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In this paper, I analyse the role of shareholder approval and pre-emption rights in protecting shareholders in share issuances by listed corporations in the UK, Belgium and France. In these countries, shareholder approval and pre-emption rights are in principle required for share issuances, but the general meeting can authorise the board of directors to issue shares and disapply pre-emption rights. Proxy advisors and institutional investors have adopted guidelines that signal that they strongly support pre-emption rights and shareholder approval of share issuances. However, I provide empirical evidence that these guidelines are often not followed in France and Belgium, especially for smaller corporations with high levels of insider ownership. I contrast this with the strong impact of the guidelines in the UK. I also offer explanations for these differences, as well as policy options that would give shareholders a larger say on the balance between flexibility and accountability regarding authorisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe and apply a method probing into linguistic (in)directness in complaint tweets. The sample analyzed consists of French-language Twitter complaint interactions, half of which are between the SNCF (the French National Railway company) and its customers and half between the SNCB (the Belgian National Railway company) and its customers. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we present and test a methodology that measures the explicitness (or linguistic (in)directness) of complaints, which, we argue, in line with Decock and Depraetere (2018), must be differentiated from perceived (im)politeness or perceived face-threat. Linguistic (in)directness is analyzed in the complete complaint situation, that is, in the first tweet as well as in the ensuing interaction. Secondly, as the sample shows differences in the realization of complaints in two linguistically close communities, we put forward some hypotheses concerning the relative impact of cultural differences and the companies' response strategy. • We analyze complaint components and how they are linguistically realized. • We differentiate complaint (in)directness and perceived (im)politeness. • Twitter complaints vary in their degree of linguistic (in)directness. • We explore the impact of response strategy on Twitter complaint interaction. • Twitter complaint realizations in French are different in Belgium and France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their increasing political importance and role in frame construction and application, issue framing research has paid very little attention to domain experts – those who hold comprehensive knowledge in a specific field. This paper draws upon concepts from environmental psychology to examine how agroecology training centers in Belgium, France, and Spain construct and apply agroecology issue frames based on specific environmental values. I develop the argument that by highlighting a "community frame" based on the value of environmental altruism, domain experts can act as potentially powerful conduits through which informal institutions can develop and spread in the transition to agroecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Articulatory excursion and vocal intensity are reduced in many children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP), contributing to the children's intelligibility deficits and negatively affecting their social participation. However, the effects of speech‐treatment strategies for improving intelligibility in this population are understudied, especially for children who speak languages other than English. In a cueing study on English‐speaking children with dysarthria, acoustic variables and intelligibility improved when the children were provided with cues aimed to increase articulatory excursion and vocal intensity. While French is among the top 20 most spoken languages in the world, dysarthria and its management in French‐speaking children are virtually unexplored areas of research. Information gleaned from such research is critical for providing an evidence base on which to provide treatment. Aims: To examine acoustic and perceptual changes in the speech of French‐speaking children with dysarthria, who are provided with speech cues targeting greater articulatory excursion (French translation of 'speak with your big mouth') and vocal intensity (French translation of 'speak with your strong voice'). This study investigated whether, in response to the cues, the children would make acoustic changes and listeners would perceive the children's speech as more intelligible. Methods & Procedures: Eleven children with dysarthria due to CP (six girls, five boys; ages 4;11–17;0 years; eight with spastic CP, three with dyskinetic CP) repeated pre‐recorded speech stimuli across three speaking conditions (habitual, 'big mouth' and 'strong voice'). Stimuli were sentences and contrastive words in phrases. Acoustic analyses were conducted. A total of 66 Belgian‐French listeners transcribed the children's utterances orthographically and rated their ease of understanding on a visual analogue scale at sentence and word levels. Outcomes & Results: Acoustic analyses revealed significantly longer duration in response to the big mouth cue at sentence level and in response to both the big mouth and strong voice cues at word level. Significantly higher vocal sound‐pressure levels were found following both cues at sentence and word levels. Both cues elicited significantly higher first‐formant vowel frequencies and listeners' greater ease‐of‐understanding ratings at word level. Increases in the percentage of words transcribed correctly and in sentence ease‐of‐understanding ratings, however, did not reach statistical significance. Considerable variability between children was observed. Conclusions & Implications: Speech cues targeting greater articulatory excursion and vocal intensity yield significant acoustic changes in French‐speaking children with dysarthria. However, the changes may only aid listeners' ease of understanding at word