Sudden, unexpected death in a 5-year-old boy with an unusual primary intracranial neoplasm. Ganglioglioma of the medulla

This report documents sudden, unexpected death in a 5-year-old boy from a ganglioglioma of the medulla. Gangliogliomas are rare, primary brain tumors that are encountered predominantly in childhood. We are unaware of any previous report of a similar case.     

"Revolting to humanity": oversights, limitations, and complications of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926

This article analyses three areas that limited the effectiveness of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926. First, re-registration was public, expensive, and time-consuming. Second, the Treasury Office used the change in the law of intestacy to refuse more distant relatives' claims on estates. Third, the law separated legitimacy from nationality, thus denying citizenship to legitimated children born abroad of British fathers and foreign mothers. In short, both because of parliamentary oversights and civil servants' narrow interpretations of the law, relatively few children took advantage of the Act, and the minority who did, rather than being 'illegitimate' or 'legitimate', were a third category, the 'legitimated'.     

Can Dispersed Practices Be Held Ethically Accountable?

This article offers a positive answer to: can dispersed practices, such as global civil society and the society of democratic states, be held ethically accountable? To clarify this kind of ethical judgement, a contrast is made between the ways we hold individuals ethically accountable within social practices, awarding praise/blame to individuals (individual persons or collective actors such as states), and the way in which we deploy critical theories to hold a dispersed practice ethically responsible for certain consequences flowing from its operation. Such judgements are ironic given that within such practices individual actors are not, from an ethical point of view, doing wrong. The kind of ethical criticism made possible by critical theory in general, and constitutive theory in particular, is a necessary precursor to many political campaigns aimed at transforming the global dispersed social practices within which we are constituted as who we are.     

Reviews

Barrington Moore Jr, Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism—USA, USSR and China. Oxford: OUP and Clarendon Press, 1987, x + 142 pp. £15.00.

Allen Lynch, The Soviet Study of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, xii + 197 pp., £25.00 h/b. $34.50.

Frederick C. Barghoorn and Thomas F. Remington, Politics in the USSR. Third Edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986, xiii + 530 pp., £8.95.

Charles E. Ziegler, Environmental Policy in the USSR. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, xiii + 195 pp., £18.50. $25.00.

Mary Buckley, ed. Soviet Social Scientists Talking. An Official Debate about Women. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986, 107 pp. £25.00 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Alex Pravda and Blair A. Ruble eds. Trade Unions in Communist States. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986, xiii+281 pp. $34.95, £22.50.

Paul R. Rogers, Insurance in the Soviet Union. New York: Praeger, 1986, 211 pp., £31.99.

Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986, 244 pp. £34.00 h/b, £12.70 p/b.

Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko eds. Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933. Edmonton: University of Alberta, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986, 192 pp. No price.

Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria. London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 221 pp. £20.00, $34.50 h/b, £7.95, $12.95 p/b.

Alena Heitlinger, Reproduction, medicine and the socialist state. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1987, 318 pp., £29.50.

Vladimir Wozniuk, From Crisis to Crisis. Soviet‐Polish Relations in the 1970s. Iowa State University Press‐Ames, 1987, x + 176 pp., $12.95.     

An Evaluation of the Economic Approaches Used by Policy Actors towards Investment in Place-Based Partnerships in Victoria

Place-based partnerships are supported by the state and include various organisations and interests within particular geographic areas. The Victorian government has established place-based partnerships to plan and coordinate resource allocation decisions to meet objectives such as economic development and social inclusion. In the literature there are positive and negative views of these partnerships. One view is that they allow regions to build competitive advantage, while another is that they are a means of pursuing a neoliberal policy agenda that seeks to reduce government protection and investment. We help clarify the tensions between positive and negative views of partnerships by examining the economic approaches used by policy actors toward place-based partnerships in Victoria. We find that policy actors combine neoclassical and institutionalist approaches to argue that partnerships generate networks that enable more efficient and equitable resource allocation within places .     

Adolescent Caffeine Consumption and Self-Reported Violence and Conduct Disorder

Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world and currently the only one legally available to children and adolescents. The sale and use of caffeinated beverages has increased markedly among adolescents during the last decade. However, research on caffeine use and behaviors among adolescents is scarce. We investigate the relationship between adolescent caffeine use and self-reported violent behaviors and conduct disorders in a population-based cross-sectional sample of 3,747 10th grade students (15–16 years of age, 50.2 % girls) who were enrolled in the Icelandic national education system during February 2012. Through a series of multiple regression models, while controlling for background factors, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder symptoms and current medication and peer delinquency, and including measures on substance use, our findings show robust additive explanatory power of caffeine for both violent behaviors and conduct disorders. In addition, the association of caffeine to the outcomes is significantly stronger for girls than boys for both violent behaviors and conduct disorders. Future studies are needed to examine to what extent, if at all, these relationships are causal. Indication of causal connections between caffeine consumption and negative outcomes such as those reported here would call into question the acceptability of current policies concerning the availability of caffeine to adolescents and the targeting of adolescence in the marketing of caffeine products.     

Safeguarding Children's Welfare in Non‐Contentious Divorce: Towards a New Conception of the Legal Process?

This article considers the working of the current procedure intended to ensure the welfare of children when their parents divorce but are not seeking any orders relating to them. It shows that the process is ineffective in safeguarding children's welfare and is not geared to ensuring that their wishes and feelings are taken into account. It argues that the focus of policy should shift away from assuming that the legal system can handle the problems of divorce, towards using the legal process as a point of contact through which families can be offered the full range of services they may need during relationship breakdown.