The corporate responsibility to respect human rights was formally introduced in 2011 with the unanimous endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) by the UN Human Rights Council. It is grounded in social expectations and forms part of the companies' “social license to operate.” This paper argues that this responsibility is progressively turning into a legal duty for lead companies to respect human rights in those types of value chains which are characterized by a high level of control by a lead company over its business partners. Our argument rests on two recent legal developments. Firstly, the article analyzes the judicialization of the corporate responsibility to respect in the case law on parent company liability in various jurisdictions, which, we argue, is highly likely to have some implications in relation to certain types of value chains so as to trigger the liability of lead companies for the human rights harms arising out of the activities of entities over which they exercise sufficient control. Secondly, the article delves into the legislative developments which increasingly require lead companies to exercise due diligence so as to prevent and address adverse human rights impacts in their own activities and global value chains.

Through the observations and the analysis of maser polarization it is possible to measure the magnetic field in several astrophysical environments (e.g., star-forming regions, evolved stars). In particular from the linearly and circularly polarized emissions we can determine the orientation and the strength of the magnetic field, respectively. In these proceedings the implications, on observed data, of the new estimation of the Landé g-factors for the CH3OH maser are presented. Furthermore, some example of the most recent results achieved in observing the polarized maser emission from several maser species will also be reported.

Maser observations of both linearly and circularly polarized emission have provided unique information on the magnetic field in the densest parts of star forming regions, where non-maser magnetic field tracers are scarce. While linear polarization observations provide morphological constraints, magnetic field strengths are determined by measuring the Zeeman splitting in circularly polarized emission. Methanol is of special interest as it is one of the most abundant maser species and its different transitions probe unique areas around the protostar. However, its precise Zeeman-parameters are unknown. Experimental efforts to determine these Zeeman-parameters have failed. Here we present quantum-chemical calculations of the Zeeman-parameters of methanol, along with calculations of the hyperfine structure that are necessary to interpret the Zeeman effect in methanol. We use this model in re-analyzing methanol maser polarization observations. We discuss different mechanisms for hyperfine-state preference in the pumping of torsion-rotation transitions involved in the maser-action.

This article explores the idea that the USDOC imposed anti-dumping duties on Vietnamese shrimp producers despite the fact that the surge of shrimp imports giving rise to the duties may have come from elsewhere in the developing world. We argue that Vietnam's shrimp exporters may have been subject to anti-dumping duties because Vietnam has ‘non-market economy’ (NME) status in the United States. This makes it possible to levy higher duties against Vietnamese firms. We make the point that it was particularly inappropriate to impose anti-dumping duties against the Vietnamese shrimp industry because this industry shows clear indications of being perfectly competitive, whereby firms cannot dump. This in turn raises the question of how the USDOC was able to construct a dumping case where apparently none could have existed. Use of the ‘zeroing’ methodology, in conjunction with Vietnam's NME status, turns out to be central to the answer. The broader issue is that anti-dumping duties are overused where safeguards would be more efficient. The analysis is relevant for the current controversy over China's NME status with a number of its trading partners.

Analysis of political communication is an important aspect of political research. Thematic content analysis has yielded considerable success both with manual and automatic coding, but Semantic Network Analysis has proven more difficult, both for humans and for the computer. This article presents a system for an automated Semantic Network Analysis of Dutch texts. The system automatically extracts relations between political actors based on the output of syntactic analysis of Dutch newspaper articles. Specifically, the system uses pattern matching to find source constructions and determine the semantic agent and patient of relations, and name matching and anaphora resolution to identify political actors. The performance of the system is judged by comparing the extracted relations to manual codings of the same material. Results on the level of measurement indicate acceptable performance. We also estimate performance at the levels of analysis by using a case study of media authority, resulting in good correlations between the theoretical variables derived from the automatic and manual analysis. Finally, we test a number of substantive hypotheses with regression models using the automatic and manual output, resulting in highly similar models in each case. This suggests that our method has sufficient performance to be used to answer relevant political questions in a valid way.

The Habsburg Empire was a sovereign dynasty ruled by the Habsburgs between the 15th and 20th centuries. Although its borders were not defined before the 19th century, what is now Austria, Hungary, some areas of the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Italy were at some point part of the Empire. Starting in the 17th century, the Empire had Vienna as the capital, which was a hub for culture and craft where silk was a valued commodity. Despite the political and cultural importance of the Empire, little is known of its trade practices and sources of raw material. Using a combination of X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Photodiode Array Detector (HPLC-PDA) for the study of a Viennese swatch book, we conducted the first systematic approach to understanding the industry. Benedict Codecasa, a prominent merchant active in Vienna between the late 18th and early 19th century sold silk and other textile goods. Authorized by the Royal Court, Codecasa was assumed to sell luxurious and high-quality textiles. However, our results suggested colored goods were dyed with more focus on aesthetics (finding a similar color) rather than quality through unique recipes. This greatly contrasts with other contemporary textile industries praised for their quality and which, in turn, might be related to comparatively lesser quality textiles sold in Vienna.

The current study investigated the effects of bilingualism on the clinical manifestation of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a European sample of patients. We assessed all incoming AD patients in two university hospitals within a specified timeframe. Sixty-nine monolinguals and 65 bilinguals diagnosed with probable AD were compared for time of clinical AD manifestation and diagnosis. The influence of other potentially interacting variables was also examined. Results indicated a significant delay for bilinguals of 4.6 years in manifestation and 4.8 years in diagnosis. Our study therefore strengthens the claim that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve and postpones the symptoms of dementia.