Acute poisoning involving the pyrrolidinophenone-type designer drug 4'-methyl-alpha-pyrrolidinohexanophenone (MPHP)

A 36-year-old woman consulted the medical emergency unit of a private health center for abdominal pain and gastroenteritis of 5 days duration. Acute right pyelonephritis was diagnosed. Five hours after admission she became unconscious in a state of clinical shock. She was transferred to an intensive care unit but resuscitation attempts were unsuccessful and she died 3 h later. Three days after death, she was buried in the family vault. Five days after the burial, her husband lodged a complaint with the public prosecutor because he had not received a clear explanation from the physicians concerning the cause of his wife's death. After analysis of the medical records of the deceased by two forensic pathologists, a medicolegal autopsy was ordered by the public prosecutor. The corpse was exhumed and autopsy performed 9 days after death. Massive hemoperitoneum was diagnosed with a macroscopically ruptured subcapsular hematoma. Pathological study confirmed acute right pyelonephritis and demonstrated the precise cause of the hemorrhage: rupture of the hepatic artery at the hilar part, following infectious arteritis which was probably secondary to the acute pyelonephritis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published report of such a case.     

The stalking of public figures: management and intervention

Public figures are at relatively high risk of unusual contact initiated by fixated individuals. Prior research on managing the threat presented by public figure stalkers concludes that although direct threats rarely precede attacks, there is usually evidence of pre-planning. Furthermore, some public figure attackers do attempt to communicate with their future intended victim prior to attack. Thus, early warning signs from unusual contact behavior can be a powerful tool in threat assessment and risk management. The current paper offers a systematic concept for managing public figure stalking and constitutes five stages: (i) screening, (ii) first analysis, (iii) passive research, (iv) active research and finally (v) considered management strategy. It is concluded that assessment and management of risk are dynamic procedures, requiring ongoing monitoring and flexibility. Furthermore, although different stalkers will engage in ostensibly similar behavior, their motives and underlying psychopathologies may vary considerably. As such, all interventions require individual construction.     

Strain and Opportunity Structures

Traditional strain theory received substantial empirical attention for a prolonged period of time, but it currently occupies a marginal position in criminology. Efforts to revitalize and elaborate it have occurred under the rubric of Agnew's general strain theory. These theories share a focus on how contextual factors, in particular what are commonly referred to as opportunity structures, affect the relationship between stresses and strains and delinquency. Using national-level data, this study considers empirically the impact of several illegitimate opportunity structures conceptualized at the school-level on the association between strain, stressful life events, delinquency, and self-concept. The results indicate that both stress and strain affect changes in delinquency and self-concept over time. Yet there is little evidence that these relationships are conditioned by access to illegitimate opportunity. These results suggest that strain and stress affect delinquency uniformly across a variety of illegitimate opportunity structures.     

Privatizing Federal Credit Programs: Why Sallie Mae?

The federal government subsidizes lending to a number of borrowers—notably students, farmers, and homeowners. Government‐sponsored enterprises issue the securities that channel capital to many of these privileged borrowers. One of the largest of these enterprises, the Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae), is scheduled to be wholly privatized by September 30, 2008. What explains the privatization of this enterprise? To identify distinctive features of Sallie Mae that permitted or abetted privatization, we investigate the structure, related capital market innovations, and growth of three government‐sponsored enterprises. We conclude that a unique structural feature of Sallie Mae may explain the pace of privatization. The core asset of Sallie Mae, the student loan, is guaranteed and subsidized by the government. The case of Sallie Mae is an instructive yet poorly understood example of how the federal government can leverage private‐sector assets and incentives to achieve public policy missions.     

The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments

The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.     

Dispute Resolution in a Worker Cooperative: Formal Procedures and Procedural Justice

While most research on workplace grievance resolution focuses on hierarchical settings, this study examines grievance resolution in a worker cooperative, a workplace mutually owned and democratically managed. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews and observations, this research explores how workers' perceptions of procedural justice influence their anticipated grievance strategies. Despite working side by side in the same organization, both men and women had very different experiences regarding procedural justice and dispute resolution. For men, working at a cooperative meant informal dispute resolution strategies, while the women cited the cooperative identity as empowering them to use formal grievance procedures.