The World Trade Organization is an intergovernmental organization, concerned with the regulation of international trade between nations. The WTO commenced on 1 January 1995 under the Marrakesh Agreement, signed by 123 nations on 15 April 1994, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which commenced in 1948, it is the largest international economic organization in the world. The WTO deals with regulation of trade in goods and intellectual property between participating countries by providing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements, which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their parliaments; the WTO prohibits discrimination between trading partners, but provides exceptions for environmental protection, national security, other important goals. Trade-related disputes are resolved by independent judges at the WTO through a dispute resolution process; the WTO's current Director-General is Roberto Azevêdo, who leads a staff of over 600 people in Geneva, Switzerland.

A trade facilitation agreement, part of the Bali Package of decisions, was agreed by all members on 7 December 2013, the first comprehensive agreement in the organization's history. On 23 January 2017, the amendment to the WTO Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement marks the first time since the organization opened in 1995 that WTO accords have been amended, this change should secure for developing countries a legal pathway to access affordable remedies under WTO rules. Studies show that the WTO boosted trade, that barriers to trade would be higher in the absence of the WTO; the WTO has influenced the text of trade agreements, as "nearly all recent reference the WTO explicitly dozens of times across multiple chapters... in many of these same PTAs we find that substantial portions of treaty language—sometime the majority of a chapter—is copied verbatim from a WTO agreement." The WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was established by a multilateral treaty of 23 countries in 1947 after World War II in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation—such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

A comparable international institution for trade, named the International Trade Organization never started as the U. S. and other signatories did not ratify the establishment treaty, so GATT became a de facto international organization. Seven rounds of negotiations occurred under GATT; the first real GATT trade rounds concentrated on further reducing tariffs. The Kennedy Round in the mid-sixties brought about a GATT anti-dumping greement and a section on development; the Tokyo Round during the seventies represented the first major attempt to tackle trade barriers that do not take the form of tariffs, to improve the system, adopting a series of agreements on non-tariff barriers, which in some cases interpreted existing GATT rules, in others broke new ground. Because not all GATT members accepted these plurilateral agreements, they were informally called "codes". Despite attempts in the mid-1950s and 1960s to establish some form of institutional mechanism for international trade, the GATT continued to operate for half a century as a semi-institutionalized multilateral treaty régime on a provisional basis.

Well before GATT's 40th anniversary, its members concluded that the GATT system was straining to adapt to a new globalizing world economy. In response to the problems identified in the 1982 Ministerial Declaration, the eighth GATT round—known as the Uruguay Round—was launched in September 1986, in Punta del Este, Uruguay, it was the biggest negotiating mandate on trade agreed: the talks aimed to extend the trading system into several new areas, notably trade in services and intellectual property, to reform trade in the sensitive sectors of agriculture and textiles. The Final Act concluding the Uruguay Round and establishing the WTO regime was signed 15 April 1994, during the ministerial meeting at Marrakesh and hence is known as the Marrakesh Agreement; the GATT still exists as the WTO's umbrella treaty for trade in goods, updated as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations. GATT 1994 is not, the only binding agreement included via the Final Act at Marrakesh; the agreements fall into six main parts: the Agreement Establishing the WTO the Multilateral Agreements on Trade in Goods the General Agreement on Trade in Services the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights dispute settlement reviews of governments' trade policiesIn terms of the WTO's principle relating to tariff "ceiling-binding", the Uruguay Round has been successful in increasing binding commitments by both developed and developing countries, as may be seen in the percentages of tariffs bou

Stanislav Hanzík is a contemporary Czech sculptor. He is known for free sculptures and realizations together with architects. Stanislav Hanzík was born in Most - an industrial city in the northern Czech Republic. During the Nazi occupation his family had to leave the Czech/German border region and moved closer to Prague, to Rakovnik. Here Stanislav created his first colored terracottas, he made the acquaintance of his future wife Kveta. After a year's study at the Padagogical Faculty of Charles University in Prague, under the tutelage of Czech sculptor Karel Lidický, he enrolled in studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague under the well-known Czech sculptor Jan Lauda. Hanzík graduated in 1956 and was given the opportunity for another year's honorary study at the same school. In 1957, he rented part of a house in Malá Strana, one of the historic districts of Prague, established there his studio where he works to this day. At that time, Hanzík was working on sculptures which predestined the future orientation of his work, such as Simeon, the terra cotta sculpture Gorgona-Hiroshima and Miner.

