Alteration of the Death Scene After Self‐stabbing: A Case of Sharp Force Suicide Disguised by the Victim as a Homicide?

This paper reports a case of a 72‐year‐old woman who was found dead in her bedroom with a 4 cm vertical stab wound in the abdomen. A bloodstained knife was found in the top drawer of her bedside table. The clothes worn by the victim showed no damage. A bloodstained vest and a sweater with frontal incisions were found far from the victim, in the bathroom and in the bedroom respectively. Several bloodstains were found in every room of the apartment. The evidence found during the forensic examination and, in particular, the Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, led the investigators to determine the manner of death, being consistent with a suicide with a long‐lasting physical activity after self‐stabbing. This report describes an unusual case of “disguised suicide,” in which the victim tried to cover‐up the suicide by changing her clothes and concealing the weapon, in the last minutes of her life.     

Toxicological Analysis of Opiates from Alternative Matrices Collected from an Exhumed Body

In this case study, the body of a 45‐year‐old man was exhumed after 1 year at the request of the public prosecutor to assess whether the death was caused by drug consumption. Toxicological analyses were performed on several matrices, including liver, kidney, and the alternative matrices hair and teeth. The systematic toxicological analysis (STA), which consisted of basic and acid liquid/liquid extraction and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC‐MS) analysis, showed the presence of opiates in each of the matrices analyzed. Subsequently, to confirm and quantify the presence of opioids, samples of each of the matrices were subjected to solid‐phase extraction and specific GC‐MS analysis. The case presented demonstrates the possibility of drug detection in an exhumed body that has been buried for 1 year, despite the problems of quantitative interpretation of the data, and that toxicological results could be useful along with other forensic evidence.     

Information strategy： An analysis framework

Strategic information requirements define which information an enterprise needs to operate and manage its business. These requirements are told ＂strategic＂, since they are at a very high abstraction level, and reflect what managers want to know about operations. In an ideal world, managers would simply express their needs in natural language and the analyst will translate them in actual systems. To get close to these ideal results, a key point is to structure requirements and go from a strategic level, suitable for managers but not for IT analysts, from a semantic level, suitable for IT analysts. For this purpose, we here present an approach to strategic information requirements elicitation （SIRE）. It includes a meta-model, analysis steps and a software tool. The meta-model describes the information domains of the enterprise. The design steps specify the activities the analyst should perform to go from a strategic level to an engineering level. SIRE is based on some key ideas. First, an enterprise processes information made of universal information domains, which include stakeholders, products, process and contexts. By specializing these domains, the analyst identifies domains specific to individual enterprises. Second, whatever domain includes different information types： Master information that defines structural properties, transaction information that describes events, indicators that describe performances. By crossing information domains and types the analyst identifies strategic information entities （SIE）. The method requires few definitions and is readily understood by management and users. Of course, it can be used to design new systems. Additionally, it can be used in information systems planning to assess the coverage of current systems （fill-gap analysis）. The tool enables to store high level schemas that can be mapped against real database schemas of commercial software platforms to understand their coverage.     

An evaluation of the Cozart RapiScan system as an on-site screening tool for drugs of abuse in a non-conventional biological matrix: vitreous humor

The aim of this project was to evaluate the Cozart RapiScan Oral fluid Drug Testing System as an on-site screening tool for vitreous humor samples collected during post-mortem examinations. Vitreous humor is easy to collect and as it is contained within the eye it is almost completely unaffected by post-mortem redistribution. The ability to carry out an initial drug screen on vitreous humor at the earliest stage of the death investigation process could contribute significantly to the assessment of the role drugs may have played prior to confirmation with toxicological analyses at the laboratory. Vitreous humor (n = 146) was collected from autopsy examinations (111 males and 35 females) with a specific focus on cases where death occurred following a road traffic accident or where an overdose was suspected. All samples were screened using the five-panel methadone Cozart RapiScan Cartridge with an overall positive rate of 29%. Of the positive results, 43% screened positive for benzodiazepines, 17% for cocaine, 7% for methadone and 33% for opiates. Positive samples, with the exception of benzodiazepines, and 20% of negative samples were analysed by GC/MS. This is the first reported use of this system as an on-site forensic tool in death investigation and for screening for drugs of abuse in vitreous humor. The conclusions from this study show that the Cozart RapiScan System could play an important role in obtaining information on the toxicological state of the person at the time of death.     

Pragmatic Maxims and Presumptions inLegal Interpretation

The fields of linguistic pragmatics and legal interpretation are deeply interrelated. The purpose of this paper is to show how pragmatics and the developments in argumentation theory can contribute to the debate on legal interpretation. The relation between the pragmatic maxims and the presumptions underlying the legal canons are brought to light, unveiling the principles that underlie the types of argument usually used to justify a construction. The Gricean maxims and the arguments of legal interpretation are regarded as presumptions subject to default used to justify an interpretation. This approach can allow one to trace the different legal interpretive arguments back to their basic underlying presumptions, so that they can be compared, ordered, and assessed according to their defeasibility conditions. This approach allows one to understand the difference between various types of interpretive canons, and their strength in justifying an interpretation.     

Life Satisfaction across Cities: Evidence from Romania

Based on the literature on agglomeration economies and studies on life satisfaction, especially with regard to Central and Eastern European countries, this article focuses on subjective wellbeing in Romania between 1996 and 2011. The findings indicate that life satisfaction was greater in larger cities, although the positive effects of agglomeration held up to a certain threshold. These effects were both direct (people living in large cities were more satisfied than those living in rural areas) and indirect (people living in rural areas embedded in urbanised regions were more satisfied than people in rural areas embedded in less urbanised regions).     

Fake & original: the case of Japanese food in Southeast Asian countries

This paper seeks to answer two main questions: whether restaurants using a national brand to capture customers in fact use original national ingredients for producing food and, in cases where original ingredients are not used, what is the economic rationale behind this choice? Specifically, the study focuses on Japanese restaurants in three Southeast Asian countries, using a theoretical model and an empirical investigation based on interviews and survey data collected through field research. Considering restaurants, their suppliers, and their customers, we show how a dual asymmetric-information problem exists, between suppliers and restaurants and between restaurants and their customers. The results indicate that a first reason for buying non-original ingredients—important especially for cheaper restaurants—is a desire to reduce costs. That said, the use of non-original ingredients occurs among all types of Japanese restaurants in the three studied countries. It does not depend on the presence of a Japanese chef or owner, nor on the share of Japanese customers. By contrast it does significantly depend on the reliability of the wholesale channel, and the resultant difficulties that restaurants encounter when buying original ingredients.