‘Venona’: the British dimension

‘Venona’ remains the greatest secret of the Cold War yet to be declassified, and offers the pieces of a jigsaw that, when assembled and interpreted, reveals the identities of dozens of Soviet agents who participated in GRU and NKVD networks across the globe between 1940 and 1948. Among them, operating in London, were Professor J.B.S Haldane, codenamed ‘Intelligentsia’, and Lord Swaythling's son, the Honourable Ivor Montagu, appropriately codenamed ‘Nobility’. Contained in the sometimes partially decrypted texts are clues to hundreds of other, as yet unexposed, spies, active in Australia, Mexico, Sweden, the United States, Britain, and numerous other countries. Betrayed by William Wiesband and Kim Philby, the ‘Venona’ project failed to find the traitor known as ‘Baron’ inside the wartime GCHQ, but was responsible for the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, confirming the guilt of Alger Hiss, Donald Maclean and the Rosenbergs, supporting the allegations of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and sparking off molehunts on three continents. ‘Venona’ sheds important new light on the assassination of Trotsky, Soviet penetration of the Manhattan project at Los Alamos and Berkeley, and reveals high-level espionage in the White House, OSS, the State Department and virtually every government department in Washington DC.     

When legal rights are not a reality: do individuals know their rights and how can we tell?

Public knowledge of rights has been the subject of a number of empirical enquiries over the last decade. In England and Wales, knowledge of rights and its relationship with an individual's capacity to ‘self-help’ and ‘self-represent’ when faced with a civil justice problem has become the subject of renewed attention following changes to legal aid which, from March 2013, will see the availability of legal advice and representation dramatically reduced. Previous studies focusing on public knowledge of rights in this (and other) jurisdictions have illustrated a lack of knowledge amongst the general population and more specifically, a widespread tendency of individuals to assume that the law aligns with their own moral, ethical or social attitudes. However, many of these studies have also suffered from methodological shortcomings. In attempting to address some of these shortcomings this study uses an open-ended format to ask individuals with one or one or more civil or social justice problems to describe their rights/legal position. We find that whilst an open-ended question approach to exploring knowledge of rights yields insight not acquired by other formats, its utility is constrained by difficulty reconciling articulation and actual knowledge of rights. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the development of future research in the field of family and social welfare law, Public Legal Education (PLE) and access to justice post-March 2013.     

Remembering remotely: would video-mediation impair witnesses' memory reports?

Witnesses often experience lengthy delays prior to being interviewed, during which their memories inevitably decay. Video-communication technology – favored by intergovernmental organizations for playing larger roles in judicial processes – might circumvent some of the resourcing problems that can exacerbate such delays. However, whereas video-mediation might facilitate expeditious interviewing, it might also harm rapport-building, make witnesses uncomfortable, and thereby undermine the quality and detail of their reports. Participants viewed a crime film and were interviewed either one day later via video-link, one day later face-to-face, or 1–2 weeks later face-to-face. Video-mediation neither influenced the detail or the accuracy of participants' reports, nor their ratings of the quality of the interviews. However, participants who underwent video-mediated interviews after a short delay gave more accurate, detailed reports than participants who waited longer to be interviewed face-to-face. This study provides initial empirical evidence that video-mediated communication (VMC) could facilitate the expeditious conduct of high-quality investigative interviews.     

The Municipalization of Enterprise-Owned “Social Assets” in Russia

One British and two Russian social scientists examine the causes and consequences of the transfer of responsibility for funding of social services from enterprises to municipalities in Russia. The study is part of a larger project, funded by the European Union, on the social impact of economic reform in Russia. The primary sources of data are official governmental statistics, data compiled by international organizations, and extensive surveys conducted among enterprise administrators, municipal officials, and the mass public. Regional differences are highlighted by the data; the authors offer recommendations for improvements in the financing of social services.     

The Disempowerment of Empowerment: How Stakeholding Clogs Up Rural Decision-making

In the context of a growth in both participatory democracy and responsible participation, rural decision-making in England has become increasingly complex over the past 30 years, fuelled by national polices relating to regionalism, citizenship and relocalisation. A survey of ‘agents of rural governance’ (ARGs) in the county of Gloucestershire, England, charts their recent growth, reasons for formation and perceived jurisdiction as well as examining complexities of decision-making relating to partnerships, networks and finance. The survey suggests that policies designed to ‘empower’ rural people can be seen to have clogged up rural decision-making processes sufficiently to have, effectively, disempowered many of them. The paper identifies and exemplifies six different types of ‘clogging up’ that impact upon rural decision-making: crowding, knotting, clouding, meandering, subverting and impoverishing. Whilst governmental proposals have been introduced in an attempt to rationalise this decision-making complexity, particularly through the Haskins Review and the English National Rural Strategy, other policy strands have conspired to make such decision-making essentially laissez faire.     

重构公共政策评估——基于公民权与行政权相对平衡的分析

对公共政策进行评估,形式上是对政策方案执行前、执行中和执行后的评价,实质上则是行政权与公民权的再分配。本文从公共政策过程出发,以公民权与行政权相对平衡为分析框架,将公共决策事前评估的重点安排为公民权比重大于行政权,这是确定一种公民本位的制度安排;将公共决策事中评估的重点安排为行政权比重大于公民权,是以最少的时间和成本实现这一制度安排;将公共决策事后评估的重点安排为公民权比重等于行政权,是因为行政权与公民权的和谐相处可以避免公共政策自身运作的损耗,使其沿着正确轨道良性健康进行,并为新一轮的公共政策发挥创造良好环境和基础。     

Evaluation of six presumptive tests for blood, their specificity, sensitivity, and effect on high molecular-weight DNA

Luminol, leuchomalachite green, phenolphthalein, Hemastix, Hemident, and Bluestar are all used as presumptive tests for blood. In this study, the tests were subjected to dilute blood (from 1:10,000 to 1:10,000,000), many common household substance, and chemicals. Samples were tested for DNA to determine whether the presumptive tests damaged or destroyed DNA. The DNA loci tested were D2S1338 and D19S433. Leuchomalachite green had a sensitivity of 1:10,000, while the remaining tests were able to detect blood to a dilution of 1:100,000. Substances tested include saliva, semen, potato, tomato, tomato sauce, tomato sauce with meat, red onion, red kidney bean, horseradish, 0.1 M ascorbic acid, 5% bleach, 10% cupric sulfate, 10% ferric sulfate, and 10% nickel chloride. Of all the substances tested, not one of the household items reacted with every test; however, the chemicals did. DNA was recovered and amplified from luminol, phenolphthalein, Hemastix, and Bluestar, but not from leuchomalachite green or Hemident.