Kitâb-ı ahdnâme-yi hümâyûn-ı saâdet-makrûn : manuscript, 1740?

According to the colophon (f. 23r), copy of capitulations of 4 Rebīʻ I 1153 AH [May 31, 1740 AD], signed by the Grand Vezir el-Ḥācc Meḥmed Paşa and the French envoy Louis-Sauveur, Marquis de Villeneuve (mentionned f. 3r), granted to France. Contains renewal of the capitulations granted during the Reign of Sultan Meḥmed IV (r. 1058-99 [1648-87]) with some newly introduced articles.

Fī bayān mā dhakarahu Muḥammad Afandī al-Awaljī al-marsūl min ṭaraf al-dawlah al-ʻalīyah ilá Faransā wa-mā shāhadahu hunāk =: Traduction arabe de la relation de voyage en France de Mehmet Effendi, Ambassadeur de Turquie : manuscript, undated

بيان ما ذكره محمد افندي المرسول من طرف الدولة العلية إلى فرنسا وجميع ما شاهده هناك قال انه... :Incipit

Reducing task’s redundancy – the strategy of Faculty of Pharmacy Library to centralize all scientific research

Introduction – Based on a previous project of University of Lisbon (UL) – a Bibliometric Benchmarking Analysis of University of Lisbon, for the period of 2000-2009 – a database was created to support research information (ULSR). However this system was not integrated with other existing systems at University, as the UL Libraries Integrated System (SIBUL) and the Repository of University of Lisbon (Repositório.UL). Since libraries were called to be part of the process, the Faculty of Pharmacy Library’ team felt that it was very important to get all systems connected or, at least, to use that data in the library systems. Objectives – The main goals were to centralize all the scientific research produced at Faculty of Pharmacy, made it available to the entire Faculty, involve researchers and library team, capitalize and reinforce team work with the integration of several distinct projects and reducing tasks’ redundancy. Methods – Our basis was the imported data collection from the ISI Web of Science (WoS), for the period of 2000-2009, into ULSR. All the researchers and indexed publications at WoS, were identified. A first validation to identify all the researchers and their affiliation (university, faculty, department and unit) was done. The final validation was done by each researcher. In a second round, concerning the same period, all Pharmacy Faculty researchers identified their published scientific work in other databases/resources (NOT WoS). To our strategy, it was important to get all the references and essential/critical to relate them with the correspondent digital objects. To each researcher previously identified, was requested to register all their references of the ‘NOT WoS’ published works, at ULSR. At the same time, they should submit all PDF files (for both WoS and NOT WoS works) in a personal area of the Web server. This effort enabled us to do a more reliable validation and prepare the data and metadata to be imported to Repository and to Library Catalogue. Results – 558 documents related with 122 researchers, were added into ULSR. 1378 bibliographic records (WoS + NOT WoS) were converted into UNIMARC and Dublin Core formats. All records were integrated in the catalogue and repository. Conclusions – Although different strategies could be adopted, according to each library team, we intend to share this experience and give some tips of what could be done and how Faculty of Pharmacy created and implemented her strategy.

Belarus 2006. OSW Report, January 2007

The presidential election of 19 March 2006, which Alyaksandr Lukashenka won, played an important role in developing the dictatorial political regime in Belarus. In order to ensure Lukashenka's victory, the authorities employed repressive and undemocratic methods, which since then have become permanent elements of the political system in Belarus. They included legal and administrative measures to limit the citizens' freedom, arbitrary ways of applying these measures, actions by the state security institutions intended to intimidate the public, a large-scale state propaganda campaign, and restrictions on civil liberties and freedom of speech. The presidential election strengthened Alyaksandr Lukashenka's political position, as the president extended his rule by another five years to 2011. It also reinforced the repression apparatus, consolidated the ruling group and ensured that the democrats remained marginalised. This has ensured the stability of the Belarusian regime and preserved the country's specific political and economic system.This report aims to present the situation in Belarus since the presidential election in March 2006. Part I, devoted to the internal situation, is a description of the internal political scene, i.e. the ruling camp and the opposition. It also includes a section on the prevailing moods in Belarusian society. Another section presents the economic situation in Belarus and the government's economic policy.Part II examines the foreign relations of Belarus, and consists of two sections: the first describes the Belarusian government's relations with Russia, its single most important foreign partner, and the second its relations with Western countries, i.e. the EU member states and NATO countries. Finally, the last part contains predictions of future developments in Belarus.

Tunisia. Supervising Tunisian Elections by civil society: How to improve it? Arab Citizenship Review No. 7. January 2015

