This timely book scrutinises the mechanisms for guaranteeing respect for the rule of law in the European legal system. Focusing on external relations, it assesses the capacity of the EU to disseminate these values as a global actor and offers novel suggestions for how this capacity could be exercised more effectively. Using EU legislation and case law, the book identifies the essential elements of the rule of law, and distinguishes the general limits it places on the behaviour of public authorities. Focusing on EU sanctions, trade policy and relations with neighbouring and membership candidate countries, it argues that the EU’s promotion of the rule of law internally and externally has strengthened considerably over time. Nevertheless, given the degradation of the rule of law on the international scene, contributors call for an overhaul of EU rule of law policy to uphold the EU’s ethical commitments and strengthen its international standing. This book will be an important read for scholars and students of European law, trade law and international relations. Presenting detailed analyses of EU policy and case law, it will also be highly useful for practitioners and policy-makers seeking to promote human rights and democracy.

Texans of Mexican descent built a unique and highly developed ranching culture that thrived in South Texas until the 1880s. In ""Tejano Empire"", historian Andres Tijerina describes the major elements that gave the Tejano ranch community its identity: shared reaction to Anglo-American in-migration, tightly interconnected families, cultural loyalty, networks of communication, Catholic religion, and a material culture well adapted to the conditions of the region. After the introduction's historical overview of the region, the chapters address specific elements of the lives people led in the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas: work ways and tools, housing and ranch layouts, family networks and authority patterns, education and the arts, religion and daily prayer.A gallery of energetic line drawings by the late Ricardo M. Beasley and graceful pen-and-ink detail drawings by Servando G. Hinojosa of Alice, Texas, commissioned especially for this book, intricately portray scenes from South Texas daily life.

This valuable study offers new insights and contextualization regarding the relation of nationalism to modernism. Hinojosa shows how many writers and critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using Renaissance historiography as a model, produced cultural, art, and literary history to promote two often-competing goals: national culture and modernist culture. Reading authors such as Ruskin, Symonds, Arnold, Pater, Fry, Berenson, Hulme, Pound, and Saintsbury alongside relevant archival and periodical literature, Hinojosa reveals the structures of modernist historiography, high and low culture, and historical periodization. This book should interest literary and art historians in modernist, Victorian, Shakespeare, and Renaissance studies, as well as scholars of cultural studies and cultural history.

Schmidek and Sweet has been an indispensable reference for neurosurgery training and practice for nearly 50 years, and the 7th Edition of Operative Neurosurgical Techniques continues this tradition of excellence. A new editorial board led by editor-in-chief Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, along with more than 330 internationally acclaimed contributors, ensures that readers stay fully up to date with rapid changes in the field. New chapters, surgical videos, and quick-reference features throughout make this edition a must-have resource for expert procedural guidance for today's practitioners. Discusses indications, operative techniques, complications, and results for nearly every routine and specialized procedure for brain, spinal, and peripheral nerve problems in adult patients. Covers the latest techniques and knowledge in deep brain stimulation for epilepsy, movement disorders, dystonia, and psychiatric disorders; surgical management of blast injuries; invasive electrophysiology in functional neurosurgery; and interventional management of cerebral aneurysms and arterio-venous malformations. Includes new chapters on bypass techniques in vascular disease, previously coiled aneurysms, CSF diversion procedures, surgical management of posterior fossa cystic and membranous obstruction, laser-ablation techniques, and brain stem tumors. Explores hot topics such as wide-awake surgery and ventriculo-peritoneal, ventriculoatrial and ventriculo-pleural shunts. Provides detailed visual guidance with more than 1,600 full-color illustrations and 50 procedural videos. Contains quick-reference boxes with surgical pearls and complications. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase. Your enhanced eBook allows you to access all of the text, figures, and references from the book on a variety of devices.

Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangelico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics. Latino Mennonites offers the first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Drawing heavily on primary sources in Spanish, such as newspapers and oral history interviews, Hinojosa traces the rise of the Latino presence within the Mennonite Church from the origins of Mennonite missions in Latino communities in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City, to the conflicted relationship between the Mennonite Church and the California farmworker movements, and finally to the rise of Latino evangelical politics. He also analyzes how the politics of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements captured the imagination of Mennonite leaders who belonged to a church known more for rural and peaceful agrarian life than for social protest. Whether in terms of religious faith and identity, race, immigrant rights, or sexuality, the politics of belonging has historically presented both challenges and possibilities for Latino evangelicals in the religious landscapes of twentieth-century America. In Latino Mennonites, Hinojosa has interwoven church history with social history to explore dimensions of identity in Latino Mennonite communities and to create a new way of thinking about the history of American evangelicalism.

