Reporting a sudden death due to accidental gasoline inhalation

The investigation of uncertain fatalities requires accurate determination of the cause of death, with assessment of all factors that may have contributed to it. Gasoline is a complex and highly variable mixture of aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons that can lead to cardiac arrhythmias due to sensitization of the myocardium to catecholamines or acts as a simple asphyxiant if the vapors displace sufficient oxygen from the breathing atmosphere. This work describes a sudden occupational fatality involving gasoline. The importance of this petroleum distillate detection and its quantitative toxicological significance is discussed using a validated analytical method. A 51 year-old Caucasian healthy man without significant medical history was supervising the repairs of the telephone lines in a manhole near to a gas station. He died suddenly after inhaling gasoline vapors from an accidental leak. Extensive blistering and peeling of skin were observed on the skin of the face, neck, anterior chest, upper and lower extremities, and back. The internal examination showed a strong odor of gasoline, specially detected in the respiratory tract. The toxicological screening and quantitation of gasoline was performed by means of gas chromatography with flame ionization detector and confirmation was performed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Disposition of gasoline in different tissues was as follows: heart blood, 35.7 mg/L; urine, not detected; vitreous humor, 1.9 mg/L; liver, 194.7 mg/kg; lung, 147.6 mg/kg; and gastric content, 116,6 mg/L (2.7 mg total). Based upon the toxicological data along with the autopsy findings, the cause of death was determined to be gasoline poisoning and the manner of death was accidental. We would like to alert on the importance of testing for gasoline, and in general for volatile hydrocarbons, in work-related sudden deaths involving inhalation of hydrocarbon vapors and/or exhaust fumes.     

Russia: A Country with an Unpredictable Past

Russia is a key player in the Kyoto process, and the fate of the Protocol itself heavily depends on future developments in the country, in particular in its energy sector. This article analyses the contradictory and complex relationships between carbon dioxide emissions, gas exports to Western Europe and the energy security of Russia. The paper reviews emerging trends in the energy sector of Russia that will have a long-term impact on these three parameters and assesses the possible influence of these trends on the implementation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution in Russia. Proceeding from the latest developments in the Russian energy scene, the author tries to forecast how Russia will integrate into the international community in the energy sphere. The study concludes that gas export commitments to Europe will be met despite the serious problems in the domestic gas sector, that energy saving in Russia is the most feasible way of finding a compromise between the three parameters, and that enhancing the energy security of Russia might have rather controversial consequences for Europe.     

Slouching Towards New ‘Just’ Wars: International Law and the Use of Force After September 11th

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Nations hospitable to organized crime and terrorism

This report assesses conditions that contribute to or are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world during the period 1999–2002. Although the focus of the report is on transnational activity, domestic criminal activity is recognized as a key foundation for transnational crime, especially as the forces of globalization intensify. The report has been arranged geographically into the following major headings: Africa, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Within the geographical headings, the report addresses individual countries with particularly salient conditions. Cases such as the Triborder Area (TBA) of South America and East and West Africa, where conditions largely overlap national borders, have been treated as regions rather than by imposing an artificial delineation by country. The bibliography has been divided into the same geographical headings as the text. The major sources for this report are recent periodical reports from Western and regional sources, Internet sites offering credible recent information, selected recent monographs, and personal communications with regional experts. Treatment of individual countries varies according to the extent and seriousness of conditions under study. Thus some countries in a region are not discussed, and others are discussed only from the perspective of one or two pertinent activities or conditions. Because they border the United States, Canada and Mexico have received especially extensive treatment.     

Some Remarks on the Concept of Toleration

The paper contains a conceptual analysis of "act of toleration" and the property of "being tolerant". Being tolerant is understood as a dispositional property of persons manifested in what the author calls the "circumstances of toleration". The main circumstances distinguished are: a tendency to prohibit a certain behaviour and the competence to determine the deontic status of the behaviour in question. An act of toleration, then, consists in not prohibiting (or cancelling the prohibition of) that behaviour. It is argued that this requires the existence of two different normative systems, the "basic system", and the "justifying system". Acts of toleration must be based on reasons coming from the latter. This insight enables one to establish a difference between reasonable and unreasonable toleration, as well as between toleration and related concepts like indifference, acquiescence, etc. The analysis also introduces the distinction between "vertical" and "horizontal" toleration. Acceptance of this last category implies that toleration does not necessarily require hierarchical relationships between those who tolerate and those whose actions are tolerated.     

Dominance and change in the global computer industry: Military, bureaucratic, and network state developmentalisms

This article examines the conditions under which firms in different economies were able to emerge as significant actors in the global computer industry during different time periods. To achieve this, the article divides into three periods the history of the industry in terms of the three major policy regimes that have supported the dominant firms and regions. It argues that these policy regimes can be thought of as state developmentalisms that take significantly different forms across the history of the industry. U.S. firms’ dominance over their European counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s was underpinned by a system of “military developmentalism” where military agencies funded research, provided a market and developed infrastructure, but also demanded high quality products. The “Asian Tigers”—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea—in the 1970s and 1980s were able to eclipse their Latin American and Indian rivals due in large part to the significant advantages offered by a highly effective system of “bureaucratic developmentalism,” where bureaucratic elites in key state agencies and leading business groups negotiated supports for export performance. The 1990s saw the emergence of a system of “network developmentalism” where countries such as Ireland and Israel were able to emerge as new nodes in the computer industry by careful economic and political negotiation of relations to the United States, reestablished at the center of the industry, and by more decentralized forms of provision of state support for high-tech development. Finally, the conditions under which new regimes can emerge are a consequence of the unanticipated global consequences of previous regimes. While state developmentalisms have been shaped by existing global regimes, they have promoted further and different rounds of industry globalization. Seán ó Riain is professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research has been primarily on the political economy of high-tech growth in Ireland and elsewhere, and on work and class politics among software developers. He is the author ofThe Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network, States in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 2004).     

欧洲对于私生活的法律保护:法国与德国的比较

比较法的研究有助于对欧盟成员国的不同法律传统的理解.①加强共同体公民的法律保障必须要借助于对其基本权利的保护.②在发现成员国的法律保护机制之间存在一定的相似性之后,比较法研究可以揭示出成员国国内法之间存在的一些重要差别.对于法国和德国尤其是如此.