CHINA RESPONDS

Imagine the U.S.Government shutting down almost all forms of public transportation,a substantial number of international airline flights,all schools and many businesses during the period between Thanksgiving through the end of the Christmas season and beyond.That is what is currently going on in Wuhan,the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak,with what has become possibly the largest quarantine in human history.     

How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization

Scholars have reached mixed conclusions about the implications of increased political polarization for citizen decision-making. In this paper, we argue that citizens respond to ideological divergence with heightened affective polarization. Using a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, we find that increased ideological differences between political figures produce increasingly polarized affective evaluations, and that these differences are especially large among respondents with stronger ideological commitments and higher levels of political interest. We provide further support for these findings in an observational study of citizens’ evaluations of the U.S. Senators from their state. We also find that the polarizing effects of ideological differences can be largely mitigated with biographical information about the public officials, which suggests that the pernicious consequences of ideological polarization can be overcome by focusing on matters other than political disagreement.     

The 2015 Norwegian Local Elections: Support for Governing Radical Right Progress Party Plummets and Great Gains for Greens in ‘Second-Order’ Elections

Two years into the first term of the right wing Conservative/Progress Party coalition government, the 2015 Norwegian local elections displayed many features of a ‘second-order’ election: the governing parties lost considerable support, minor parties did well and voter turnout was low. For the second local elections in a row, political circumstances prevented the far right Progress Party from mobilizing on the anti-immigration issue, adding to the burdens of governing nationally for the first time. The Green Party leveraged its 2013 entry into the national parliament into record support, consolidating the progress made in the 2011 local elections. Although the elections were shaped by national politics, municipal and county variation shows that local political factors did matter.     

The Effect of Time on Bone Fluorescence: Implications for Using Alternate Light Sources to Search for Skeletal Remains

Bones fluoresce when exposed to certain wavelengths of shortwave light, and this property can be useful in locating and sorting skeletal remains in forensic contexts. The proteins in bone collagen are largely responsible for its fluorescent properties, but these proteins degrade and denature over time. This study examined the fluorescence of bones from four temporal groups (recent, semi‐recent, ancient, and historic) ranging from 0 to 1064 years before present. Specimens were photographed under 490 nm wavelength light, and fluorescence was quantified by converting intensity to a gray scale value based on the RGB color model using ImageJ^® software. Significant (p < 0.05) differences were found in mean fluorescence between all four temporal groups, and a 0.324 coefficient of correlation indicates a significant (inverse) relationship between fluorescence and time. Bone fluorescence decreases with time, but some fluorescence is retained even in older samples. Fluorescence can therefore be reliably used in many modern skeletal remains searches.     

Effects of Aluminum Foil Packaging on Elemental Analysis of Bone,

Burned skeletal material is often very fragile and at high risk for fragmentation during packaging and transportation. One method that has been suggested to protect bones in these cases is to carefully wrap them in aluminum foil. Traces of aluminum, however, are known to transfer from foil packaging materials to food products. If such transfer occurs between aluminum foil and bones, it could interfere with subsequent chemical, elemental and isotopic analyses, which are becoming more common in forensic anthropological investigations. This study examined aluminum levels in bones prior to and following the use of aluminum foil packaging and storage for a 6‐week period. Results indicate no significant change in the detected levels of aluminum (p > 0.05), even when packaged in compromised foil and exposed to elevated temperatures. Aluminum foil can therefore continue to be recommended as a packaging medium without affecting subsequent chemical examinations.     

'Just War' or Just War? The Future(s) of a Tradition

The greatest virtue of the just war lies in its ability to pass judgement on war (the announced aims) and its conduct (the adopted strategy). But how coherent is this synthesis of ideas that assumes a unity between force, political expediency and morality? Can individual wars be morally assessed, and how useful is the just war in this respect? This article assesses the modern relevance of the tradition before suggesting directions for further research in the light of the recent Kosovo Crisis.     

False Profits: Why Product Counterfeiting is Increasing

Product counterfeiting has grown in scope, scale and complexity in the last two decades, and now affects many areas of manufacturing and retailing from clothes and CDs to items such as shampoo and vehicle components. Based on a wide range of interviews in the UK, this article argues that despite recent legislative change and increased criminal penalties for counterfeiters, enforcement is haphazard, resource problems often dictate that no criminal prosecution is undertaken, and actual penalties remain low. Moreover, questions of whether or not a particular item is counterfeit have become greatly complicated by the development of outsourcing and the rise of parallel trading. These points suggest that counterfeiting is likely to grow in the future.     

Institutions,distributional concerns,and public sector reform

Abstract. As in otherWestern countries, a wave of reform has swept the Danish public sector. The record of these reforms is mixed and paradoxical; an ambiguous delegation of executive authority and radical privatization have been successfully implemented, while other measures, especially contracting out and user democracy or the introduction of greater choice, turn out to have failed. The paper argues that this experience offers two general lessons. First, shortterm costs and benefits are decisive to those who enact and implement public sector reform. Second, institutional factors specific to each type of reorganization have a major impact on the political distribution of costs and benefits.