Labor Enforcement Issues in U.S. FTAs

[Excerpt] Labor provisions in free trade agreements (FTAs)—both in the U.S. and globally—were first included in the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the side agreement to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since then provisions have evolved from commitments not just to enforce a country’s own domestic labor laws, but also to adopt and enforce core labor principles of the International Labor Organization (ILO). As mandated by Congress through trade promotion authority (TPA), recent U.S. FTAs also subject labor chapters to the same dispute settlement procedures as all other obligations. Some Members view strong worker rights provisions in U.S. FTAs as an important issue and they have raised concerns over FTA partner compliance with labor commitments and the U.S. record of enforcement. These issues were a part of the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in the NAFTA renegotiation

Effect of cell density on thrombin binding to a specific site on bovine vascular endothelial cells.

We studied thrombin binding to proliferating and confluent endothelial cells derived from bovine vascular endothelium. [125]thrombin was incubated with nonconfluent or confluent endothelial cells and both the total amount bound and the amount linked in a 77,000-dalton thrombin-cell complex were determined. Approximately 230,000 molecules of thrombin bound per cell in nonconfluent cultures compared to 12,800 molecules per cell in confluent cultures. Approximately 67,7000 thrombin molecules were bound in an apparently covalent complex, Mr = 77,000, with each cell in sparse cultures, whereas only 4,600 thrombin molecules per cell were bound in this complex with confluent cultures. Similar studies with [125I]thrombin and endothelial cells derived from bovine cornea revealed no difference either in the total amount of thrombin bound or in the amount bound in the 77,000-dalton complex using sparse or confluent cultures. When confluent vascular endothelial cultures were wounded, additional cellular binding sites for the 77,000-dalton complex with thrombin appeared within 24 h. A 237% increase in the amount of thrombin bound to these sites was induced by a wound which resulted in a 20% decrease in cell number in the monolayer. There was no significant increase in thrombin binding to other cellular sites at 24 h. These experiments provide evidence that the first change in thrombin binding after injury is an increase in the cellular sites involved in the 77,000-dalton complex, and suggest that thrombin binding to endothelial cells may be important in the vascular response to injury

'Unfinished to perfection': Geoffrey Hill, revision and the poetics of stone

In his early criticism, Geoffrey Hill conceives of the work of poetry as a process of strenuous revision towards a definable point of ‘technical perfecti[on]’, identifying the poet’s ethical engagement in the end-directed ‘act of selfcritical decision’. The early poetry, contrastingly, expresses a distrust of the poem as finished product which is often manifest in a poetics of stone: a finished poem petrifies that which it attempts to remember. Employing a genetic methodology, this article tests whether these two conflicting attitudes might produce a friction that affects how the poems develop. It finds that the poems are animated by the question of how, ethically, to finish a poem and traces the vicissitudes of that animation in their developing deployment of stone imagery. Finally, it addresses the customary critical division between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Hill, arguing – through extended close attention to the notebook drafts of The Triumph of Love (1998) – that a dramatic shift in Hill’s revisionary ethic catalyses a profound poetic change expressed in a reconception of stone as flux. Hill’s new, late poetic seeks to comprise itself of its own revisionary processes, thus to remain perpetually in process and, in its unfinishedness, to manifest an ethical openness to alterity

Centro educativo ¿organización o comunidad?

Se plantea el tema de qué es un centro educativo y de si conviene considerarlo como una organización o como una comunidad. Con el fin de contestar esta pregunta se desarrolla la idea del centro educativo como proyecto común. La conclusión es que un centro educativo es un proyecto común de mejora integral de padres, profesores, alumnos y personal no docente en un contexto específico. Por tanto no conviene considerarlo únicamente como comunidad sino también como un proyecto común sostenido por valores constitutivos

Investigating Measures for Pairwise Document Similarity

The need for a more effective similarity measure is growing as a result of the astonishing amount of information being placed online. Most existing similarity measures are defined by empirically derived formulas and cannot easily be extended to new applications. We present a pairwise document similarity measure based on Information Theory, and present corpus dependent and independent applications of this measure. When ranked with existing similarity measures over TREC FBIS data, our corpus dependent information theoretic similarity measure ranked first

Antibody engineering to develop new antirheumatic therapies

There has been a therapeutic revolution in rheumatology over the past 15 years, characterised by a move away from oral immuno-suppressive drugs toward parenteral targeted biological therapies. The potency and relative safety of the newer agents has facilitated a more aggressive approach to treatment, with many more patients achieving disease remission. There is even a prevailing sense that disease 'cure' may be a realistic goal in the future. These developments were underpinned by an earlier revolution in molecular biology and protein engineering as well as key advances in our understanding of rheumatoid arthritis pathogenesis. This review will focus on antibody engineering as the key driver behind our current and developing range of antirheumatic treatments

Carbohydrate—protein conjugate vaccines

ABSTRACTVarious pathogenic bacteria have coats of polysaccharide, many with repeating epitopes. Though polysaccharide vaccines have been available for some time, they induce mainly IgM production, and are only moderately protective in adults and ineffective in young children. It was originally shown in 1931 that the immunogenicity of polysaccharides could be enhanced by conjugating to a protein. The last two decades have witnessed the production and clinical testing of polysaccharide—protein conjugates specific for at least four different bacteria which normally cause considerable mortality and morbidity, especially in young children. In some cases, immunizing children from 4 months of age, with a booster early in the second year, has resulted in remarkably high success rates in protecting them from disease. For one pathogen, Haemophilus influenza type b, the success rate has been sufficiently high (>95%) to suggest that this disease might, in time, be globally controlled in this way. The results of immunization with conjugate vaccines to Streptococcus pneumoniae, Neisseria meningiditis and Salmonella typhi are also very encouraging. More conjugate preparations are under development