level. The significant findings and great inter‐speaker variability are generally consistent with studies on English‐speaking children with dysarthria, although changes appear more constrained in these French‐speaking children. What this paper addsWhat is already known on the subjectAccording to the only study comparing effects of speech‐cueing strategies on English‐speaking children with dysarthria, intelligibility increases when the children are provided with cues aimed to increase articulatory excursion and vocal intensity. Little is known about speech characteristics in French‐speaking children with dysarthria and no published research has explored effects of cueing strategies in this population.What this paper adds to existing knowledgeThis paper is the first study to examine the effects of speech cues on the acoustics and intelligibility of French‐speaking children with CP. It provides evidence that the children can make use of cues to modify their speech, although the changes may only aid listeners' ease of understanding at word level.What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?For clinicians, the findings suggest that speech cues emphasizing increasing articulatory excursion and vocal intensity show promise for improving the ease of understanding of words produced by francophone children with dysarthria, although improvements may be modest. The variability in the responses also suggests that this population may benefit from a combination of such cues to produce words that are easier to understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Insufficient physical activity (PA) is one of the largest public health challenges of our time and requires a multisectoral public-health response. PA recommendations state that all children and adolescents should accumulate at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) daily and carry out vigorous PA (VPA) three times weekly. While participation in sports club activities is known to enhance the probability of reaching the recommended overall PA level, less is known about the contribution of sports club participation to VPA, and few cross-national comparisons have been carried out. The purpose of this paper is to study whether participation in sports club activities is associated with meeting the overall PA and VPA recommendations among children and adolescents across six European countries, namely Belgium (Flanders), Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ireland and Sweden. Methods: Analyses were carried out on existing self-reported national data sets using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. Results: Results indicate that approximately two-thirds of children and adolescents take part in sports club activities in the given countries. Sports club participants were more likely to meet the overall PA recommendations (OR 2.4–6.4) and VPA recommendation (OR 2.8–5.0) than non-participants. Conclusions: The extent to which overall PA and/or VPA is gained through sports club participation versus other settings needs to be further studied. Nonetheless, it can be argued that sports clubs have an important position in PA promotion for younger populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Administrative law is a legal field usually famous for its close links with specific historic features of domestic legal systems. However, states increasingly cooperate on a range of pressing issues (e.g. immigration, cybercrime, international corruption, etc.) relying heavily on administrative cooperation. Equally, lawyers are increasingly mobile, changing jobs and countries over the course of their career. These combined evolutions should encourage to revisit how legal education provides young lawyers with tools to facilitate their critical skills. This paper shows that comparative administrative law remains very much an untapped resource to provide these skills. It offers a survey (using a questionnaire) of French and Belgian private/public universities and administrative courts. This empirical methodology is supported by historical and theoretical analysis of the past, present and future of comparative administrative law. Belgian and French legal education includes modules entitled "comparative administrative law" in the academic curriculum. They also develop other tools such as double degrees ("bi-licence" and "bi-maîtrise") for their students to gain a better understanding of another administrative law system. Beyond these similarities, France and Belgian legal education have their specificities. For instance, Belgian administrative law is often taught from a comparative law perspective which is not necessary the case in France. Whereas Belgian administrative judges develop strategies to learn from the Netherlands, their neighbor, in their daily work a comparative approach, it was rarely the case for the French Conseil d'Etat until the recent set up of an expert unit in comparative law (Cellule de droit comparé). All in all, and although such tools are still few, this paper highlights the diversity of ways in which students are encouraged to become more familiar with foreign legal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some years, a French-Belgian team of archaeologists and geologists is investigating the provenance of ancient quernstones and millstones. Their study revealed the frequent occurrence of particular coarse sandstones derived from Lower Devonian strata in the Ardenne region, known as either the "Arkose of Haybes" by geologists or the "Arkose of Macquenoise" by archaeologists. Material for Late Iron Age and Roman quern-stones and millstones was quarried from open pits located west of the border between France and Belgium, between the Belgian village of Macquenoise (Commune of Momignies, Province of Hainaut) and the French town of Hirson (Aisne Department, Hauts-de-France region). This paper describes the raw materials, presents the different types of grindstones produced through historical times and provides a detailed diffusion map of the millstones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we question whether prior cross-national differences in