The way in which states formulate national positions is just as important to EU decision-making as their bargaining strength in the Council.

Which states get their way most often in the EU’s legislative process? Responding to an earlier EUROPP article, Stuart A Brown argues that analyses of Council decision-making must also account for the way in which states formulate their preferences prior to negotiations. While Council agreements on EU legislation appear to be more closely in line with the positions of smaller states like Finland, this does not necessarily mean that they have the most influence over the EU policy process as a whole

A novel mechanism of action for angiotensin-(1-7) via the angiotensin type 1 receptor

No abstract available

Art and psychoanalysis register at the White Hotel

My title refers to the fact that in D. M. Thomas's remarkable novel, both art, in the form of literary imagination, and psychoanalysis seek to comprehend the life of a woman named Lisa Erdman, and both register certain truths or part truths. The novel traces Lisa's life from the time she enters analysis with Freud in Vienna until her death at Babi Yar at the hands of the Nazis. In a final chapter entitled "the camp" that has troubled many readers we witness a kind of apotheosis in which Lisa and most of the characters we have met survive their own deaths. Most readers find The White Hotel to be a brilliant treatment of human aggression, which it certainly is; and an equally brilliant portrait of Freud, who is presented in his role as the man who first unlocked the secrets of hysteria. But the landscape of hysteria, which is the terrain of the novel, is also the landscape of imagination, and so there is a basic opposition between art and psychoanalysis from the outset

RAWS 1992 progress report

The purpose of the Radar Wind Sounder (RAWS) instrument is to measure winds aloft in clouds while providing additional capabilities as an ocean surface-wind and rainfall sensor. The concept of RAWS stems from the Laser Atmospheric Wind Sounder (LAWS) planned to monitor winds via Doppler shifts of lidar return from aerosols in a cloud-free environment. If, however, dense clouds are present, LAWS will be unable to measure the winds below the cloud tops. Thus an instrument that can penetrate clouds is necessary and is the basis for RAWS. The primary tasks related to the RAWS study are to determine: (1) scattering and attenuation models; (2) required radar sensitivity; (3) optical frequencies; (4) needed antenna size; (5) suitable scan pattern; (6) removal of the ambiguity imposed by range and Doppler-frequency sizes; (7) spectrum measurements; (8) system configuration; (9) performance as a rain sensor; and (10) performance as an ocean-surface wind sensor

Brussels blog round up for 6 October – 12 October: Merkel inGreece, the Catalonia debate rages on, and EU wins the NobelPeace Prize.

Reaction to the EU’s 2012 Nobel Peace Prize award has been mixed. Open Europe draws a comparison with the “once celebrated actor who just got a lif etime achievement award”, arguing that while European integration did play a signif icant role in ensuring peace af ter World War II, the EU’s recent record is less impressive. European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more positive. She calls the award “most welcome, unexpected, and important”