He began presenting his work in 1959 at exhibitions held by the North Bohemian Branch of the Union of Fine Artists. In 1961, he was accepted as a postgraduate student at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of the sculptor Vincenc Makovský and his sculpture Welder was selected that year for the Czech exhibition at the "Biennale de la Jeunesse" in Paris. Hanzík was awardet, in the main sculpture prize; this achievement got him a stipend which enabled him to study in France at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where he took the opportunity and joined the regardet studios of Ossip Zadkine and Henri Georges Adam. In Hanzík's own studio in Paris, he began by now large series of torsos; this first pieces were subsequently exposed during the artist's first solo exhibition in the "Maison de la Culture" in Le Havre in 1963. After the return from France, in 1964, Hanzík continued his postgraduate studies and taught modeling to students of architecture of the Academy of fine Arts, he held solo exhibitions in the Czech cities, such as Litoměřice, Hradec Králové, Jičín, elsewhere.

The great success had his exhibition in Prague - at the "New Hall Gallery" in 1967. In this year, he accepted an offer from Karel Lidický to become his assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1970, Hanzík was habilitated a privat docent. In 1991-1996 Hanzík taught at the University of Ostrava. From 1996 Hanzík devote his entiery time to his sculptor's work. During his long artistic activities, Stanislav Hanzík organized dozens of exhibitions and created numerous important sculptures; these can be seen in places such as the romonesque chapel of St. Georg on the Czech Říp Mountain, in the Czech National Theater, in front of Carolinum - in the Old Town of Prague, on the Old Stairs of Prague Castle, etc. Significant is Hanzík's work for the Northern Bohemia. Hanzík's sculptures decorate public places of numbers of towns. 1960 Welder, 1964 Motherhood, 1968 Mother Karyatida, 1969 Impailed lion, Dialog of a Poet and a Girl 1970 My Country, 1972 Josef Sudek - a bust, 1973 Chest Game, Lion's Fontain of Carolinum, 1974 Stanislav Neumann - the Czech actor, Corteous Dialog, 1976 the Good Shepherd, 1978 The Czech Lion 1983 Josef Kemr - a Czeh actor, 1984 Rudolf Hrušínský - the Czech actor, 1987 Wrestling of a Lion with a Serpant, 1988 Judgement of Paris, The Pilgrim – Tribute to K. H. Mácha - the Czech romantic poet 1990 The Horse, 1999 commemorative plaque of A. Muchy -the Czech painter 2000 Crucifixtion, 2001 commemorative plaque of A. Muchy, 2001 Metamorphosis, 2002 Josef Bican - the Czech hockey pleyer, 2003 the Memorial stone of the district Usti nad Labem, etc.

Hanzík's sculptures have won numerous awards at abroad. Some of the prices are: 1952 1st prize of the Ministry of Culture and Education for the bust for the Czech architect J. Zitek's grave in Malenice, 1961 main prize for sculpture at the Bennale de la Jeunesse Paris for the sculpture Welder, 1962 award of achiement at the World Exhibition of Ceramics in Prague for the sculpture Gorgona-Hiroshima, 1966 1st common prize with arch. M. Marak for the "space of leisure time of youth, Liberec, 1976 1st prize for the Good Shepferd for the interior of romanesque rotunda St. Georg, the Czech pilgrim place the Mountain Rip, 1988 Merited Czech Artist, 1999 the proze of the Society of Portrait Sculptor London - Medal of Jean mason Davidson for the bust of t

Lampropeltis nigra known as the black kingsnake, is a nonvenomous colubrid species indigenous to the United States. It is a member of the kingsnake genus; the black kingsnake is a large to medium constrictor. Adult specimens attain an average size of 90 to 122 centimetres in total length, with some reaching maximum total lengths of 147 to 183 centimetres, it is similar to L. getula getula, although its can be distinguished by its geography and appearance. It has a black body, interspersed with spaced yellow or cream-colored speckles and more numerous along the sides; the dorsum in some is unpatterned and in others crossbanded. The venter displays a checked yellow pattern. Ventral scales range from 197 to 222 in both sexes, with subcaudal scales ranging from 45 to 59 in males and 37 to 51 in females; the black kingsnake is found in the southeastern quarter of the United States, ranging from southern Illinois to Ohio down along the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and the Alabama River watershed to the northern Gulf Coast in south Alabama and along the coast to the Mississippi River in Louisiana.

Black kingsnakes occupy a wide variety of habitats and is one of the most encountered species by humans in some states. Preferred habitats include abandoned farmsteads, debris piles, edges of floodplains, thick brush around streams and swamps