Charlie Hebdo is nothing new

Since January’s tragic events in Paris, Charlie Hebdo is undoubtedly the planet’s best-known journal of satirical cartooning, as well as now being the one with by far the highest sales. Yet its trademark features—scatology, vivid sexual humour, and the breaking of taboos, above with respect to, but showing no respect for, religious beliefs—are nothing new in France

Ferdinand de Saussure's Unknown Bandes Dessinées

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Inside the pages of the oldest comic in the World

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Instagram had a Medieval equivalent—and it’s making a comeback

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Scotland, the cradle of comics

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Transforming Anthony Trollope: 'Dispossession', Victorianism and 19th-century Word and Image

Published by Leuven University Press © Universitaire Pers Leuven/Leuven University PressAn edited collection of eleven chapters. Introduction attached

La caricature comme pilier du premier comic du monde : Glasgow Looking Glass (1825)

Le Glasgow Looking Glass, premier comic du monde ? Un débat passionné autour de cette question s’ouvrit en 1996, lors d’un colloque qui eut lieu au Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême sur « Les origines de la bande dessinée » et dont la revue Le Collectionneur de Bandes Dessinées nous a livré la retranscription. Yves Frémion, critique de bande dessinée et ancien député européen, souligna lors de l’ouverture du colloque le fait que celui-ci avait lieu pour célébrer le cent ..

Why we need more collaboration in Europe to enhance post-marketing surveillance of vaccines.

The influenza A/H1N1 pandemic in 2009 taught us that the monitoring of vaccine benefits and risks in Europe had potential for improvement if different public and private stakeholders would collaborate better (public health institutes (PHIs), regulatory authorities, research institutes, vaccine manufacturers). The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) subsequently issued a competitive call to establish a public-private partnership to build and test a novel system for monitoring vaccine benefits and risks in Europe. The ADVANCE project (Accelerated Development of Vaccine benefit-risk Collaboration in Europe) was created as a result. The objective of this paper is to describe the perspectives of key stakeholder groups of the ADVANCE consortium for vaccine benefit-risk monitoring and their views on how to build a European system addressing the needs and challenges of such monitoring. These perspectives and needs were assessed at the start of the ADVANCE project by the European Medicines Agency together with representatives of the main stakeholders in the field of vaccines within and outside the ADVANCE consortium (i.e. research institutes, public health institutes, medicines regulatory authorities, vaccine manufacturers, patient associations). Although all stakeholder representatives stated they conduct vaccine benefit-risk monitoring according to their own remit, needs and obligations, they are faced with similar challenges and needs for improved collaboration. A robust, rapid system yielding high-quality information on the benefits and risks of vaccines would therefore support their decision making. ADVANCE has developed such a system and has tested its performance in a series of proof of concept (POC) studies. The system, how it was used and the results from the POC studies are described in the papers in this supplementary issue

Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States Final Report

On April 9, 2021, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. issued Executive Order 14023 establishing this Commission, to consist of “individuals having experience with and knowledge of the Federal judiciary and the Supreme Court of the United States.” The Order charged the Commission with producing a report for the President that addresses three sets of questions. First, the Report should include “[a]n account of the contemporary commentary and debate about the role and operation of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system and about the functioning of the constitutional process by which the President nominates and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoints Justices to the Supreme Court.” Second, the Report should consider the “historical background of other periods in the Nation’s history when the Supreme Court’s role and the nominations and advice-and-consent process were subject to critical assessment and prompted proposals for reform.” Third, the Report should provide an analysis of the principal arguments for and against particular proposals to reform the Supreme Court, “including an appraisal of [their] merits and legality,” and should be informed by “a broad spectrum of ideas.” The Report begins by explaining the genesis of today’s Court reform debate, including by identifying developments that gave rise to President Biden’s decision to issue the April 2021 Executive Order, particularly the debates surrounding the most recent nominations. This Introduction emphasizes that the Court’s composition and jurisprudence long have been subjects of public controversy and debate in the nation’s civic life: The Court serves as a crucial guardian of the rule of law and also plays a central role in major social and political conflicts. Its decisions have profound effects on the life of the nation. Though conflict surrounding the processes by which the President nominates and the Senate confirms Justices is not new, it has become more intensely partisan in recent years. The Introduction also articulates three common and interrelated ideas frequently invoked in reform debates and throughout the Chapters of the Report: the importance of protecting or enhancing the Court’s legitimacy; the role of judicial independence in our system of government; and the value of democracy and its relationship to the Supreme Court’s decisionmaking. These important ideas can mean different things to different people. The Introduction discusses the range of meanings ascribed to these terms, with the aim of clarifying how they are deployed in arguments for and against reform