Unique in the field, Comparative Management of Spine Pathology presents commonly encountered spinal cases with side-by-side, case-by-case comparisons that clearly show how various experts would handle the same case. This second volume in the Neurosurgery: Case Management Comparison Series offers multiple opinions from international experts in both neurosurgery and orthopaedics, each of whom explains their preferred approach and management style for the same case. This format allows for quick and helpful comparisons of different ways to approach a lesion, advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and what each expert is looking for in how they would manage a particular case. Offers 4 expert opinions on each case in a templated format designed to help you quickly make side-by-side comparisons-an ideal learning tool for both trainee and practicing neurosurgeons and orthopaedic surgeons for board review and case preparation. Helps you easily grasp different approaches to spine management with different expert approaches to the same case and summaries from the editors on the advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Features a wide variety of management decisions, from preoperative studies to surgical approach, surgical adjuncts, and postoperative care, from experts in the field who specialize in different aspects of spine surgery. Presents 70 cases in the areas of degenerative spine, traumatic spine, spinal deformity, spinal oncology, and miscellaneous topics such as epidural abscess, osteomyelitis, and post-instrumentation infection. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase. Your enhanced eBook allows you to access all of the text and figures from the book on a variety of devices.

Illuminates how religion has shaped Latino politics and community building Too often religious politics are considered peripheral to social movements, not central to them. Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 seeks to correct this misinterpretation, focusing on the post-World War II era. It shows that the religious politics of this period were central to secular community-building and resistance efforts. The volume traces the interplay between Latino religions and a variety of pivotal movements, from the farm worker movement to the sanctuary movement, offering breadth and nuance to this history. This illuminates how broader currents involving immigration, refugee policies, de-industrialization, the rise of the religious left and right, and the Chicana/o, immigrant, and Puerto Rican civil rights movements helped to give rise to political engagement among Latino religious actors. By addressing both the influence of these larger trends on religious movements and how the religious movements in turn helped to shape larger political currents, the volume offers a compelling look at the twentieth-century struggle for justice.

This book presents a collection of the most recent hybrid methods for image processing. The algorithms included consider evolutionary, swarm, machine learning and deep learning. The respective chapters explore different areas of image processing, from image segmentation to the recognition of objects using complex approaches and medical applications. The book also discusses the theory of the methodologies used to provide an overview of the applications of these tools in image processing. The book is primarily intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of science, engineering and computational mathematics, and can also be used for courses on artificial intelligence, advanced image processing, and computational intelligence. Further, it is a valuable resource for researchers from the evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence and image processing communities.

2021 Finalist Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book, International Latino Book Awards Winner of the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education Inaugural Book Award Unraveling the intertwined histories of Latino radicalism and religion in urban America, this book examines how Latino activists transformed churches into staging grounds for protest against urban renewal and displacement. In the late 1960s, the American city found itself in steep decline. An urban crisis fueled by federal policy wreaked destruction and displacement on poor and working-class families. The urban drama included religious institutions, themselves undergoing fundamental change, that debated whether to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism. Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis; relates the tensions they created; and articulates the activists' bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements frequently crossed boundaries between faith and politics and argues that understanding the history of these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

The use of metaheuristic algorithms (MA) has been increasing in recent years, and the image processing field is not the exempted of their application. In the last two years a big amount of MA has been introduced as alternatives for solving complex optimization problems. This book collects the most prominent MA of the 2019 and 2020 and verifies its use in image processing tasks. In addition, literature review of both MA and digital image processing is presented as part of the introductory information. Each algorithm is detailed explained with special focus in the tuning parameters and the proper implementation for the image processing tasks. Besides several examples permits to the reader explore and confirm the use of this kind of intelligent methods. Since image processing is widely used in different domains, this book considers different kinds of datasets that includes, magnetic resonance images, thermal images, agriculture images, among others. The reader then can have some ideas of implementation that complement the theory exposed of each optimization mechanism. Regarding the image processing problems this book consider the segmentation by using different metrics based on entropies or variances. In the same way, the identification of different shapes and the detection of objects are also covered in the corresponding chapters. Each chapter is complemented with a wide range of experiments and statistical analysis that permits the reader to judge about the performance of the MA. Finally, there is included a section that includes some discussion and conclusions. This section also provides some open questions and research opportunities for the audience.

Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels: Hope and the Burdens of History argues historical novels can help readers receive the burdens of history-meaning both the burdens of the past, present, and future and the burden of living in time-and develop a more robust conception of and concrete practice of hope. Since the 1960s, historical novels have been a dominant literary genre, but they have been influenced primarily not by Christian but by postmodern and marxist thinkers and writers. This book provides a theological and literary analysis of all three types of historical novels-postmodern, marxist, and Christian-and outlines what each school of thought can learn from each other regarding historical understanding and hope. Using Jurgen Moltmann's theology of hope and Frank Kermode's literary criticism as a theoretical basis, the book offers readings of novels by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Ursula LeGuin, among others, and ends with an extended analysis of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series.

