The Fight Against Government Corruption in Romania: Irreversible Results or Sisyphean Challenge?

The fight against political, especially government, corruption has dominated Romanian political discourse for many years. However, the vast majority of the political elite have continuously opposed the prosecution and conviction of defendants of corruption crimes. After a long constitutional conflict that seriously inhibited the fight against government corruption between 2006 and 2009, law enforcement agencies finally began to experience some success. Nevertheless, the extent of government corruption has remained consistently high. This article analyses the struggles that have occurred between 2004 and 2013 in the fight against government corruption in Romania and particularly examines the interplay between formal and informal factors in this field.     

Strengthening the Legitimacy of Representative Democracy: Public Participation,Bipartisan Floor Bills and Plenary Deliberations in the Japanese Diet

It is argued that parliamentary legislation in Japan has become the almost exclusive playing field of the bureaucracy, who acts on behalf of the executive, and party councils. Moreover bureaucrats bypass the legislative Diet process by making rules themselves. This is problematic because it is the lawmakers who are directly held accountable by voters for the enacted legislation risking to be eventually voted out of office. It is suggested that under the given circumstances of strict party discipline, drafting of bills by the bureaucracy and endorsement by party councils, the formal majority rule alone is not sufficient to justify legislative outcomes. The legitimacy factor is introduced to verify in how far individual lawmakers are enabled to initiate and draft floor bills by themselves, discuss bill contents in plenary deliberations and get the public opinion involved. The article attempts to demonstrate that bipartisan floor bills reflect the quest for parliamentary legitimacy and equality among lawmakers across party boundaries. It is suggested that the more legislators participate in drafting and discussing a bill the more legitimate the outcome becomes. The paper screens to this effect several bipartisan bills submitted to the Diet of Japan. Bills such as the NPO law, the law to ratify the Rome Statute for the accession to the ICC, the law to prevent suicide and the law to implement internet filters to protect children are the result of cooperation among lawmakers trying to constrain the interference of the executive or of the powerful bureaucracy. The participation of non-parliamentary agents taking an active part in the legislative process has enhanced the dynamics of representative democracy as well. In the decades of radical ideological confrontation in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s the majority rule risked to become an instrument of coercion. The opposition was compelled to resort to anti-parliamentary obstructionist tactics to derail majority legislation that was rammed through parliament without sufficient plenary deliberation and without taking into account the concerns or viewpoints of the minority. Obstructionism decreased with the LDP co-optation of opposition parties to government responsibility in the 1990s. Opposition for the sake of opposition (communists, DPJ until 2006) and governing for the sake of governing (SDPJ, Komei) have not been honored by the voters. After 2007 the DPJ started to refocus its policies more on ideological differentiation and managed to beat the LDP in the 2009 elections. Recently the work of the Diet has been increasingly put under the scrutiny of international NGOs and legislatures abroad. The unresolved controversial comfort women issue suggests that omission to pass appropriate and timely reconciliatory legislation can cause a serious loss of parliamentary institutional esteem and respect.     

Patterns of War Reconciliation in Japan and Germany. A Comparison

East Asia - War reconciliation and cultures of memory themes continue to receive high attention but despite the long list of newly released books praising Germany which has been thought to be more...     

Taxonomy of Challenges for Digital Forensics

Since its inception, over a decade ago, the field of digital forensics has faced numerous challenges. Despite different researchers and digital forensic practitioners having studied and analysed various known digital forensic challenges, as of 2013, there still exists a need for a formal classification of these challenges. This article therefore reviews existing research literature and highlights the various challenges that digital forensics has faced for the last 10 years. In conducting this research study, however, it was difficult for the authors to review all the existing research literature in the digital forensic domain; hence, sampling and randomization techniques were employed to facilitate the review of the gathered literature. Taxonomy of the various challenges is subsequently proposed in this paper based on our review of the literature. The taxonomy classifies the large number of digital forensic challenges into four well‐defined and easily understood categories. The proposed taxonomy can be useful, for example, in future developments of automated digital forensic tools by explicitly describing processes and procedures that focus on addressing specific challenges identified in this paper. However, it should also be noted that the purpose of this paper was not to propose any solutions to the individual challenges that digital forensics face, but to serve as a survey of the state of the art of the research area.     

