Fatal Families: Why Children are Killed in Familicide Occurrences

This literature review attempts to identify the underlying factors and commonalities regarding the killing of children in occurrences of familicide (wherein the entire family is slain by a family member). Numerous journal and newspaper articles were reviewed to glean information regarding similarities in victim families, the breakdown of the family prior to the incident of familicide, and the degree of pre-meditation by the perpetrator. This information is then used to discuss and inform possible implications in counselling such as assessment, prevention, and grief and loss therapy as well as directions for future research.     

Beyond Endogeneity: How Firms and Regulators Co‐Construct the Meaning of Regulation

What role do regulators and firms play in the construction of open‐ended regulatory terms? The new institutional legal endogeneity model posits that organizations respond to legal uncertainty by adopting formal structures to symbolically signal their compliance. These structures, however, tend to embody businesses' managerial and commercial values, as opposed to regulatory goals. Law becomes endogenous insofar as legal actors then defer to businesses' institutionalized ideas about regulation and compliance. Professionals, such as lawyers and human‐resource managers, and their strategic deployment of framing, are portrayed as the engines of the above process of legal endogeneity. By comparison, administrative agencies' strategies in shaping the meaning that corporations attach to the law are practically ignored. Building on a detailed case study of British financial firms' responses to the Financial Services Authority's Treating Customers Fairly initiative, this article problematizes the supposition of regulatory deference to business constructions of law. Instead, it develops a more balanced model that recognizes business professionals' and regulators' co‐construction of regulation and compliance. The process of regulatory meaning co‐construction, as depicted by this model, involves alignment and disputes between regulators' and professionals' strategic framing of regulatory concerns with tangible consequences for the enactment of regulation.     

Do bone elasticity and postmortem interval affect forensic fractographic analyses?

Forensic fractographic features of bone reliably establish crack propagation in perimortem injuries. We investigated if similar fracture surface features characterize postmortem fractures. Experimentally induced peri- and postmortem fractures were used to assess if fractographic features vary as bone elasticity decreases during the postmortem interval (PMI). Thirty-seven unembalmed, defleshed human femoral shafts from males and females aged 33–81 years were fractured at varying PMIs with a drop test frame using a three-point bending setup and recorded with a high-speed camera. Vital statistics, cause of death, PMI length, temperature, humidity, collagen percentage, water loss, fracture energy, and fractography scores were recorded for each sample. Results showed that fractographic features associated with perimortem fractures were expressed in PMIs up to 40,600 accumulated degree hours (ADH), or 60 warm weather days. Hackle was the most consistently expressed feature, occurring in all fractures regardless of ADH. The most variable characteristics were wake features (78.4%) and arrest ridges (70.3%). Collagen percentage did not correlate strongly with ADH (r = −0.04, p = 0.81); however, there was a strong significant correlation between ADH and water loss (r = 0.74, p < 0.001). Multinomial logistic regression showed no association between fractographic feature expression and ADH or collagen percentage. In conclusion, forensic fractographic features reliably determine initiation and directionality of crack propagation in experimentally induced PMIs up to 40,600 ADH, demonstrating the utility of this method into the recent postmortem interval. This expression of reliable fractographic features throughout the early PMI intimates these characteristics may not be useful standalone features for discerning peri- versus postmortem fractures.     

Nuanced Understanding

The need to grasp the complexity of contemporary China is more urgent than ever The year 2021 is a big year for the People's Republic of China. Midyear will see the 100 th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. It will also mark one of the nation's centennial goals, referred to over the last few years, when the country achieves a moderately prosperous status. A lot of planning has already gone into how things will happen in July. At least, within China, there will be a lot going on.     

A PEOPLE'S PARTY

As an organization, there can be few in modern history that have had so much impact on the world as the Communist Party of China (CPC). Since 1949, it has been the ruling party in a country whose population comprises a fifth of humanity. That alone means it merits attention and study. But in addition to this, over that time, it has also seen the People's Republic of China (PRC) grow from a country with huge developmental and economic challenges to the world's second largest economy, and one of its great modern powers. In this way, the CPC has become increasingly important for the outside world to understand as the impact of the country's economic growth increases.