Under what conditions do citizens most effectively connect to the democratic process? We tend to think that factors like education, income, and workforce participation are most important, but research has shown that they exert less influence than expected when it comes to women's attitudes and engagement. Scholars have begun to look more closely at how political context affects engagement. This book asks how contexts promote women's interest and connection to democracy, and it looks to Latin America for answers. The region provides a good test case as the institution of gender quotas has led to more recent and dramatic increases in women's political representation. Specifically, Magda Hinojosa and Miki Caul Kittilson argue that the election of women to political office-particularly where women's presence is highly visible to the public-strengthens the connections between women and the democratic process. For women, seeing more "people like me" in politics changes attitudes and orientations toward government and politics. The authors untangle the effects of gender quotas and the subsequent rise in women's share of elected positions, finding that the latter exerts greater impact on women's connections to the democratic process. Women citizens are more knowledgeable, interested, and efficacious when they see women holding elected office. They also express more trust in government and in political institutions and greater satisfaction with democracy when they see more women in politics. The authors look at comparative data from across Latin America, but focus on an in-depth case study of Uruguay. Here, the authors find that gender gaps in political engagement declined significantly after a doubling of women's representation in the Senate. The authors therefore argue that far-reaching gender gaps can be overcome by more equitable representation in our political institutions.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

This book examines different levels of narcotics control cooperation between the United States, Mexico and Colombia. Victor J. Hinojosa finds that Mexico is consistently held to a very different standard than Colombia and that the US often satisfies domestic political pressures to be tough on drugs by punishing Colombia while allowing Mexico much more freedom to pursue different strategies. He also explores the role of domestic terrorism and presidential reputation in Colombia for the US-Colombia pair and the role of competing issues in the US-Mexican bilateral agenda for that country pair, finding that congressional pressure and electoral tests exert the most impact on US behavior but that Mexican and Colombian behavior is best explained in other ways. Together, these findings suggest both the promise of integrating the study of international relations and comparative politics and important limitations of the theoretical framework.

Many countries throughout Latin America have experienced high levels of corruption, drug trafficking, and violence, which has created elements of fragility. The book is comprises case studies that explore the nature of violence in countries throughout the region. Moreover, it seeks to address some of the ways in which governments have sought to address violence. The cases examined in this volume are quite diverse, illustrating different types of violence as all of the countries in Latin America are not the same. Countries like Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have high levels of drug trafficking and organized crime. Strategies designed to combat drug trafficking organization, particularly in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, and counter-gang strategies in Central America have help foment violence as these various criminal organizations have responded to such government policies. Yet other countries, like Peru and Bolivia, have much lower levels of violence. However, the perception of insecurity is quite high despite the fact that Peru has one of the lower homicide rates in the country. On the other hand, the nature of violence in Bolivia is quite different. This country does not have a homicide rate like El Salvador, but the country has witnessed public lynchings and other forms of violence. This volume is an effort to better understand the major trends in political violence in this particularly violent region.

Unique in the field, Intrinsic and Skull Base Tumors presents commonly encountered skull base and intrinsic neoplasm cases with side-by-side, case-by-case comparisons that clearly show how various experts would handle the same case. This inaugural volume in the Neurosurgery: Case Comparison Series offers multiple opinions from international experts in neurosurgery who provide various approaches and management styles for the same case. This format allows for quick and helpful comparisons of different ways to approach a lesion, advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and what each expert is looking for in how they would manage a particular case. Offers 3 to 4 expert opinions on each case in a templated format designed to help you quickly make side-by-side comparisons-an ideal learning tool for both trainees and practicing neurosurgeons for board review and case preparation. Helps you easily grasp different approaches to brain tumor management with different expert approaches to the same case and summaries from the editors on the advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Features a wide variety of management decisions, from preoperative studies to surgical approach, surgical adjuncts, and postoperative care, from experts in the field who specialize in different aspects of neurosurgery. Covers low and high grade gliomas, metastatic brain cancers, meningiomas, sellar and parasellar lesions, skull base lesions, and other brain lesions such as colloid cyst, cavernoma, hemangioblastoma, brain abscess, and more. Enhanced eBook version included with purchase. Your enhanced eBook allows you to access all of the text, figures, and references from the book on a variety of devices.

Unlike many Latin American writers whose work has been published in the United States, Francisco Hinojosa does not rely on magical realism, exotic recipes or cultural nostalgia. Rather, his stories convey a mercilessly sardonic view of family and society, and his ingenious array of anti-heroes embodies a conspicuous disdain for convention.

Here, in eight masterly stories that are as cruel and pitiless as they are hilarious, he explores the complexities of love and human relationships. These fiercely funny picaresque adventures are peopled with characters who inspire feelings of both solidarity and derision, but let the reader beware: just when you find yourself laughing out loud, you might recognize your reflection in the funhouse mirror.

Francisco Hinojosa was born in Mexico City in 1954, and is the author of three story collections, two volumes of poetry, and numerous childrens' books. He is the recipient of Mexico's National Prize for the Short Story, among other awards.

This book examines different levels of narcotics control cooperation between the United States, Mexico and Colombia.

Victor J. Hinojosa finds that Mexico is consistently held to a very different standard than Colombia and that the US often satisfies domestic political pressures to be tough on drugs by punishing Colombia while allowing Mexico much more freedom to pursue different strategies. He also explores the role of domestic terrorism and presidential reputation in Colombia for the US-Colombia pair and the role of competing issues in the US-Mexican bilateral agenda for that country pair, finding that congressional pressure and electoral tests exert the most impact on US behavior but that Mexican and Colombian behavior is best explained in other ways. Together, these findings suggest both the promise of integrating the study of international relations and comparative politics and important limitations of the theoretical framework.