Why Mexico Matters for a Climate Dea

BY anyone＇s standards 2010 has been an appalling year for weather-related disasters. While the people of Pakistan have borne the brunt of these disasters, China too has been impacted on a vast scale by a seemingly endless sequence of droughts, floods, crop failures and deadly mudslides.     

Australia's Northern Territory perspectives of public sector reform

This article analyses the forces driving reform of the Northern Territory Public Sector over the past 20 years. It spans an era in which the NT, a ‘small State’ moved from colonial-style dependency on external governments to self-government, with corresponding shifts in the public service. Included is an analysis of the demise of old civil service traditions and their replacement with modern methods of policy development and implementation. It scrutinizes the impact of politicians and politics on the public sector. It examines new legislation currently governing the public sector and the role played by the Public Service Commissioner in leading the reform movement through all its stages—from the analysis of weaknesses in earlier legislation to the passage of new legislation which encapsulates the philosophy behind a modern and effective public sector. It looks at what subordinate legislation is needed by a public service to add substance to a primary Public Sector Employment & Management Act. It analyses the main functions of the Act and highlights the roles and relationships of politicians with the Public Service Commissioner and the Chief Executive Officers of various government departments. Finally, it attempts to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Act after three years of operation. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

EFFECT OF SUSPECT RACE ON OFFICERS’ ARREST DECISIONS*

Many respondents to opinion surveys say that the citizen's race influences how police officers treat the public, yet recent expert social‐science panels have declared that research findings are too contradictory to form a conclusion on whether American police are biased against racial minorities. We perform a meta‐analysis of quantitative research that estimates the effect of race on the police decision to arrest. Screening nearly 4,500 potential sources, we analyze the results based on 27 independent data sets that generated 40 research reports (both published and unpublished) that permitted an estimate of the effect size of the suspect's race on the probability of arrest. The meta‐analysis shows with strong consistency that minority suspects are more likely to be arrested than White suspects. Depending on the method of estimation, the effect size of race varied between 1.32 and 1.52. Converting the race effect size to probabilities shows that compared with the average probability in these studies of a White being arrested (.20), the average probability for a non‐White was calculated at .26. The significant race effect persists when taking into account the studies’ variations in research methods and the nature of explanatory models used in the studies. Implications for future research are presented.     

Linguistic Objectivity in Norm Sentences: Alternatives in Literal Meaning

Assuming that legal science, specifically with regard to interpretation, has to provide the tools to reduce the uncertainty of legal solutions arising from the use of natural languages by legal orders, it becomes a central matter to identify, in this limited domain, the spectrum of semantic variation (and its boundaries) that language brings to the definition of a norm expressed by a norm sentence. It is in this framework that the present paper, analyzing norm sentences as a specific kind of speech act, examines the relation of the legal order to natural language rules, the limits of linguistic uncertainty, and alternatives of meaning as distinct possibilities of norms covered by the text (that are, because of this, still within what literal meaning is). Considering interpretation just as the linguistic decoding process, the reverse of the process of creating norm sentences, the paper also argues that subjects not connected with the relation between norm sentences and norms (mainly, normative defeasibility) are analytically distinct and should be removed from the field of language.     

The Impact of Tax Revenue from Capital Gains Realizations on State Income Tax Revenue and Budget Conditions

We explore the effect of the rapid increase in capital gains realizations on state income tax revenue during the 1990s and 2000s, and the effect that this had on state fiscal decisions regarding the use of these revenue. We find wide variation in the growth of capital gains realizations across states and that the growth in capital gains had a significant effect on state income tax revenue for many states. We find that states used a sizable portion of the additional revenue from capital gains to fund reserves in the year the revenue was generated, and that capital gains revenue lead to some reductions in taxes but not to increases in expenditures. The evidence suggests that states were conservative in their use of capital gains related revenues.     

'I'm Making a TV Programme Here!': Reality TV'S Banged Up and Public Criminology

Abstract: This article examines the TV series Banged Up and media reactions to it. In doing so it seeks to argue that it served a wider public service purpose, or public criminology, than simply entertainment. A number of other 'experiments' and the crossover between those and reality TV are also explored. The series was not universally admired and no attempt is made to hide this. In addition to engaging with theoretical matters the experience of one of the authors of being part of the programme is set out.     

THE TRADE IN TOOLS: THE MARKET FOR ILLICIT GUNS IN HIGH‐RISK NETWORKS

Illegal guns circulating among high‐risk networks represent a threat to the security and well‐being of urban neighborhoods. Research findings reveal that illegal firearms are usually acquired through a variety of means, including theft and diversions from legitimate firearms commerce. Little is known, however, about the underground gun markets supplying the gang and drug networks responsible for a large share of gun violence in U.S. cities. In this article, we take a mixed‐methods approach, combining trace analyses of recovered handguns with ethnographic interviews of high‐risk gun users to develop new insights on the entry of guns into three criminal networks in Boston. We find that guns possessed by Boston gang members are of a different character compared with other crime guns; these guns are more likely to be older firearms originating from New Hampshire, Maine, and I‐95 southern states. The results of our qualitative research reveal that gang members and drug dealers pay inflated prices for handguns diverted by traffickers exploiting unregulated secondary market transactions, with significant premiums paid for high‐caliber semiautomatic pistols. Taken together, these findings provide an analytic portrait of the market for illicit guns among those most proximate to violence, yielding novel empirical, theoretical, and practical insights into the problem of criminal gun access.     

Space Situational Awareness in Europe: The Fractures and the Federative Aspects of European Space Efforts

ABSTRACT

One part of the massive US intelligence effort to learn about Soviet missile and space programs during the Cold War was acquiring and analyzing Soviet space debris that had returned to Earth. Equally important was retrieving US fragments that had landed in foreign nations to prevent the Soviets from recovering and exploiting them. At times bitter jurisdictional battles among the interested government agencies plagued the undertaking. Additionally the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 limited the ability to obtain foreign debris in some circumstances. Despite these problems, however, the available record shows that in many cases the United States acquired and tested important Soviet fragments and also was able to retrieve its own.