food attitudes still exist and if so, to what extent. Due to societal evolutions such as sedentarism and globalization, international variations in food attitudes may not be as pronounced as currently believed. A cross-sectional web-based survey was carried out in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. A total of 2167 respondents (52% women; mean age = 39.0 years, SD = 11.4) participated. To successfully combat obesity, a joint approach focusing on food choice and physical activity is required; therefore we included behavioral measures by means of choice tasks for these two important drivers. Further, the extent to which respondents subscribe to the unhealthy = tasty intuition, together with health and taste interest were investigated. Socio-demographic information and self-reported heights and weights were also incorporated. Logistic regressions were fitted with weight status as the dependent variable and the attitudinal and behavioral measures as independent variables. Our findings indicate that having a higher interest in healthy eating decreases the chance of being overweight (odds = 0.88) and believing that unhealthy food is tasty significantly increases the chance of being obese by 1.18 times. Overall, we find that food attitudes have largely converged across the countries we investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses economic growth, which is one of the most critical macroeconomic themes. We use quarterly GDP time series that was well adjusted for each country through seven different mathematical functions. Then, we calculated the first derivative of these functions to obtain the average economic growth per quarter of each country and the second derivative that measures the instantaneous economic acceleration. Based on the information theory quantifiers, we propose a novel economic indicator called the Macroeconophysics indicator of economic efficiency (MIEE) that shows how efficient a country is in terms of allocating resources from economic growth to convert them simultaneously into a long-term virtuous cycle and, this way, maximizing welfare. Given this, our findings show that the USA, France, and Belgium are present a high value of MIEE. • Taxonomy of the quarterly Gross Domestic Product of 26 countries. • Quantify the economic speed and economic acceleration. • We present a novel Macroeconophysics indicator of economic efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a primary sources analytic description -France and Belgium Visitation Sister's spiritual biographies on the xvii and xviii centuries-- and secondary sources --text books an dictionaries-- which make reference to profane and Illustrated discourses about "breast cancer disease". The contemporary to this centuries Illustrated discourses and the contents of biographies corpus are analized, bringing both out the different social representations and metaphors probably in force today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a quantitative investigation into the occurrence of English in product advertisements in Dutch-speaking Belgium, French-speaking Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. For each country six issues of Elle in 2004 were collected and all ads of half a page or larger were analyzed, for a total of 2,384 different ads. More than two-thirds of those ads contained one or more English words. The actual occurrence of English was low, since 90 per cent of the ads with English were partly in English and partly in the local language, and only 13 per cent of the total amount of the text in those ads was in English. English was especially used for advertising products that can be associated with modernity. Our results regarding the amount of English used and the position of English in the ad do not completely corroborate those of other studies. This could indicate an increase in the use of English in product ads, but it could also be due to the fact that we applied a different research method than had been previously used. The countries we investigated differ considerably in the amount of English used. These differences shed new light on earlier theoretical studies that have compared European countries on the use and status of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High levels of antibiotic consumption are driving levels of bacterial resistance that threaten public health. Nonetheless, antibiotics still provide highly effective treatments for common diseases with important implications for human health. The challenge for public education is to achieve a meaningful reduction in unnecessary antibiotic use without adversely affecting the management of bacterial infections. This paper focuses on the lessons learned from national campaigns in countries (Belgium and France) with high antibiotic use. Evaluation of these national campaigns showed the importance of television advertising as a powerful medium to change attitudes and perhaps also behaviour with regard to antibiotics. Moreover, in both countries, strong evidence suggested reduced antibiotic prescribing. However, adverse effects associated with a reduction in antibiotic prescribing were not monitored. We conclude that carefully designed mass education campaigns could improve antibiotic use nationally and should be considered in countries with high antibiotic use. However, these campaigns should employ techniques of social marketing and use appropriate outcome measures. The benefits and risks of such campaigns have been less well established in countries where antibiotic use is already low or declining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear of the 'Fifth Column' was one of the most important aspects of the defeat suffered by the British army in France and Belgium during May and June 1940, but it has so far been largely overlooked in most accounts of the campaign. There was widespread paranoia throughout the British Expeditionary Force that its efforts were being undermined by spies, traitors and saboteurs, all working behind the lines to deliver a fatal 'stab in the back' to British forces. This paper suggests that this feature of the experience of retreat