Fatal hemorrhage from ruptured varicose veins of the sigmoid colon in liver cirrhosis

A 41-year-old woman died within a few hours one morning due to massive rectal hemorrhage. At autopsy, complete liver cirrhosis, signs of portal hypertension, liquid blood in the entire colon, and high-grade anemia were detected. The source of bleeding was a ruptured submucosal varix in the sigmoid colon, which was almost invisible even microscopically and had been caused by portal hypertension. In the vicinity, and somewhat further away from the rupture site, numerous, greatly dilated veins with wall sclerosis and intimal thickening, as well as paravascular iron deposits, were found as indications that severe hemorrhages had already occurred earlier. To detect the source of bleeding, meticulous inspection and dissection with hematoxylin and eosin, elastica van Gieson, and iron staining, were necessary.     

Toward a General Ontology for Digital Forensic Disciplines

Ontologies are widely used in different disciplines as a technique for representing and reasoning about domain knowledge. However, despite the widespread ontology‐related research activities and applications in different disciplines, the development of ontologies and ontology research activities is still wanting in digital forensics. This paper therefore presents the case for establishing an ontology for digital forensic disciplines. Such an ontology would enable better categorization of the digital forensic disciplines, as well as assist in the development of methodologies and specifications that can offer direction in different areas of digital forensics. This includes such areas as professional specialization, certifications, development of digital forensic tools, curricula, and educational materials. In addition, the ontology presented in this paper can be used, for example, to better organize the digital forensic domain knowledge and explicitly describe the discipline's semantics in a common way. Finally, this paper is meant to spark discussions and further research on an internationally agreed ontological distinction of the digital forensic disciplines. Digital forensic disciplines ontology is a novel approach toward organizing the digital forensic domain knowledge and constitutes the main contribution of this paper.     

In a Violent World a Just World Makes Sense: The Case of “Senseless Violence” in The Netherlands

Recent violent incidents in The Netherlands caused nationwide debates about their purported senselessness. Building on Lerner's Just World Theory (Lerner, 1980, The Belief in a Just World. A Fundamental Delusion, Plenum Press, New York), the present experiment sought to delineate the circumstances under which violence is perceived as senseless by outside observers. Participants were more likely to perceive an act of violence as senseless and to identify with the victim when there was no opportunity to blame the victim and when the victim was uninvolved with the perpetrator. These findings suggest that acts of violence are perceived as senseless when attributional strategies fail to uphold observers' belief in a just world.     

Communications

How do people handle their regret at having believed that a foolish war was not just acceptable but necessary? Japan after World War II provides an instructive example. Many contrite Japanese revisited the aesthetic realm, looking for ways to interpret culture that did not convey the values of fascism, such as glorifying willing surrender to a powerful leader. They saw their task as engendering an individual aesthetic and therefore political subjectivity, so that Japanese would in the future more bravely resist state violence at home and abroad. These individuals saw culture as intrinsically political rather than as a refuge from politics. Recognizing the difficulty in countering fascist culture through ideas alone, they also created what economists today call “capacity building” institutions to help them do so, such as Japan's first museum dedicated solely to modern art, the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, established in 1951. The founders of the Kamakura Museum self-consciously set out to create a new institution that would embody a democratic aesthetic and so prevent—they hoped—Japan from repeating the disastrous experience of war. The curators argued for diverse and dynamic modernities, a concept that parried both the idea that artistically Japan was a pale copy of modern Europe and the notion of a single national culture in Japan or elsewhere. At the same time, however, the legacy of the war was visible in an entirely different and less admirable way in the museum curators’ stance toward Asian modernity beyond Japan and its evasion of Japan's responsibility for the wartime devastation of China.