Investigative studies into the recovery of DNA from improvised explosive device containers

Apprehending those who utilize improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is a national priority owing to their use both domestically and abroad. IEDs are often concealed in bags, boxes, or backpacks to prevent their detection. Given this, the goal of the research presented was to identify IED handlers through postblast DNA recovery from IED containers. Study participants were asked to use backpacks for 11 days, after which they served as containers for pipe bombs. Eleven postdeflagration backpack regions likely to be handled were swabbed and analyzed via mini-short tandem repeats (miniSTRs) and alleles were called blind. An experimental consensus method was examined in which profiles from all regions were considered, to help identify spurious drop-in/out. Results were correct for all loci, except one that remained ambiguous. The results show that recovering DNA from IED containers is a viable approach for aiding in the identification of those who may have been involved in an IED event.     

Predicting discharge in forensic psychiatry: the legal and psychosocial factors associated with long and short stays in forensic psychiatric hospitals

In Germany, both the number of patients treated in forensic psychiatric hospitals and the average inpatient treatment period have been increasing for over thirty years. Biographical and clinical factors, e.g., the number of prior offences, type of offence, and psychiatric diagnosis, count among the factors that influence the treatment duration and the likelihood of discharge. The aims of the current study were threefold: (1) to provide an estimate of the German forensic psychiatric patient population with a low likelihood of discharge, (2) to replicate a set of personal variables that predict a relatively high, as opposed to a low, likelihood of discharge from forensic psychiatric hospitals, and (3) to describe a group of other factors that are likely to add to the existing body of knowledge. Based on a sample of 899 patients, we applied a battery of primarily biographical and other personal variables to two subgroups of patients. The first subgroup of patients had been treated in a forensic psychiatric hospital according to section 63 of the German legal code for at least ten years (long-stay patients, n=137), whereas the second subgroup had been released after a maximum treatment period of four years (short-stay patients, n=67). The resulting logistic regression model had a high goodness of fit, with more than 85% of the patients correctly classified into the groups. In accordance with earlier studies, we found a series of personal variables, including age at first admission and type of offence, to be predictive of a short or long-stay. Other findings, such as the high number of immigrants among the short-stay patients and the significance of a patient's work time before admission to a forensic psychiatric hospital, are more clearly represented than has been observed in previous research.     

L’Ail for What Ails You

<正>Is at down in a small,crowded hutong restaurant and waited for the harried waitress to finally navigate through the bustle of requests and take my food order.From my obvious appearance as a foreigner,she must have guessed in advance that my spoken Chinese would be barely intelligible.As I waited,I mooted whether or not to blow my runny nose on a few sheets taken     

Comparing U.S. and European police subcultures: A field study

This article is a satire of sociology and field anthropology research on comparative police behavior; it uses humorous anecdotes to make a serious point. The author argues that until police supervision is undertaken by civilian review boards, police behavior will never conform to community morality despite attempts at police reform. To support this argument, the author compares U.S., German, Italian, Russian, and French police subcultures in an attempt to calculate (a) the correlation between police behavior and its conformity to community morality, and (b) whether a high correlation results from a high degree of civilian oversight. The author concludes that, because no country has appreciable civilian oversight, and because the police of no country conform to community morality, there is therefore a perfect correlation between lack of civilian oversight and lack of police conformity to community morality.     

The Dynamics of Self-Esteem: A Growth-Curve Analysis

Research on adolescent self-esteem has been inconsistent regarding development patterns and processes, with some scholars concluding that self-esteem is a static construct and others concluding that it is a dynamic construct. A potential source of this inconsistency is the lack of attention to intraindividual changes in self-esteem across adolescence and to gender-specific developmental patterns. Building on previous research, we use a growth-curve analysis to examine intraindividual self-esteem changes from early adolescence to early adulthood. Using 7 years of sequential data from the Family Health Study (762 subjects ages 11–16 in Year 1), we estimated a hierarchical growth-curve model that emphasized the effects of age, life events, gender, and family cohesion on self-esteem. The results indicated that age had a curvilinear relationship with self-esteem suggesting that during adolescence self-esteem is a dynamic rather than a static construct. Furthermore, changes in self-esteem during adolescence were influenced by shifts in life events and family cohesion. These processes were different for males and females, particularly during early adolescence.     

Budgetary Control in a Decentralized System: Meeting the Criteria for Fiscal Stability in the European Union

This article provides a set of measures that are recommended to the leadership of the European Union to enhance budgetary balance and control within a highly decentralized system, one that requires the coordination of budgetary policy in more than a dozen nations. These measures are intended to be relevant to European budgetary coordination efforts but also appear to apply to U.S. federal initiatives to reduce the annual budget deficit and total debt. The individual measures recommended include holding increases in expenditures at or below the rate of GDP growth, establishing envelopes for major accounts, placing all entitlement on a pay-as-you-go basis, means testing of entitlements and elimination of automatic entitlement indexing, considering the option of marginal reductions in some entitlement programs, and voting on budgets as single, omnibus packages. The proposal to establish executive line-item budget authority also is evaluated-and rejected.     

Democratic Legitimacy and the International Criminal Court: A Liberal Defence

In response to the criticism that the International CriminalCourt is undemocratic, this article outlines a liberal conceptionof institutional legitimacy and defends its appropriatenessas a moral foundation for the International Criminal Court.In contrast to a communitarian concept of democracy (which seesdemocracy as an expression of the general will), liberals seepolitical legitimacy as stemming from a respect for fundamentalhuman rights. Thus, as long as the International Criminal Courtrespects the right of the accused to a fair trial, then it isa legitimate institution.