Dissecting coronary artery aneurysm: a report of two cases

Two cases of sudden, unexpected death resulting from coronary artery dissection have been reported. Since sudden and unexpected death falls within medical examiners' jurisdiction, the systematic autopsy examination of such cases offers an opportunity to evaluate this entity as well as other rare causes of natural death. A review of the literature concerning the subject has been presented.     

RESPONSES OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM TO LEGISLATION PROVIDING MORE SEVERE THREATENED SANCTIONS

In 1971, the Tennessee legislature enacted legislation providing for mandatory jail sentences and driver's license revocations for anyone convicted of driving while intoxicated. This new law had no demonstrable impact on the highway traffic fatalities rate-the intended objective. This paper explores the reasons for this apparent lack of impact. Data suggest that, while there was some increase in the severity of sanctions imposed on drunken drivers, there was still a consistent tendency to suspend the jail sentences and grant drivers restricted driving privileges. Nor is there any reason to believe that the police intensified their efforts to apprehend larger numbers of drunken drivers. Thus, the more severe sanctions threatened in the new law were generally mitigated in practice. Some possible interpretations for this are offered.     

THE CONTEMPORARY CRISES OF MARXIST CRIMINOLOGY

Marxist theory gains its critical capacity by presenting itself as in the process of being realized through class conflict. By locating its critical and empirical reality in a ideal, unrepressive, unoppressive, relatively crime free future, it renders itself irresponsible for its own history and immune from empirical criticism. In order to sustain this vision in the absence of historical evidence. the chief promoters of a Marxist perspective in American criminology have found it necessary to invent untestable and irrefutable concepts whose principal function is to maintain a suspension of the relationship between history, social reality, and theory. Because such work is more akin to religious phophesy than criminology. it presently appears to be irreconcilable with all heretofore accepted standards of academic scholarship.     

Tribes and Tribulations: Bedouin Losses in the Saudi and Iraqi Struggles Over Kuwait's Frontiers, 1921–1943

In the years following World War One the pastoral populations of northern Arabia were subjected to political pressures and economic hardships arising from the creation of French and British spheres of influence in the territories that would become the states of Jordan, Syria and Iraq, and by the aggressive expansion of the domains of the ruler of Najd, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman Al Saud. Year by year the nascent states in the region asserted more control over the vast stretches of desert and steppe that had heretofore been the domains of powerful bedouin tribes and confederations. New borders often cut across tribal territories creating complications and conflict in such matters as sovereignty, citizenship, migration, raiding and political refuge. The establishment of new customs regimes and economic policies meant that age-old patterns of trade between the settled and nomadic populations were altered, curtailed or criminalized as ‘smuggling’.

This article examines two sets of policies that Iraqi and Saudi forces employed to express political domination in the desert and steppes of Kuwait and beyond in the guise of controlling trade: the Saudi blockade of overland trade with Kuwait; and Iraq's aggressive ‘anti-smuggling’ measures that often victimized innocent bedouin. In both cases, members of bedouin tribes were harassed, attacked, pillaged and forced to alter their normal patterns of trade and migration. The eventual rise and dominance of state power resulted in the historic defeat of bedouin control in the deserts and steppes and a gradual loss of their traditional economic options. This article provides detailed evidence showing how part of this large transformation in bedouin society took place.