‘Relais actors’ and co-decision first reading agreements in the European Parliament : the case of the advanced therapies regulation

The processing of the advanced therapies regulation is of particular interest to scholars of the European Union's (EU) legislative process and students of the European Parliament (EP) because it provides a case study which throws light upon assumptions commonly made about the role of the EP's ‘relais actors’, the promotion of consensus-building within and between parliamentary committees, and the development of intraorganizational rules in response to early agreements in the co-decision procedure. An examination of the EP's processing of the advanced therapies dossier provides an ‘unusual’ but vivid illustration of how the identification of committee rapporteurs as the most important parliamentary ‘relais actors’ fails to capture the increasingly important roles performed by shadow rapporteurs. Significantly, the ‘unusual’ occurrences associated with the processing of the advanced therapies regulation came at a crucial juncture in the reconsideration of the EP's intraorganizational rules in relation to early agreements and the subsequent adoption of new Rules of Procedure in 2009

The interplanetary hydrogen and helium glow and the inferred interstellar gas properties

Observations of the interplanetary hydrogen and helium glow have been obtained by a number of spacecraft and rocket experiments during the past fifteen years. Important results have been established on the temperature, density, velocity, spatial dependence, and hydrogen to helium ratio. However, only four spacecraft launched to date are investigating the outer solar system and of these four the Pioneer 10 spacecraft is the farthest out at 28 A.U. Observations from this spacecraft at great distances have permitted an improved analysis of the effects which are only evident at large distances from the Sun. Perhaps the most significant result in this regard is the clear evidence of the importance of multiple scattering of solar Ly-alpha; an effect which has not been observed in earlier work. Ignoring this effect can lead to a gross overestimate of the local galactic glow. Current best estimates of the galactic glow and the local interstellar wind parameters obtained by the Pioneer 10 photometer at great distances are presented, in addition to complementary experimental observations of particular interest