Politics and the Roma in state-socialist Eastern Europe

This article is a comparative analysis of state-socialist policies towards the East European Gypsies (Roma). I make two related arguments. First, the Gypsy policies of East European states evolved differently and resulted in considerable variation. Second, notwithstanding the state-socialist social control policies, a measure of independent Romani activism did emerge laying the groundwork for post-socialist Gypsy mobilization.     

Constructing STR Multiplexes for Individual Identification of Hungarian Red Deer

Red deer is the most valuable game of the fauna in Hungary, and there is a strong need for genetic identification of individuals. For this purpose, 10 tetranucleotide STR markers were developed and amplified in two 5‐plex systems. The study presented here includes the flanking region sequence analysis and the allele nomenclature of the 10 loci as well as the PCR optimization of the DeerPlex I and II. LD pairwise tests and cross‐species similarity analyses showed the 10 loci to be independently inherited. Considerable levels of genetic differences between two subpopulations were recorded, and F_ST was 0.034 using AMOVA. The average probability of identity (PI_ave) was at the value of 2.6736 × 10^?15. This low value for PI_ave nearly eliminates false identification. An illegal hunting case solved by DeerPlex is described herein. The calculated likelihood ratio (LR) illustrates the potential of the 10 red deer microsatellite markers for forensic investigations.     

Civil–Military Relations and Institutional Decay: Explaining Russian Military Politics

The Russian military's extraordinary decline is widely known. The changing political role of high-ranking officers and the different treatment they have been subjected to by Russian presidents has received relatively little scholarly attention, however. This article analyses this phenomenon—including the military elites' electoral participation, relationship to the executive, and opposition to state policy—and offers a method for explaining it. To generate a more penetrating understanding of Russian particularities while expanding our theoretical reach, the article combines the civil–military relations literature with that of the institutionalist approach, and more specifically, the concepts of path dependence and institutional decay.     

Analysis of pathological and non-pathological human skeletal remains by FT-IR spectroscopy

In this study, we report the chemical analyses of various non-pathological, tuberculosis and syphilis infected bone samples from different burial environments by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), in the framework of a general study of diagenesis. Dating human skeletal remains is one of the most important and yet unreliable aspects of forensic anthropology. In this paper, a new method has been suggested, using the crystallinity index and carbonate-phosphate index as a means of distinction between recent and archaeological, anthropological bone samples. Pathological bone samples were analyzed with the same method to see if changes in crystallinity interfere with the process of dating.