Highlights COVID-19 presents unprecedented challenge to all facets of human endeavour. A critical review of the negative and positive impacts of the pandemic is presented. The danger of relying on pandemic-driven benefits to achieving SDGs is highlighted. The pandemic and its interplay with circular economy (CE) approaches is examined. Sector-specific CE recommendations in a resilient post-COVID-19 world are outlined.

Internet of things IoT is playing a remarkable role in the advancement of many fields such as healthcare, smart grids, supply chain management, etc. It also eases people's daily lives and enhances their interaction with each other as well as with their surroundings and the environment in a broader scope. IoT performs this role utilizing devices and sensors of different shapes and sizes ranging from small embedded sensors and wearable devices all the way to automated systems. However, IoT networks are growing in size, complexity, and number of connected devices. As a result, many challenges and problems arise such as security, authenticity, reliability, and scalability. Based on that and taking into account the anticipated evolution of the IoT, it is extremely vital not only to maintain but to increase confidence in and reliance on IoT systems by tackling the aforementioned issues. The emergence of blockchain opened the door to solve some challenges related to IoT networks. Blockchain characteristics such as security, transparency, reliability, and traceability make it the perfect candidate to improve IoT systems, solve their problems, and support their future expansion. This paper demonstrates the major challenges facing IoT systems and blockchain's proposed role in solving them. It also evaluates the position of current researches in the field of merging blockchain with IoT networks and the latest implementation stages. Additionally, it discusses the issues related to the IoT-blockchain integration itself. Finally, this research proposes an architectural design to integrate IoT with blockchain in two layers using dew and cloudlet computing. Our aim is to benefit from blockchain features and services to guarantee a decentralized data storage and processing and address security and anonymity challenges and achieve transparency and efficient authentication service.

The obnoxious p-median (OpM) problem is the repulsive counterpart of the more known attractive p-median problem. Given a set I of cities and a set J of possible locations for obnoxious plants, a p-cardinality subset Q of J is sought, such that the sum of the distances between each city of I and the nearest obnoxious site in Q is maximised. We formulate OpM as a {0, 1} linear programming problem and propose three families of valid inequalities whose separation problem is polynomial. We describe a branch-and-cut approach based on these inequalities and apply it to a set of instances found in the location literature. The computational results presented show the effectiveness of these inequalities for OpM.

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