Homicide by burning

Compared to the total number of deaths by heat (burning, scalding), homicides by the direct effect of thermal energy (setting the victim on fire, pouring hot liquids over them) are rare; accordingly this subject is seldom dealt with in forensic and criminological literature. From our own autopsy material three cases are presented describing some peculiarities of homicide by heat. Sometimes additional findings (e.g., residual traces of gagging or tying) primarily point in the direction of homicide.     

Simulation of homicide to hide child's suicide

A case of pretending a homicide to conceal a child suicide is reported in which characteristic findings of the postmortem examination and conclusions from the analysis of forensic autopsy series provided substantial support for the police investigation. In the late night hours of a spring day the police authorities were informed that a 10-year-old girl had been found dead on a playground near its parents' house. As injuries of the neck were recognized by the police officers a homicide investigation was initiated. The post mortem examination showed a furrow symmetrically slanting from the front to the nape of the neck, discrete punctate haemorrhages of the skin of the face and numerous 'tram-line' bruises of the back, buttocks and extremities. These findings indicated as cause and manner of death suicidal hanging following corporal punishment. Confronted with these conclusions the mother immediately made a corresponding confession.     

Secondary combined suicide viewed by the wife]

A 47-year-old man was found dead at the bottom of a wall outward the door of the cellar of his house. Preliminary physical examination at the scene of the death revealed a laceration of the scalp, an incised wound in front of the neck and several stab wounds in the left chest penetrating through the clothing. Questioned by the police his wife told that her husband who suffered from severe depression had inflicted the incised and the stab wounds himself, had made an unsuccessful attempt at self-strangulation and had finally jumped down from the wall beside the stairs declining to the cellar of their house. As the circumstances of the scenario were suspicious and as the pattern of injuries arose doubts concerning self-infliction homicide was taken into consideration as well. Autopsy showed additional hesitation marks adjacent to the left end of the incised wound in front of the neck. The stab wounds of the chest were restricted to the region of the heart and displayed only minimal penetration of the chest-wall, findings characteristic of self-infliction. As a consequence the manner of death could be determined as prolonged suicide, and exact reconstruction was possible with the help of the wife's testimony.     

Acheiving Full Employment: Four Perspectives

Books reviewed in this article.
Samuel Bowles, David M. Cordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Wasteland: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline
Economic Report of the President 1981
Helen Cinsburg, Full Employment and Public Policy: The United States and Sweden
Elliot Jaques, Free Enterprise, Fair Employment     

Bridging the donor-decentralization gap: Rethinking incentives and institutional impacts in control-oriented bureaucracies

Some important studies suggest that the organizational imperatives of donor agencies explain the tendency of foreign aid to reinforce institutional centralization rather than to support the development of decentralized institutions in recipient countries. This article shows that certain design features of two decentralized USAID projects completed in Peru during the 1980s facilitated achieving donor objectives, decentralized institutional development, and national-level reforms favoring decentralization. Analysis of this experience reveals that these design features reduced the costs and increased the benefits of decentralized implementation for the donor, while allowing synergies between implementation and institution building to be exploited. Indeed, in the context of Peru’s highly centralized, control-oriented public sector, bypass mechanisms traditionally used by donors to expedite implementation and insulate projects from uncertainty also generally enhanced the development of decentralized institutions. The lessons distilled in this case study have broad relevance since the sorts of administrative obstacles encountered by USAID in Peru—excessive centralization, disbursement bottlenecks, and onerous bureaucratic controls—are all too frequently found in other developing countries. Gregory D. Schmidt is an associate professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and an associate ofSeguimiento, Análisis y Evaluación Para el Desarrollo (SASE), a Peruvian nongovernmental organization specializing in grassroots development. He is the author of a book and various journal articles on development issues, and of a forthcoming book on the 1990 Peruvian presidential election.     

Technology transfer in snow control engineering

The design and construction of a complex snow fence system, the development and implementation of a visual range monitoring system, and the development and use of a snow profile prediction model for highway design, are used as examples of successful technology transfer. Contributing factors include a strong imperative and commitment to solving an urgent problem; the availability of knowledge, the direct involvement of scientists and engineers working together throughout the planning, implementation, and evaluation stages; and a synergetic relationship between research and application.     

Adolescents' Participation in Service Activities and Its Impact on Academic,Behavioral, and Civic Outcomes

The National Household Education Survey, a nationally representative data set (N=4,306 high school students and one parent of each), was analyzed to describe characteristics of adolescents, the nature of their service activities, and academic, behavioral and civic outcomes associated with service (voluntary compared to school-required and by type of service). Participation in any service is associated with positive outcomes whether service is voluntary or required. Adolescents who worked directly with individuals in need had better academic adjustment; those who worked for organizations had better civic outcomes than adolescents who performed other types of service. Findings are discussed in terms of their significance for adolescent development, educational policy, and the use of large national data sets to examine service participation. Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Northern Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology: Human Development from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include motivation, resilience, and positive youth development. Professor at Northern Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include family, community, and out-of-school influences on child and adolescent educational adjustment. Received her M.S. Ed. in Educational Psychology from Northern Illinois University, where she is currently pursuing her doctoral degree. Her current research interests involve the role of adolescents' family, community and school contexts in fostering their social, moral, and educational development.     

On The Odiousness of Greek Debt

Unlike the popular narrative, which suggests that the Greek debt crisis was the result of lavish spending, this article demonstrates that the ‘crisis’ was generated by a transformation of purely private debt into public debt. This finding is supported by the preliminary report of the Greek Parliamentary Committee on the Truth of the Greek Debt, which clearly showed that the exponential increase of private debt in Greece risked the collapse of the private financial institutions exposed to it, namely Greek, French and German banks. This resulted in pressure on the Greek government to recapitalise and nationalise Greek banks through Eurozone and IMF funding. This funding, which came to be known as ‘bailout for Greece’ was nothing more than the rescue of private banks through EU taxpayers' money, only 5% of which went into the Greek economy. The article shows that the process by which the debt was transformed, as well as the post‐crisis bailout were odious, illegal and illegitimate and the ensuing debt itself was unsustainable and wholly against fundamental human rights.     

Suicide by self-immolation

In the Western world, self-incineration is a rare event compared with the Asian countries. The circumstances of death are often unusual, and differentiation from homicide is sometimes possible only after evaluating all the investigation results and findings. In many cases of self-cremation, a fire accelerant is used. In our study material at least 30% of the body surface were burned. Unaffected skin was predominantly found on the back of the body. The cases presented by us are inhomogenous as to the motive and differ from those reported in the literature with regard to gender distribution, scene, motivational situation and psychological constitution.