Prevalence of rhabdomyolysis in drug deaths

Rhabdomyolysis has repeatedly been reported as a possible consequence of illicit drug consumption especially in clinical literature. In order to investigate the prevalence of rhabdomyolysis in cases of drug deaths, immunohistochemical staining of kidney sections with a myoglobin antibody was performed at 103 consecutive fatal drug poisonings. The control group consisted of 107 unselected forensic autopsies. With regard to the presence of intratubular myoglobin, 33% of the study group were categorized as "strongly positive", 17.5% as "slightly positive" and 49.5% as "negative". No single substance showed a particularly high incidence of rhabdomyolysis nor were there correlations to special combinations of substances. In the control group a "strongly positive" result after myoglobin staining was observed in only 10.3% of 107 cases, a "slightly positive" result in 13.1% and a "negative" result in 76.6%. The findings suggest that rhabdomyolysis is a frequent consequence of illicit drug consumption and that it is not promoted by a single factor, but by a combination of several factors.     

Diagnosis of a captive-bolt injury in a skull extremely destroyed by fire

The authors report on a combined suicide of a 71-year-old farmer who fired a shot to his forehead with a livestock stunner before burning himself. As the fire was fueled by a pile of firewood it burnt for many hours, thus, causing subtotal incineration of the body. The remaining bones were calcined and reduced to a residual mass of only 3 kg. In spite of the extreme destruction, a circular bone defect corresponding to the site where the captive-bolt had entered the skull could be identified in the frontal squama. The example of this suicide is used to illustrate the problems of distinguishing between mechanical and thermal fractures. As expected, the attempted isolation and amplification of both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA for the purpose of identification was not successful.     

The importance of policy design fit for effectiveness: a qualitative comparative analysis of policy integration in regional transport planning

Policy Sciences - Policy design has returned as a central topic in public policy research. An important area of policy design study deals with effectively attaining desired policy outcomes by...     

Explaining constitutional garrulity

Constitutions differ dramatically in length although they serve very similar functions everywhere. This paper tries to identify some determinants of constitutional length. It contains a new dataset spelling out the length of 135 constitutions in words. It turns out that a common law legal origin significantly increases the length of the constitution, whereas countries in the Middle East and North Africa have significantly shorter constitutions. Further, having been a British or Spanish colony is correlated with longer constitutions, a higher share of Protestants with shorter constitutions.     

How Employee Race Moderates the Relationship Between Non-Contingent Punishment and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Test of the Negative Adaptation Hypothesis

The negative adaptation hypothesis states that Black employees, but not White employees, have psychologically adapted to the occurrence of interpersonal mistreatment in organizations because they experience more negative events across different domains of social life than Whites. Consequently, Blacks react less strongly to the same level of actual interpersonal mistreatment compared to Whites. The authors applied this prediction to the relationship between non-contingent punishment and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). As expected, in a field study among 456 manufacturing plant workers, the relationship between non-contingent punishment and supervisory-rated OCB was negative and significant for Whites, but not for Blacks. Implications for the study of race, interpersonal mistreatment, and the perpetuation of racial inequalities in organizations are discussed.

Legal enclaves as a test environment for innovative products: Toward legally resilient experimentation policies1

Many countries adhere to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development creed that innovation is good for the economy. Experiments are often used to intentionally create space for innovation. Decisions allowing experiments result in temporary legal enclaves for a few, excluding many others. Therefore, they come with risks. The aim of this article is to provide a set of guidelines that help improve the legal resilience of experimentation policies, so they are better able to withstand legal attacks when they occur. To do so, we first arranged the existing diversity of legal experiments in a theoretical model. Special attention was paid to two archetypes of legal experiments: statutory experiments and regulatory sandboxes. Second, we analyzed the impact of both types of experiments on four core legal principles: legality, certainty, equality, and public accountability. From this assessment, we eventually formulated a set of guidelines to secure or improve legal resilience.     

Disaggregating public-private governance interactions: European Union interventions in transnational private sustainability governance

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco-certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public-private governance interactions—whether more competitive or complementary—we need to disaggregate a public authority's intervention. The article distinguishes between four features of private governance in which a public authority can intervene: standard setting, procedural aspects, supply chain signaling, and compliance incentives. Using the cases of the European Union's policies on organic agriculture and biofuels production, the article shows that public-private governance interaction dynamics vary across these private governance features as well as over time. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the importance of active lobbying by private governance actors in influencing these dynamics and the resulting policy outputs.     

Political Conflict over Time

We study a model of electoral competition in which politicians must decide whether to initiate the provision of some public good and, afterward, how much of the public good to supply. The model illuminates how a project's implementation affects elections and, conversely, how electoral considerations influence decisions about implementation. Under well-defined conditions, politicians will either implement projects that they do not like or delay projects that, absent electoral concerns, they would support. The model further reveals how the perceived benefits of holding office can impede the production of public goods about which there is broad consensus. And depending on facts about the program's structure and the electoral landscape, a policy's implementation can either mitigate or exacerbate political conflict.     

Vladimir the great,Grand Prince of Muscovy: Resurrecting the Russian service state

This article draws on the ideas of continuity theory in order to examine Russia's attempted transition and locate it in the longer duration of Russian history. The argument here begins by outlining the main features of the institutional matrix that evolved in old Muscovy, and proceeds to show how those early choices became path dependent. It presents the imperial ‘age of reform' as a project that introduced far reaching formal changes, but failed to achieve a transformation of supporting norms, and it views the Soviet order as a reversal of those formal changes, resulting in a full return to the Muscovite matrix. The Yel'tsin era is held up as yet another ‘time of troubles', to be followed, under Vladimir Putin, by a resurrection of the traditional Russian ‘service state'.