Halfe the world knowes not how the other halfe lies: Investigation of verbal and non‐verbal signs of deception exhibited by criminal offenders and non‐offenders

Purpose. This study examined the verbal and non‐verbal behaviours exhibited by criminal offender and non‐offender participants while they related planned truthful and deceptive accounts about emotional autobiographical events. Methods. In a 2 × 2 (participant group × veracity) quasi‐experimental design, offenders (N = 27) and university students (N = 38) provided videotaped accounts of four autobiographical emotional events: two honest and two fabricated (counterbalanced). Patterns of behaviour exhibited during the truthful and the deceptive accounts were then compared. Results. In general, offenders and non‐offenders showed similar patterns of deceptive behaviour. Deceptive accounts by both groups contained fewer details than honest accounts. Deception was associated with an increase in illustrator usage and self‐manipulations; however, univariate analyses indicated only that offenders exhibited significantly more self‐manipulations when lying. A significant interaction emerged in which offenders showed a reduction in smiles when lying about the emotional events, while students showed no difference. Conclusions. Offenders and students showed similar patterns of lying on most cues. However, unlike non‐offenders, offenders smiled less and showed an increase in self‐manipulations when lying. We theorize that offenders may have been aware that smiling and laughing are negatively related to perceived credibility in the speaker and used self‐manipulations to distract listeners from the content of their lies.     

Corporate wealth or public health? WTO/TRIPS flexibilities and access to HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs by developing countries

Between 1994 and 2003, the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement of the WTO was refined to allow for flexibilities in the use of compulsory licences to import and export ‘generic’ varieties of pharmaceutical products, including ARV drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. After summarising this process, and assessing its implications in practice for developing countries, this article briefly places the current regime in a longer-term context of the institutional protection of patents in Britain and Europe dating from the nineteenth century. It traces how that pattern, which benefits major patent holders, continues to be present in TRIPS. The article goes on to demonstrate the continuity of corporate influence over the state, as expressed in the ‘TRIPS-plus’ conditions, which are appearing in bilateral free-trade agreements between the USA and either individual developing countries or regional groupings. This array of what amount to institutional obstacles to the sustained availability of cheap drugs presents serious problems for future operations of the supply chain for many imported medicines and, in the case of HIV/AIDS, has negative implications for the long-term clinical effectiveness of the most widely used drugs.     

Personnel reorganization in the Canadian public service: some observation on the past

Abstract. This paper addresses the history of public personnel reorganization of the federal level of government in Canada and focuses on two periods of fundamental change. The first of these periods revolved around the Civil Service Act of 1918 and was associated with the introduction of the merit principle. The second period revolved around the public service legislation in 1967 and was associated with introduction of the principle of collective bargaining. The significance of these two watersheds, and of less important developments in the intervening years, is described. The author concludes that the forces required to bring about another period of fundamental change in public service personnel management are not in evidence and cautions against proposals that would, by diminishing the statutory powers of the Public Service Commission, undermine the merit principle governing public service appointments.     

Recognition of Skeletal Fractures in Infants: An Autopsy Technique

Abstract:  Complete recognition and documentation of injury pattern is crucial in the diagnosis of child abuse. Skeletal fractures regarded as highly specific to nonaccidental injury in infants include posterior rib, scapular, metaphyseal, and spinous process fractures. These injuries are often occult, especially when acute, to standard radiologic and autopsy procedures. The presented autopsy technique requires incising and reflecting skeletal muscles to expose the bones and costal osseous joints in situ , increasing the opportunity to recognize skeletal injury. Fractured or atypical appearing bones are removed and processed for complete evaluation. The bones are processed by macerating the soft tissue in a water soap bath at an elevated temperature. To aid in reconstruction of the decedent, long bones are replaced with wooden dowels and the chest cavity is packed with the organ bag. The technique is invasive and recommended for cases in which the pathologist has reasonable suspicion of acute or remote trauma.     

Speed Kills

Over the past two decades, a misguided, militaristic war on drugs has been waged through a variety of means, including drug interdiction programs on the streets and highways of the United States, and high-profile campaigns in the United States media designed to construct drug use as a dangerous social problem. Yet during this same period, a far more deadly social problem - the death of some 40,000 people a year in automobile accidents along these same streets and highways — has largely been excluded from public consciousness and public debate. Recently, a convergence of circumstances in New Mexico made visible this imbalance in public awareness and public policy, and perhaps even began to remedy it. The roadside shrines that decorate the highways of New Mexico and other states likewise serve this purpose, encoding the collective tragedy of automotive death in the cultural landscape. In their tragic beauty and ongoing accumulation, these shrines challenge critical criminologists to find a new focus, a new everyday criminology of the automobile that can expand the existing criminology of automotive corporate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The framework convention on tobacco control: The politics of global health governance

This paper analyses the particular challenges that tobacco control poses for health governance in an era of accelerating globalisation. Traditionally, health systems have been structured at the national level, and health regulation has focused on the needs of populations within individual countries. However, the increasingly global nature of the tobacco industry, and the risks it poses to public health, require a transnational approach to regulation. This has been the rationale behind negotiations for a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) by the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organisation (TFI/WHO). In recognition of the need to go beyond national governments, and to create a governance mechanism that can effectively address the transnational nature of the tobacco epidemic, WHO has sought to involve a broad range of interests in negotiations. The contributions of civil society groups in particular in the negotiation process have been unusual. This paper explores the nature and effectiveness of these contributions. It concludes with an assessment of whether the FCTC constitutes a significant shift towards a new form of global health governance, exploring the institutional tensions inherent in attempting to extend participation within a state-centric organisation.     

Export instability: An alternative analysis of causes

Numerous studies into the causes of the export instability experienced by developing countries have failed to establish any significant relationships. This paper suggests that the widely‐used technique of cross‐country regression analysis is inappropriate and that the typical explanatory variable set is inadequately specified. Accordingly, analysis is shifted to a time‐series basis at the level of individual countries, and explanatory variables are developed which correspond more closely to the supply and demand determinants of instability. Applying this alternative model to data for a sample of developing countries produces results which suggest that this approach has considerable explanatory power.     

The Parade of Sovereignties: Establishing the Vocabulary of the New Russian Federalism

On the basis of extensive on-site interviews and documentary sources, the author interprets the dynamics of the collapse of the Soviet Union by analyzing the cascade of sovereignty declarations issued by republics of the USSR as well as by autonomous republics and other subunits of the Russian republic, in 1990-1991. Interrelationships among the declarations, and other putative causes of their content and timing, are explored. A case study of Tatarstan is provided. The study also analyzes the impact of the process on subsequent Russian approaches to federalism.