Chinese Reserves Make the World Go 'Round

As it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, China's authoritarian development model, which has sustained high growth for two decades, is entering a fragile new stage. Tainted toys and other products have made the American consumers on whom China relies wary even as the debt‐and‐deficit ridden American economy relies on China's massive foreign reserves to keep going. In the meantime, China's aggressive search for raw materials in Africa is causing a backlash while its cyberspying probes into Western defense systems are reviving Cold War‐like tensions. The US treasury secretary, a top China expert and former intelligence officials offer their views.     

Japan's Crucial Moment

<正>Hopes for the Japanese economy remain high despite the severe blow it has suffered The tragic impact of the massive March 11 earth-quake on the northeast coast of Japan has filled the newswires across the world.Those     

A COMPARISON OF DEFENSE STRATEGY AND RACE AS INFLUENCES IN DIFFERENTIAL SENTENCING

This study compares the influence of defense strategy and the race of the defendant on the variance in felony sentence length for a sample of 2,090 convicts in a state penal system Defense strategy includes the subsequent plea of the defendant and the type of defense counsel. Control variables are age, marital status, urban-rural childhood, education, prior criminal record, and type of crime. A comparison is made for both burglary and homicide. The findings for butglay show defense strategy explains 16.5% of the variance in sentence length (because of the type of plea), while race of the defendant explains only I% of the variance (due to the positive relationship between being black and sentence length). For homicide the unique explanation of the defense strategy model accounts for 3% of the variance (due more to type of attorney than plea), while the race of the defendant accounts for another 3% (because of the negative relationships between being Indian or Mexican-American and sentence length).     

Social Class, Child Maltreatment, and Delinquent Behavior

The relationship between social class and child maltreatment and between maltreatment and delinquency were examined, particular attention being paid to previous deficiencies in the operationalization of maltreatment and class. Maltreatment was operationalized with subscales for physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect, while social class was operationalized with multiple indicators. Survey data from 110 high school freshmen were analyzed and revealed the following: (a) a weak but consistent inverse correlation between social class and all forms of child maltreatment, (b) a stronger relationship between social class and maltreatment when lower-class membership was operationalized in a manner consistent with the concept of an underclass, (c) that emotional abuse and neglect were correlated positively with all forms of delinquent behavior examined, and (d) that physical abuse was not correlated appreciably and positively with any form of delinquency.