancing self-reliance, and promoting community inclusion. In Bình Mỹ Commune, Ho Chi Minh City, social work has played an important bridging role in facilitating PWDs’ access to vocational training programs and employment opportunities appropriate to their capacities. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative surveys of PWDs with in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, along with document analysis and field observations. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and content analysis, and the effectiveness of social work activities was examined from a rights-based social work perspective and a sustainable livelihoods approach. The findings indicate that vocational training and employment support activities have achieved several positive outcomes, particularly in promoting self-employment and household economic development among PWDs. However, these activities remain constrained by limited resources, a lack of job diversity, and insufficient engagement from the business sector, resulting in unequal access and benefits across different groups of PWDs. Based on these findings, the study proposes several recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of social work interventions in supporting employment for persons with disabilities at the local level.

Education in India often faces challenges such as limited resources, overcrowded classrooms, and unequal access to quality learning. Sahayak AI is an intelligent teaching and learning assistant designed to support both teachers and students in such low-resource, multi-grade environments. The system integrates artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and immersive technologies to create an adaptive micro-learning experience. Teachers can generate lesson plans, assessments, and interactive content using an AI-powered assistant, while students receive personalized learning paths based on their progress and understanding. The platform uses React.js and Node.js for its scalable architecture, Firebase for efficient data handling, and LangChain.js with Gemini API for generative AI capabilities. In addition, WebXR modules enable VR and ARbased educational content, enhancing engagement and conceptual understanding. Preliminary evaluations indicate improved student motivation and teacher productivity. This paper discusses the system’s architecture, key modules, implementation strategy, and its potential impact on accessible and adaptive digital education