is a fundamental issue. It argues that many of the other notable facets of the retreat – the strained relationship with allies, the problems in dealing with civilians, the deterioration of morale – can be better understood within the context of the widespread fear of the 'Fifth Column'. Furthermore, it argues that there was a disintegration and brutalization of relationships with civilians, refugees and allies as a direct result of 'Fifth Column' paranoia. It concludes that although the actual influence of any Fifth Column was probably insignificant, the British army suffered far greater damage from the phantom menace of its imaginary 'Fifth Column'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic heavy metal widespread in the environment leading to human exposure in particular through diet (when smoking is excluded), as documented by recent human biomonitoring (HBM) surveys. Exposure to Cd at environmental low-exposure levels has been associated with adverse effects such as renal toxicity and more recently bone effects. The implication, even if limited, of Cd in the etiology of osteoporosis can be of high importance at the population level given the significant prevalence of osteoporosis and the ubiquitous and life-long exposure to Cd. Therefore, the osteoporosis cases attributable to Cd exposure was estimated in three European countries (Belgium, France and Spain), based on measured urinary Cd levels from HBM studies conducted in these countries. The targeted population was women over 55 years old, for which risk levels associated with environmental Cd exposure were available. Around 23% of the cases were attributed to Cd exposure. Moreover, in a prospective simulation approach of lifelong urinary Cd concentrations assuming different intakes scenarios, future osteoporosis attributable cases were calculated, based on urinary Cd levels measured in women aged under 55. Between 6 and 34% of the considered populations under 55 years were at risk for osteoporosis. Finally, the costs associated to the burden of osteoporosis-related fractures attributable to Cd for each country targeted in this paper were assessed, standing for a major contributing role of Cd exposure in the overall social costs related to osteoporosis. Absolute costs ranged between 0.12 (low estimate in Belgium) and 2.6 billion Euros (high estimate in France) in women currently over 55 years old and at risk for fractures. Our results support the importance of reducing exposure of the general population to Cd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The professional life of the author has been a fascinating journey through the magnificent landscapes of synthetic organic chemistry. A friendly editor invited him to share a few of these travel memories. This review is thus a (very) personal and (totally) prejudiced account of the author's research in organic chemistry. It describes the work of his associates and coworkers at UCLouvain in Belgium or at IECB in France. All schemes only deal with work which was done in both research groups. The names of the coworkers will appear in the references. The author apologizes to those coworkers whose work has not been cited but he had to sail within his pages' allocation. As will be seen, many areas of organic synthesis have been visited. The results of the research were put into perspective with the status of the field when the research was undertaken. Obviously several of these fields of research have dramatically expanded later on; credit could not be given here to these important developments. However, when available, some recent reviews will be cited to give a flavour of the most recent work. Thus, the reader should not expect to read a "classical" review of a topical subject. The purpose of this paper is merely the sharing of professional experiences of a modest but enthusiastic teacher and researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Techniques for late spontaneous recovery from stuttering clustered into six strategies. • The strategies reflect components of established treatments and naïve explanations. • Causal attributions of recovery clustered into three implicit theories about recovery. • Knowledge about strategies and implicit theories may help to improve treatment. (1) To survey the employed techniques and the reasons/occasions which adults who had recovered from stuttering after age 11 without previous treatment reported as causal to overcome stuttering, (2) to investigate whether the techniques and causal attributions can be reduced to coherent (inherently consistent) dimensions, and (3) whether these dimensions reflect common therapy components. 124 recovered persons from 8 countries responded by SurveyMonkey or paper-and-pencil to rating scale questions about 49 possible techniques and 15 causal attributions. A Principal Component Analysis of 110 questionnaires identified 6 components (dimensions) for self-assisted techniques (Speech Restructuring; Relaxed/Monitored Speech; Elocution; Stage Performance; Sought Speech Demands; Reassurance; 63.7% variance explained), and 3 components of perceived causal attributions of recovery (Life Change, Attitude Change, Social Support; 58.0% variance explained). Two components for self-assisted techniques (Speech Restructuring; Elocution) reflect treatment methods. Another component (Relaxed/Monitored Speech) consists mainly of items that reflect a common, non-professional understanding of effective management of stuttering. The components of the various perceived reasons for recovery reflect differing implicit theories of causes for recovery from stuttering. These theories are considered susceptible to various biases. This identification of components of reported techniques and of causal attributions is novel compared to previous studies who just list techniques and attributions. The identified dimensions of self-assisted techniques and causal attributions to reduce stuttering as extracted from self-reports of a large, international sample of recovered formerly stuttering adults may guide the application of behavioral stuttering therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]