Corporate manslaughter: An examination of the determinants of prosecutorial policy

Although the offence of corporate manslaughter has arguably been established in English law for over twenty five years, it has been prosecuted only twice and both indictments failed. There is, however, much prima facie evidence to implicate companies in reckless manslaughter. The purpose of this paper is to present an explanation of why companies which appear to commit homicide have been treated with conspicuous indulgence by the state. I begin by examining the evidence that incriminates companies in homicide. I look at how the state has responded to these deaths with marked leniency. A brief account is given of the historical development of corporate liability in this area. The state's prosecutorial policy is then considered from three perspectives, moving outwards from close focus to a wide historical angle: I examine (a) the mechanics of the criminal justice system, its procedures and the decisions of its personnel; (b) the role of public perception in influencing those decisions and (c) the aspects of the political economy which engender the public perception in question

Diamonds, gold and crime displacement: Hatton Garden, and the evolution of organised crime in the UK

The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition

Are decision trees a feasible knowledge representation to guide extraction of critical information from randomized controlled trial reports?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This paper proposes the use of decision trees as the basis for automatically extracting information from published randomized controlled trial (RCT) reports. An exploratory analysis of RCT abstracts is undertaken to investigate the feasibility of using decision trees as a semantic structure. Quality-of-paper measures are also examined.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A subset of 455 abstracts (randomly selected from a set of 7620 retrieved from Medline from 1998 – 2006) are examined for the quality of RCT reporting, the identifiability of RCTs from abstracts, and the completeness and complexity of RCT abstracts with respect to key decision tree elements. Abstracts were manually assigned to 6 sub-groups distinguishing whether they were primary RCTs versus other design types. For primary RCT studies, we analyzed and annotated the reporting of intervention comparison, population assignment and outcome values. To measure completeness, the frequencies by which complete intervention, population and outcome information are reported in abstracts were measured. A qualitative examination of the reporting language was conducted.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Decision tree elements are manually identifiable in the majority of primary RCT abstracts. 73.8% of a random subset was primary studies with a single population assigned to two or more interventions. 68% of these primary RCT abstracts were structured. 63% contained pharmaceutical interventions. 84% reported the total number of study subjects. In a subset of 21 abstracts examined, 71% reported numerical outcome values.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The manual identifiability of decision tree elements in the abstract suggests that decision trees could be a suitable construct to guide machine summarisation of RCTs. The presence of decision tree elements could also act as an indicator for RCT report quality in terms of completeness and uniformity.</p

17β-Estradiol Enhances Breast Cancer Cell Motility and Invasion via Extra-Nuclear Activation of Actin-Binding Protein Ezrin

Estrogen promotes breast cancer metastasis. However, the detailed mechanism remains largely unknown. The actin binding protein ezrin is a key component in tumor metastasis and its over-expression is positively correlated to the poor outcome of breast cancer. In this study, we investigate the effects of 17β-estradiol (E2) on the activation of ezrin and its role in estrogen-dependent breast cancer cell movement. In T47-D breast cancer cells, E2 rapidly enhances ezrin phosphorylation at Thr567 in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. The signalling cascade implicated in this action involves estrogen receptor (ER) interaction with the non-receptor tyrosine kinase c-Src, which activates the phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase/Akt pathway and the small GTPase RhoA/Rho-associated kinase (ROCK-2) complex. E2 enhances the horizontal cell migration and invasion of T47-D breast cancer cells in three-dimensional matrices, which is reversed by transfection of cells with specific ezrin siRNAs. In conclusion, E2 promotes breast cancer cell movement and invasion by the activation of ezrin. These results provide novel insights into the effects of estrogen on breast cancer progression and highlight potential targets to treat endocrine-sensitive breast cancers

Beneficial Effects of Estrogen in a Mouse Model of Cerebrovascular Insufficiency

BACKGROUND: The M(5) muscarinic acetylcholine receptor is known to play a crucial role in mediating acetylcholine dependent dilation of cerebral blood vessels. Previously, we reported that male M(5) muscarinic acetylcholine knockout mice (M5R(-/-) mice) suffer from a constitutive constriction of cerebral arteries, reduced cerebral blood flow, dendritic atrophy, and short-term memory loss, without necrosis and/or inflammation in the brain. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We employed the Magnetic Resonance Angiography to study the area of the basilar artery in male and female M5R(-/-) mice. Here we show that female M5R(-/-) mice did not show the reduction in vascular area observed in male M5R(-/-) mice. However, ovariectomized female M5R(-/-) mice displayed phenotypic changes similar to male M5R(-/-) mice, strongly suggesting that estrogen plays a key role in the observed gender differences. We found that 17beta-estradiol (E2) induced nitric oxide release and ERK activation in a conditional immortalized mouse brain cerebrovascular endothelial cell line. Agonists of ERalpha, ERbeta, and GPR30 promoted ERK activation in this cell line. Moreover, in vivo magnetic resonance imaging studies showed that the cross section of the basilar artery was restored to normal in male M5R(-/-) mice treated with E2. Treatment with E2 also improved the performance of male M5R(-/-) mice in a cognitive test and reduced the atrophy of neural dendrites in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. M5R(-/-) mice also showed astrocyte swelling in cortex and hippocampus using the three-dimensional reconstruction of electron microscope images. This phenotype was reversed by E2 treatment, similar to the observed deficits in dendrite morphology and the number of synapses. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our findings indicate that M5R(-/-) mice represent an excellent novel model system to study the beneficial effects of estrogen on cerebrovascular function and cognition. E2 may offer new therapeutic perspectives for the treatment of cerebrovascular insufficiency related memory dysfunction