Suicide with a manipulated hand grenade

Explosion injuries in civilians are rare. An uncommon case of suicide with a manipulated hand grenade is presented. The findings at the scene and on the body (i.a. massive soot blackening of the skin, singeing, size and number of splinters) gave reason to doubt the use of trinitrotoluene (TNT), the usual explosive charge in hand grenades. Further investigations showed that parts of several hand grenades and black powder from standard fire-crackers commercially available without legal restriction had been used as propelling charge. The victim, who was in a sitting position, held the hand grenade in the left hand and triggered it with the right. He bled to death due to a fracture of the right femur and lacerations of the liver. The chronological course and total circumstances of the case suggested suicide in a strongly intoxicated condition (BAC 2.5 per mille). In the flat, a larger number of unlicensed weapons and weapon parts were found.     

Global Connections: ‘A Tool for Active Citizenship’

As a result of globalisation and changing technologies, young people are increasingly required to engage with the broader world beyond their local and national communities. This raises significant questions about the ways and spaces in which young people will need to engage as active citizens, and the new tools and resources that young people will need to equip them for their futures. The Global Connections Program has been developed to address these identified needs. It is a youth-led global learning initiative which aims to provide an opportunity for connection and learning among young people in Australia and Indonesia. This article explores Plan's youth-led approach to global learning, with a focus on the implementation and evaluation findings of the Global Connections Program, as well as the challenges faced thus far.     

Articulating Body,Territory, and the Defence of Life: The Politics of Strategic Equivalencing between Women in Anti-Mining Movements and the Feminist Movement in Peru

In Latin America, rural and indigenous women have mobilised in defence of their territories and built strategic alliances with urban and mestiza feminist movements. This paper focuses on how these processes have played out in Peru, tracing the development of the discourse on ‘body as territory’, which articulates sexual and reproductive rights with territorial autonomy. It discusses the ‘cosmopolitics’ of translating the distinct concerns and worldviews of the women involved, arguing that this discourse has enabled partial recognition and strategic equivalencing but that it has failed to fundamentally transform the underlying asymmetric relations of power and privilege.     

Austria's Report Card on Neutrality during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 tested the Austrians' ability to exercise neutrality for the first time, while simultaneously rendering humanitarian aid to Hungarian refugees. Needing to justify the invasion of a Warsaw Pact ally, communist authorities exploited issues like border incidents, espionage, repatriation of refugees, and favouritism toward organisations to “prove” Austria's breech of neutrality. The Raab government — which signed the State Treaty only one year earlier — prudently weighed every move, passing the test admirably.     

Collaborative Innovation,New Technologies,and Work Redesign

Stakeholders agree on the need to promote innovation in work organization in public services. This article deploys the concept of collaborative innovation to discuss employees' and managers' experiences of a major technology‐driven work redesign project within National Health Service pharmacy services in Scotland. The authors draw on extant literature on New Public Management (NPM) and collaborative approaches to innovation to frame more than 40 in‐depth interviews with managers and employees. They find that key components of collaborative innovation—related to joint problem‐solving, interdisciplinary working, and mutual learning—were important to the success of the redesign project and had positive impacts on job quality for some employees. The authors argue that researchers and policy makers should look beyond NPM‐driven models that have dominated some areas of the public innovation literature to consider the potential added value of collaborative innovation to improving both work and service delivery in the public sector.     

The Associations of Affection and Rejection During Adolescence with Interpersonal Functioning in Young Adulthood: A Macro- and Micro- Level Investigation Using the TRAILS TRANS-ID Study

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Affection and rejection in close relationships during adolescence are thought to impact adult interpersonal functioning, but few studies focused on how the...     

Comparative Institutional Analysis,the European Court of Justice and the General Principle of Non‐Discrimination—or—Alternative Tales on Equality Reasoning

The general principle of equality in European law is often held to be inconsistently applied by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and insufficiently supported by methodology. Contrary to this assessment, this paper argues that there is substantial coherence and theoretical underpinning to the court's equality reasoning. First, it shows that the respective case‐law can be subdivided into three groups, depending on the level of scrutiny applied. Second, it establishes that the prevailing accounts have difficulty in explaining the court's choice of scrutiny due to their limited selection of analytical parameters. Third, it concludes that comparative institutional analysis offers an alternative framework to make the ECJ's testing approaches in equality matters more intelligible.     

Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage

The proportion of votes cast before election day has risen steadily over the last two decades. Previous research asked how early voting has impacted voter participation. In this article, we ask how early voting has affected the flow of information to voters through the mass media. By increasing the number of days voters are able to vote, are we also increasing the number of days that candidates and campaigns continuously disseminate campaign-related information to the news media? Is news coverage of campaigns quantitatively and qualitatively different when opportunities to vote early are available and utilized? Our expectation is that early voting significantly influences the volume and nature of campaign news coverage. We study the effects of early voting on campaign news coverage of gubernatorial and Senate races in 2006 and 2008. Our findings reveal that the volume and content of campaign news coverage is significantly influenced by early voting.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: Appendix for Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage—Alternative Model Specifications.]