Introduction. On October 26, 2014, Tunisia held its second democratic legislative elections. Participation among more than 5 million registered voters was at about 60%, a relatively good turnout for the country, compared to the 52% voters in 2011. Preliminary results for the 33 constituencies (27 within the country and 6 for expatriates) reveal that secular frontrunner Nidaa Tounes (Call of Tunisia) won around 37% percent of votes while moderate Islamist party Ennahdha, winner of the 2011 elections and leader of Tunisia’s post-revolution government, received 27% of votes. Other parties with notable percentages are the Free Patriotic Union (French: UPL) with 4.4% and the leftist party, Popular Front, with 3.7%. Legislative were immediately followed by two round presidential elections the first one held on November 23, the second one after one month. Conversely to what was expected, people were more attracted by presidential elections even though president has notably less prerogatives than the parliament: representing the state, he is mainly responsible for determining the general state policies in the domains of defense, foreign relations and national security (article 76.) This paradox is ascribed to national imaginary more confident in a “Zaïm” (leader) rather than a collective institution such as a parliament. The turnout was at about 64% within the national 27 constituencies. Out of 70 candidates (including 5 female), 27 (with only one female) met the legal requirements to run for the presidency. The result confirms the legislative trend and Beji Caid Essebsi, leader of Nidaa, was proclaimed the third President of Tunisia. He gained 39.46% of the votes at the first round elections. Essebsi was followed by Moncef Marzouki who received an unexpected score (33.43%) at the first round, thanks to the support of Ennahdha audience and to an active and insistent campaign focused on the idea that revolution is threatened by old regime guard “come-back.” Rewarded for his long militant live, the extreme leftist Hamma Hammami in a new look gained 7,8% of the votes while the new comer Slim Riahi received 5,5% despite rumors circulating on his personal reputation. Notably, Kalthoum Kennou gained 0,55% (18.287 votes) but listed eleventh out of 27.

Ukraine and the European Union: Time for a Re-Think. ACES Working Papers, 2011

There are two reasons for the virtual nature of the West’s dialogue with Ukraine. The first is institutional as the EU has until now only been willing to use ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’ in ‘enlargement-heavy’ (i.e. full membership) whereas it has only used ‘carrots,’ but never ‘sticks’, in ‘enlargement-light’ (i.e. the DCFTA). European Council Foreign Relations Senior Fellows Nicu Popescu and Andrew Wilson argue that the EU should be more willing to use both carrots and sticks; that is integrating its soft and hard power. The second is a disconnection between the West and Kyiv over definitions of democracy. The Ukrainian authorities have until now wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; rolling back democracy in Kyiv while claiming to sign up to ‘European values’ in Brussels.

US Democracy Promotion from Bush to Obama. EUSpring Working Paper No. 1, 15 April 2015

Throughout the twenty-first century the United States (U.S.) has attempted to balance its traditional national security interests, whilst also seeking to promote the long-term transformation of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) towards democracy based on liberal values. With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks providing a catalyst for policy change, the U.S. has moved away from its twentieth-century policy of pursuing a regional status quo and instinctively balking at political change. Yet, the U.S. has not abandoned its reliance on autocratic regimes that cooperate on more immediate national security interests such as counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, and the free-flow energy sources into the global market. Rather, U.S. democracy promotion in the MENA has become incremental by design and is characterized by its gradualist and often-collaborative nature. U.S. foreign policy in the MENA is, therefore, depicted by a cautious evolutionary stance rather than supporting revolutionary shifts in power.

Downscaled land surface temperatures obtained by a particle smoothing approach, with links to NetCDF files

This dataset contains continuous time series of land surface temperature (LST) at spatial resolution of 300m around the 12 experimental sites of the PAGE21 project (grant agreement number 282700, funded by the EC seventh Framework Program theme FP7-ENV-2011). This dataset was produced from hourly LST time series at 25km scale, retrieved from SSM/I data (André et al., 2015, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2015.01.028) and downscaled to 300m using a dynamic model and a particle smoothing approach. This methodology is based on two main assumptions. First, LST spatial variability is mostly explained by land cover and soil hydric state. Second, LST is unique for a land cover class within the low resolution pixel. Given these hypotheses, this variable can be estimated using a land cover map and a physically based land surface model constrained with observations using a data assimilation process. This methodology described in Mechri et al. (2014, doi:10.1002/2013JD020354) was applied to the ORCHIDEE land surface model (Krinner et al., 2005, doi:10.1029/2003GB002199) to estimate prior values of each land cover class provided by the ESA CCI-Land Cover product (Bontemps et al., 2013) at 300m resolution . The assimilation process (particle smoother) consists in simulating ensemble of LST time series for each land cover class and for a large number of parameter sets. For each parameter set, the resulting temperatures are aggregated considering the grid fraction of each land cover and compared to the coarse observations. Miniminizing the distance between the aggregated model solutions and the observations allow us to select the simulated LST and the corresponding parameter sets which fit the observations most closely. The retained parameter sets are then duplicated and randomly perturbed before simulating the next time window. At the end, the most likely LST of each land cover class are estimated and used to reconstruct LST maps at 300m resolution using ESA CCI-Land Cover. The resulting temperature maps on which ice pixels were masked, are provided at daily time step during the nine-year analysis period (2000-2009).

Fourth International conference of American states. Message from the President of the United States transmitting a letter from the secretary of state inclosing a report, with accompanying papers, relative to the fourth International conference of American states, held at Buenos Aires from July 12 to August 30, 1910 ...

Henry White, chairman of the delegation.

International sugar agreement : hearing before a subcommittee of the session, on Ex. B, 83d Cong., 2d sess., the International sugar agreement ... March 18, 1954.

George D. Aiken, chairman of subcommittee.

The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945.

"The first to appear in a special series of Foreign Relations volumes on World War II."

The American interest in the "colonial problem"

Mode of access: Internet.

Peoples of the Near East without a national future.

"Prepared by William L. Westermann."

Annual report of the chief justice

Report for 1854 lacks t.-p

Russia and America, dangers and prospects.

Mode of access: Internet.