Arab Citizen and the Arab State: The “Arab Spring” as a Critical Juncture in Contemporary Arab Politics

The basic characteristics and historic significance of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 are given a multitude of interpretations, not least in light of the dramatic events that have followed. This article seeks to understand the uprisings as expressions of an unfolding crisis in the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in the region within a historic-sociological approach to citizenship as a “contractual relationship.” A brief discussion of Egyptian developments is used to illustrate the approach. The mass mobilization in the 1950s and 1960s inspired by Nasserism and the “authoritarian bargaining” introduced at the time is contrasted with the demands for a new social contract that mobilized millions during the recent uprisings. The uprisings clearly represent a critical juncture in contemporary Arab history, but their long-term impact on the direction of the future political order in the Arab region remains an open question.     

Residence patterns of the elderly in early eighteenth-century Iceland

In this article the 1703 Icelandic census is used to shed light on the living arrangements of the elderly during a period of harsh climatic and social conditions. The census is unique in the sense that it includes an entire population of a country at an early date. It was taken on the initiative of the authorities in Denmark with the objective of examining the dire conditions of the Icelandic population and, in particular, assessing the number of paupers and vagrants. The census therefore provides interesting possibilities to analyse the situation of the most vulnerable groups of the society. In a society with low nuptiality rates and a low sex ratio, the risk of becoming dependent on poor relief increased with age. Elderly persons who were not able to retire in the household of an offspring ran the risk of spending their last years as paupers. In the 75 and older age group, no less than 43.5% of women were in the position of a pauper. In line with other recent studies on intergenerational co-residence, this study indicates that the elderly preferred to co-reside with their offspring. Even though elderly couples preferred to remain in the position of head of household, most would co-reside with their children. As regards widowed persons, there were noticeable differences between elderly men and women. Elderly widows were thus more likely than widowers to resign from headship on entering widowhood in order to retire in the household of one of an offspring.     

No Offense! On the Offense Principle and Some New Challenges

A central aim within criminal justice ethics is to give a plausible justification concerning which type of acts ought to be criminalized by the state. One of the principles of criminalization which has been presented and critically discussed in the philosophical literature is the Offense Principle. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that unless a rather special and implausible objective list theory of well-being is accepted, the Offense Principle should be subsumed in the Harm Principle.     

Interpreting Performance Information: Motivated Reasoning or Unbiased Comprehension

A main rationale of performance information is to empower citizens to make informed decisions by presenting them with unambiguous information about the performance of institutions. However, even objective, clear, and unambiguous performance information is subject to biased interpretation depending on whether the information is consistent with the prior beliefs held by those who receive the information. Integrating the theory of motivated reasoning with the literature on performance information, the authors hypothesize that performance information that is inconsistent with prior beliefs is less likely to be interpreted correctly than belief‐consistent information. Using randomized survey experiments in which respondents were presented with quantitative performance data, the authors show that subjects systematically interpret performance information in ways that conform with their prior beliefs. The findings question the assumption that providing performance information automatically increases knowledge about government performance, let alone improves political decisions.     

Local Officials’ Support for PILOTs/SILOTs: Nonprofit Engagement,Economic Stress,and Politics

Nonprofit property tax exemption has become a major policy issue as the collapse of the housing market, the Great Recession, and property tax caps have threatened local tax collections. Consequently, many local governments have sought to obtain payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) from charities that are formally exempt from property taxes. Using a 2010 survey of local government officials in Indiana, this article examines whether support for PILOT policies is related to officials’ personal involvement with nonprofits, their views on government–nonprofit relationships, the type of position they hold, the level of economic distress in the county, local political conditions, and local nonprofit wealth. The findings support most of these hypotheses but also show that attitudes toward PILOTs appear to be shaped by somewhat different concerns than attitudes toward services in lieu of taxes (SILOTs).     

The last Viking King: a royal maternity case solved by ancient DNA analysis

The last of the Danish Viking Kings, Sven Estridsen, died in a.d. 1074 and is entombed in Roskilde Cathedral with other Danish kings and queens. Sven's mother, Estrid, is entombed in a pillar across the chancel. However, while there is no reasonable doubt about the identity of Sven, there have been doubts among historians whether the woman entombed was indeed Estrid. To shed light on this problem, we have extracted and analysed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from pulp of teeth from each of the two royals. Four overlapping DNA-fragments covering about 400bp of hypervariable region 1 (HVR-1) of the D-loop were PCR amplified, cloned and a number of clones with each segment were sequenced. Also a segment containing the H/non-H specific nucleotide 7028 was sequenced. Consensus sequences were determined and D-loop results were replicated in an independent laboratory. This allowed the assignment of King Sven Estridsen to haplogroup H; Estrid's sequence differed from that of Sven at two positions in HVR-1, 16093T-->C and 16304T-->C, indicating that she belongs to subgroup H5a. Given the maternal inheritance of mtDNA, offspring will have the same mtDNA sequence as their mother with the exception of rare cases where the sequence has been altered by a germ line mutation. Therefore, the observation of two sequence differences makes it highly unlikely that the entombed woman was the mother of Sven. In addition, physical examination of the skeleton and the teeth strongly indicated that this woman was much younger (approximately 35 years) at the time of death than the 70 years history records tell. Although the entombed woman cannot be the Estrid, she may well be one of Sven's two daughters-in-law who were also called Estrid and who both became queens.     

Computed tomography as routine in connection with medico-legal autopsies

CT-scanning as routine examination before medico-legal autopsy was introduced at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2002. The present series comprises of 525 medico-legal examinations performed in the year 2003. The purpose is to determine the value of CT-scanning prior to the post-mortem examination. All findings, CT- as well as patho-anatomic findings - more than 4000 - were registered in a database. To increase the clearness, the findings are divided in accordance to regions such as head, thorax, abdomen, pelvis, extremities and vessels and the CT-findings are compared to the patho-anatomic findings, with the purpose to estimate the advantages and disadvantages with the two types of examination. The preliminary results show, that the CT-scanner is superior when it comes to detection of extremity fractures. The scanner has ability in detecting hemorrhages and hematomas, especially, intracranial.     

Sustainability labelling as a tool for reporting the sustainable development impacts of climate actions relevant to Article 6 of the Paris Agreement

The architecture of global carbon markets has changed significantly since the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals were both agreed in 2015. Voluntary, international cooperative approaches established in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allow Parties to work together to achieve the targets set out in their respective Nationally Determined Contributions to limit global warming to an increase below 1.5–2 °C. In Article 6.4, a sustainable mitigation mechanism is established for which rules, modalities and procedures will be developed internationally considering the experience and lessons learned from existing mechanisms, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and its Sustainable Development (SD) Tool. Historically the issue of making integrated assessments of sustainable development and mitigation actions has been politically and methodologically controversial for many reasons: developing countries fear that an international definition of SD will interfere with their sovereignty and therefore their ability to define their own development pathways; players in the carbon market fear that markets can only handle one objective, namely mitigation outcomes; and sustainable development is regarded as too complex and costly to be measured and quantified. In an effort to address these concerns, the article proposes a new methodology for the sustainability labelling of climate mitigation actions relevant to Article 6 approaches. The article draws on an application of the CDM SD tool to analyse 2098 Component Programme Activities that had entered the CDM Pipeline by January 2017. The article demonstrates that assessment of the sustainable development benefits of climate actions can be graded and labelled based on the analysis of qualitative data, which is less costly than applying a quantitative approach.