日本“政治大国”走向与自主防卫

进入20世纪80年代以后,作为经济强国的日本已经不再满足于“经济大国政治小国”的地位,历届内阁开始要求与经济大国地位相适应的政治大国地位。日本政府在寻求实现政治大国目标的过程中,主要选择了以军事领域作为突破口,以成为军事大国带动政治大国目标的实现。具体体现在强化日美同盟、建立和完善有事法制、保持自主、高效的自卫力量与积极参与联合国维和行动四个方面。     

Diabetes mellitus and hypopituitarism

A 38-year-old diabetic woman developed hyponatraemia and fatal non-ketotic coma after elective cholecystectomy. At the autopsy, it was revealed that the immediate cause of death was cerebral oedema with secondary pontine haemorrhage. The cerebral oedema was associated with severe hyponatraemia and atrophy of the endocrine organs, including the adrenal glands. Biochemical analysis of serum taken immediately before death indicated that the primary defect was pituitary insufficiency, a recognised but rare complication of diabetes.     

Nixon and the Jews

ABSTRACT

In public the 37th President of the United States did not express hostility or disparagement, or show any signs of religious prejudice towards Jews. But inside the White House, Richard M. Nixon's remarks were often scurrilous. His antisemitism was not casual; it was close to compulsive. And it could be coupled with other seething grievances, for example, towards liberals, radicals, the media, Blacks and Italian-Americans. Yet Nixon controlled his antisemitism. It had no adverse effect on Jewish life, either at home or abroad. The malice that he nurtured remained unmobilized. Apart from a few limited personnel instances (mostly but not completely ignored by Nixon's underlings), it is impossible to connect private resentment to public policy, probably because the barriers to the expression of antisemitism in the United States have been so high. The ugliness of his utterances in the Oval Office revealed his character, but did not extend outward to shape the processes of governance. A disconnect can therefore be discerned between what he felt and how he acted. Most American Jews voted for Nixon's Democratic opponents in 1968 and 1972. But even Jews who voted against him, even those who loathed him, have often acknowledged that Nixon's policies fortified the security of Israel; and he was proud of his support for the Jewish state during the Yom Kippur War. What betrayed Nixon, and what forced him to resign the presidency, was his decision to instal a secret taping system in the Oval Office. When the tapes were played in 1974, he showed himself to be conspiring to obstruct justice. In subsequent years, further exposure of the tapes revealed the extent and intensity of Nixon's antipathy to Jews. The expletives that had to be deleted did much to besmirch the dignity of the office. But such was the stigma the political culture attached to antisemitism that, had his bigotry become public before 1968, Nixon's career would have been over.     

Magnitude and durability of electoral change: Identifying critical elections in the U.S. Congress 1854–2010

The two hallmarks of a critical election and, hence, of a critical realignment are the magnitude of the observed change and the durability of that change. In addition to offering a new approach to measuring durable change in national party dominance, and providing a non-parametric criterion to identify unusual changes in seat/vote shares, we provide fresh insights via a unifying statistical approach that reflects both of these factors simultaneously. Furthermore, we assess the robustness of critical election determinations in two ways. First, we compare the magnitude of inter-election shifts with both average volatility over the entire time period and volatility relative to a particular time period. Second, as an alternative to the usual perspective, we consider critical elections not as a one-time cataclysm, but rather as a pair (or perhaps even triple) of consecutive substantial shifts, generated by the same underlying factors. Overall, we distinguish six elections that marginally or provisionally meet our criteria to be critical elections. But focusing on pairs of elections, 1858–60 and 1930–32 stand out as critical among all elections since the 1850s.     

野田内阁加入TPP的战略意图探析

TPP是一种旨在实现贸易、投资及人员往来等全面自由化的高水平自由贸易协定。野田内阁意图通过TPP提升日本企业的国际竞争力,推动国内农业的结构性改革,重振日本经济;在对外关系上,则欲借此修复巩固日美同盟,配合美国牵制中国的战略布局,并在未来亚太经济一体化的进程中占据有利位置。基于上述战略意图,尽管遭到日本国内长期依赖财政补贴及贸易保护的农业部门和希望继续维持现有医疗保障体系的医师会等团体的坚决反对,以致日本面临政治分裂的风险,野田仍作出了参加TPP谈判的政治决断。     

美国证据排除规则的衰变及其启示——以Herring v. United States案为主线的考察

2009年1月的Herring v.United States案判决是近年来美国联邦最高法院关于证据排除规则方面影响最大的判决,它确立了＂过失行为所得非法证据不适用证据排除＂的新规则。该判决以其不同以往任何案例的特殊性引发了关于证据排除的存在必要性、适用范围、审查模式等一系列问题的理论探讨和实务争议。以该判决前后美国联邦最高法院的态度转变和学界回应为鉴,我国证据排除规则的确立应定位于阻吓违法行为,以过错原则为判断标准,并配合职务监督方式施行。     

Comparison of two methods for isolating DNA from human skeletal remains for STR analysis

Abstract: The quality and efficiency of a standard organic DNA isolation method and a silica‐based method using the QIAGEN Blood Maxi Kit were compared to obtain human DNA and short tandem repeats (STRs) profiles from 39 exhumed bone samples for paternity testing. DNA samples were quantified by real‐time PCR, and STR profiles were obtained using the AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler^® PCR amplification kit. Overall, the silica‐based method recovered less DNA ranging from 0 to 147.7 ng/g (average 7.57 ng/g, median = 1.3 ng/g) than did the organic method ranging from 0 to 605 ng/g (average 44.27 ng/g, median = 5.8 ng/g). Complete profiles (16/16 loci tested) were obtained from 37/39 samples (95%) using the organic method and from 9/39 samples (23%) with the silica‐based method. Compared with a standard organic DNA isolation method, our results indicate that the published silica‐based method does not improve neither the quality nor the quantity of DNA for STR profiling.