With friends like these: foreign policy as personal relationship

Governments are run by humans who have sympathies and moods. The study of leaders' personalities, albeit not widespread, is an important tool for foreign policy analysis. Plus, friendship is a feeling that decision-makers like to express for each other. This paper analyses the activity of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's three times premier, who has made ‘friendship’ a central tenet of his personal foreign policy. Three cases are considered, namely, Berlusconi's relationship with George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. The paper concludes that his friendship-based foreign policy has somehow worked; but, because he decided to ignore Italy's structural constraints in the international arena, he ended up wasting opportunities and resources.     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Children, women, and substance abuse: a look at recovery in a communal setting

This study explored the sense of community among women (n = 21) and women with children (n = 30) living in Oxford Houses, with emphasis on how the presence of children might affect the household. Sense of community did not vary between participants with more or less than three months residence. Residents reported very high levels of satisfaction with the home, possibly because of a ceiling effect of little room for increases in their sense of community over time. Participants reported that they were getting along with the children in the home, that mothers could count on babysitting help, and that the children had a positive effect on the household and their own recovery process. This effect did not differ between mothers and non-mothers, suggesting that non-mothers might view the children in the home with a sense of responsibility and sensitivity comparable to that of the mothers. Implications are discussed.     

Cultivating and maintaining effective action research partnerships: the DePaul and Oxford House collaborative

In this paper, we review the result of research conducted in the context of a 13-year collaborative partnership between DePaul University and a community-based, self-run, residential substance abuse recovery program called Oxford House. This collaborative effort highlights several examples of the research and action activities fostering a positive alliance that benefited both the research team and the Oxford House community. It also proposed practical guidelines for developing effective action research collaboratives that may be helpful to others who desire to cultivate and maintain similar mutually beneficial partnerships; including such processes as the development of trust, respecting the personal experiences of the community members and group, commitment to serving the community, validating findings with organization members, and accountability.     

Chronic hydrocephalus and alcohol abuse in a young male suicide

The paper describes a case of suicide in a young man affected by compensated chronic hydrocephalus who was subject to alcohol abuse. The case was studied by means of a complex set of analyses, including circumstantial and clinical data, anatomohistopathological findings, and chemicotoxicologic tests. What clearly emerges in the case is the importance of a continuing neuropsychological follow-up in patients with shunted hydrocephalus. The forensic interest in the case is due to the peculiar autopsy findings discussed in relation to the possible causes of sudden death in subjects with hydrocephalus.     

Controlling Immigrants: The Latent Function of Italian Administrative Orders

Enforcement of new—or relatively new—administrative powers targeting control and criminalization of behaviorbehavior has become increasingly common in Italian cities in recent years. Defined as ordinanze sindacali, Mayors’ Administrative Orders (MAOs) have traditionally been among the powers available to mayors to regulate urban life. Under a new national law passed in 2008, their use in controlling undesirable behavior ranging from minor social and physical incivilities to prostitution and social problems like begging and vagrancy has become increasingly common. In this paper, using data from our own research and from national and local studies, we discuss these orders from a new perspective, showing how they have been used in Italy to criminalize statuses and behaviors of a specific vulnerable social group: namely, legal and illegal immigrants. We describe the main features of these administrative tools, their complex interactions with the criminal justice system and immigration laws, and the mechanisms through which they target irregular and regular immigrants and their use of public space. We contextualize their enforcement in Italian cities in the broader development of exclusionary policies against immigrants and in the more general tendency to increase criminalization of groups and behaviors that seem to be part of a common punitive turn in many Western countries.     

Disenchanted Presents,Haunted Pasts,and Dystopian Futures: deferred millennialism in the cinema of Meng Jinghui

Meng Jinghui's Chicken Poets (2002) presents a postmodern meditation on the state and fate of Chinese cultural production, intellectual discourse, and social relations at the turn of the century and the millennium. Albeit released two years after 2000, it retains symptomatic traits of the fin-de-siècle and millennial mentality and is therefore examined as an instance of ‘deferred’ or ‘residual’ millennialism. As typical of such narratives, it merges visions of hope and horror, dream and disaster. The film is founded on a dialogic intersection of multiple ‘time–spaces’ of signification, each providing a separate locus of reflection and critique. Besides disclosing distinct discursive targets, the structural interplay of these different chronotopes also establishes generic distinctions within the narrative. Chicken Poets relates to the present as a self-reflexive Künstlerfilm addressing the conflict of creation and commodity in times of mechanical reproduction and mediated stardom. Its enquiry into the past triggers ghostly resurrections and nostalgic visions of compensation and resistance. Its imagination of the future generates apocalyptic fantasies of disaster while disclosing prospects of redemption.     

X-ray mapping technique: a preliminary study in discriminating gunshot residue particles from aggregates of environmental occupational origin

The possibility of detection of lead-antimony-barium aggregates from non-firearm sources is confirmed according to the tests performed on brake pads, and firework and automobile workers. Moreover, information on particles taken from cartridge cases shows the relative feeble importance of the morphology in distinguishing gunshot residues (GSRs). Furthermore, also the presence in the spectrum of other elements (e.g., iron) is not so conclusive. In this panorama, the possibility of discriminating gunshot residue particles from other non-firearm lead-antimony-barium aggregates is investigated: the proposed method is based on X-ray mapping technique--currently applied used in Reparto Carabinieri Investigazioni Scientifiche in Rome, the forensic service of Italian Carabinieri--according to which the spatial distribution of the emission energy of each element of the sample is pictured. Gunshot residues present the same lead-antimony-barium distribution (or at least the same antimony-barium distribution with lead nodules), as some other environmental occupational aggregates do not (different plaques of lead, antimony, and barium). So, X-ray mapping technique can offer a new fundamental evaluation parameter in analysis of gunshot residues with scanning electron microscopy/energy-dispersive (SEM/EDS) spectrometry, and new standards could be considered.