Sheriff law enforcement officers and the use of force

This study examined the relationship between sheriff law enforcement officers' characteristics and their use of force. Official records were utilized to collect data on the sworn law enforcement officers of the Florida Polk County Sheriff's Office and their self-reported use of force for 1999. The findings of this study indicated that White, male law enforcement officers, thirty-five years of age or younger, with less than 145 months of service, and assigned to patrol duties were more likely to resort to the use of force. Given that sheriff law enforcement officers are an integral part of policing, it is recommended that more studies be conducted of the use of force by these public officials.     

Some Concepts that may be Useful in Understanding the Myriad Forms and Contexts of Surveillance

In March 2007, following arbitration between Israel's director of Military Intelligence in the Yom Kippur War, Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira and the Mossad chief in 1973, Zvi Zamir, it was officially ruled out that Zeira leaked the identity of Israel's most important source in Egypt to unauthorized journalists. The agent, Dr Ashraf Marwan, Nasser's son-in-law and Sadat's close advisor, had since 1969 given the Mossad excellent information about Egypt’s war preparations. He was also the source for the warning that ultimately geared Israel to war a few hours before it started on 6 October 1973. This article describes the process through which, from the early 1990s, Zeira leaked to unauthorized students of the Yom Kippur War information concerning the identity of the source and hypothesizes about what could have motivated him to take this action.     

The Gothic,the Death Drive and Angela Carter

Abstract

This essay situates Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in a 1970s era in which a feminist reclaiming of various things—the streets, the night, as well as fairy tales—is the order of the day. It examines the complex nature of Carter's status, in this context, as a controversial writer. Is Carter a writer who contests or colludes with the forms of reality presented in and by her fiction? This question may be seen as framing the main debate about Carter as a ‘problematic’ or ‘polarizing’ figure. The different sides of this argument are assessed in this essay. From reading ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an exemplary reworking of the Gothic, and itself one of Carter's fictions of the death drive, the essay reaches a clear conclusion of its own regarding the vexed contest/collude dimension of Carter's storytelling.     

The paradoxical effects of macluhanisme: Cazeneuve,Baudrillard and Barthes

In the mid-1960s the controversial ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan hit France like a cyclone. ‘Macluhanisme’ is the summarization of the basic tenets of his theory and marks the paradoxical mire into which one was thrown by engaging with them. For to criticize McLuhan was to resist his truth by rationalization. Criticism. also put one in the position of being labelled a counter-revolutionary since McLuhan aligned himself, albeit rhetorically and despite his conservative politics, with counter-cultural tendencies. Moreover, he was condemned by university professors as a charlatan, but widely supported by media workers. This support exposed the political issue of who was, in French intellectual life, in a position to authenticate ideas. This study traces the effects of macluhanisme through the work of the sociologist of the media and administrator Jean Cazeneuve, the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose debts to McLuhan are well-recognized but little explored, and Roland Barthes, with whom McLuhan met in Paris to discuss (but never accomplished) a collaborative project.     

Social movements and the changing structure of political opportunity in the European union 1

To the extent that European integration results in the decline in the importance of the nation‐state as the exclusive seat of formal political power, we can expect attendant changes in those forms of interest aggregation and articulation historically linked to the state. This article suggests that a polity characterised by multi‐level governance is emerging in Europe and that this poses a set of new constraints and opportunities for groups that wish to influence political decisions. We argue that group strategy in response to this is a function of: (1) the structure of political opportunities facing a group in the EU; and (2) inherited institutions and ideologies that constrain the capacity of a group to exploit those opportunities. We use this framework to analyse the effect of European integration on four groups: the labour movement, regional movements, the environmental movement and the anti‐nuclear movement.     

“Sorry,wrong number”: Why media polls on gun control are often unreliable

Abstract

How scientific are the polls reported in the media on the gun‐control issue? Without arguing for or against gun controls, this article examines the interviewing and sampling methods used by media polls and finds that some polls claiming impressive majorities in favor of severe gun controls may not be accurate.