France faced with terrorism

Abstract

France is an interesting laboratory for studying terrorism, or antiterrorism, not because extreme violence has been committed on a large scale as in Lebanon, but because, faced with diverse terrorist actions over a short period, France has worked out and considerably modified a policy for dealing with terrorism. The subject herein is not terrorism but the official response to it, namely counterterrorist policy and actions.     

Dismantling former Yugoslavia,recolonising Bosnia

Recent conflicts in the Balkans have been portrayed largely in terms of ethnic and religious divisions, with Western military and diplomatic intervention seen as essential to securing a positive outcome. However, these divisions are the consequence of a deeper process of economic and political fracturing. The re-structuring of the former Yugoslav economy, and the policies of the international financial institutions, have not been sufficiently emphasised. However, the author contends that, far from being the basis for social and economic reconstruction, the application of free-market policies in former Yugoslavia favoured the dismantling of social-welfare structures and contributed to the rapid decline in national economic capacity. The terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords suggest that a similar future is in store for the successor states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.     

Atropine Eye Drops: An Unusual Homicidal Poisoning

In March 2009, the body of a 51‐year‐old man was found in the boot of his car. The body had been frozen before being dismembered at the abdomen. The autopsy failed to determine the cause of death. Systematic toxicological analyses of the victim's peripheral blood and urine showed the presence of atropine, a powerful anticholinergic. Atropine was therefore specifically detected and quantified throughout the victim's biologic samples by HPLC‐MS² in the biologic fluids and UHPLC‐MS² in the hair. The atropine concentrations were 887 ng/mL in the cardiac blood, 489 ng/mL in the peripheral blood, 6693 ng/mL in the gastric contents (1.1 μg), 6753 ng/mL in the urine, and 2290 pg/mg in the hair. The blood concentrations measured in the decedent were consistent with an overdose of atropine, which was determined as the cause of death. The manner of death was a homicide with criminal intent.     

Death by a Thousand Grants? The Challenge of Grant Funding Reliance for Local Government Councils in the Northern Territory of Australia

In July 2008, the local government sector in the Northern Territory of Australia underwent wide-sweeping reforms whereby 53 councils, most of which were located in remote Indigenous communities, were amalgamated into eight regional shires. The dominant justifications for these reforms focused on internal ‘deficit’ views about the community council sector, including lack of competent and ethical staff, managerial workforce instability, inefficient use of resources, and poor oversight as the primary causes of chronic underperformance and dysfunction. This paper identifies and discusses the under-scrutinised role of grants revenue dependency and volatility in the demise of remote small councils in the Northern Territory. We analyse financial data to demonstrate the extreme volatility in year-on-year grants funding. With their high dependency on grants revenue, such volatility and unpredictability resulted in councils being hamstrung in their ability to strategically plan and ensure stability in service delivery, infrastructure management and employment provision. We argue that these fiscal dynamics, fuelled by hierarchical intergovernmental relations, contributed significantly to dysfunction in the sector, as well as mutually reinforcing pre-existing structural and endogenous weaknesses. This argument runs against the common conceptualisation of the sector as requiring of externally imposed structural reform. We conclude by suggesting that there are factors additional to scale that need to be incorporated into analysis of the effects of amalgamation policies on remote councils.     

Contextualised Capital: Policy Reforms and Inward Flows in Germany

Policy-makers in Germany have implemented, from the early 1990s to the mid 2000s, an impressive set of reforms designed to provide greater legal protection to minority shareholders. These reforms are linked with circumscribed changes: medium and long-term UK/US-based institutional investors have become major shareholders of large German firms; the incursions of short-term institutional investors, in contrast, have been more limited. This outcome highlights the interaction between firm-level institutional arrangements of German companies and the characteristics of different categories of shareholder value oriented funds. Institutional arrangements act as constraints that reduce the range of the strategic options of German firms. However, institutions are not specific enough to translate into predictions about the investment behaviour of different categories of investors who are themselves governed by internally defined rules that affect how they operate within an institutional framework.