Regulatory Transgression? Drivers, Aims and Effects of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Regulation in Pakistan

The harmonization of money laundering and terrorism financing regulation is a key feature of the contemporary global economy. Since 9/11 particularly, the remarkable growth of this field of regulation has been characterized by both scale and intensity. However, this drive towards regulatory convergence is puzzling: the efficacy of the regulation remains unproven while the content of the regulation poses significant challenges to both criminal justice systems and human rights frameworks. The corollary to these observations: who does the regulation benefit? With the understanding that all regulation is an expression of some interest/s, this study analyses the trajectory of this global regulation and its products. My aim is to understand who gains what from regulation and how they influence this regulatory evolution. Focusing on Pakistan, my research will examine how anti money laundering (AML) and counter terrorism financing (CTF) regulation and its increasing demands for information affects established power hierarchies in states, between states and among states. At the international and transnational levels, I’m interested in how a universal financial regulation discourse threatens basic rights and freedoms and how this exercise of power affects civil, political and economic rights in a country, its foreign policy as well as geopolitics. At the national level, I’m curious about how such regulatory power with its distinctive objectives interacts or conflicts with or even amplifies the control of established power centres in a polity. The analysis of power relations in the case of Pakistan will be particularly instructive for several reasons. First, the size of its formal economy is rivalled (if not surpassed) by the informal or black economy and the money laundering industry is all the more powerful for processing illicit funds from crime; corruption; and tradeand taxation-related malpractices. Second, Pakistan’s military establishment has long supported militancy as a foreign policy tool, both materially and financially, and to date orients its foreign policy accordingly. Finally, the military establishment also relies on intrusive surveillance tools to control civil society. The opacity of the discourse regarding international financial governance makes a closer scrutiny of its aims a critical imperative. By exploring the links between regulation, power, knowledge and surveillance, I hope to understand the aims of this power and offer a critique of financial regulation as a technique of power and the politics of making and administering AML/ CTF regulation, both across the globe and within states

Regulatory Transgression? Drivers, Aims and Effects of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Regulation in Pakistan

The harmonization of money laundering and terrorism financing regulation is a key feature of the contemporary global economy. Since 9/11 particularly, the remarkable growth of this field of regulation has been characterized by both scale and intensity. However, this drive towards regulatory convergence is puzzling: the efficacy of the regulation remains unproven while the content of the regulation poses significant challenges to both criminal justice systems and human rights frameworks. The corollary to these observations: who does the regulation benefit? With the understanding that all regulation is an expression of some interest/s, this study analyses the trajectory of this global regulation and its products. My aim is to understand who gains what from regulation and how they influence this regulatory evolution. Focusing on Pakistan, my research will examine how anti money laundering (AML) and counter terrorism financing (CTF) regulation and its increasing demands for information affects established power hierarchies in states, between states and among states. At the international and transnational levels, Im interested in how a universal financial regulation discourse threatens basic rights and freedoms and how this exercise of power affects civil, political and economic rights in a country, its foreign policy as well as geopolitics. At the national level, Im curious about how such regulatory power with its distinctive objectives interacts or conflicts with or even amplifies the control of established power centres in a polity. The analysis of power relations in the case of Pakistan will be particularly instructive for several reasons. First, the size of its formal economy is rivalled (if not surpassed) by the informal or black economy and the money laundering industry is all the more powerful for processing illicit funds from crime; corruption; and trade- and taxation-related malpractices. Second, Pakistans military establishment has long supported militancy as a foreign policy tool, both materially and financially, and to date orients its foreign policy accordingly. Finally, the military establishment also relies on intrusive surveillance tools to control civil society. The opacity of the discourse regarding international financial governance makes a closer scrutiny of its aims a critical imperative. By exploring the links between regulation, power, knowledge and surveillance, I hope to understand the aims of this power and offer a critique of financial regulation as a technique of power and the politics of making and administering AML/ CTF regulation, both across the globe and within states

Factors Influencing Undergraduate Nursing Students’ Perception of Educational Quality

Context: Quality education is a contemporary concern. Students' evaluations of teaching (SET) are universal measures applied in almost every higher educational system in the world.Aim: The present study aims to explore student perception of factors that influence educational quality among undergraduate nursing students. Methods: A survey research design was utilized to achieve the aim of this study. The study was conducted in the obstetrics and gynecology classroom. Faculty of Nursing, El-Minia University. The study subjects consisted of all 3rd year nursing students (male & female) who registered in Obstetrics & Gynecological course (the total number was 125 students) during the academic year 2017- 2018. Three tools were used to achieve the aim of this study; they are student achievement records, students' evaluation of educational quality scale, and factors affecting educational quality scale (FAEQS). Results: This study revealed that students' perception of the components of educational quality named learning experience, instructor rapport, enthusiasm, and tests grading, organization and clarity, theoretical breadth coverage, group interaction, and course texts and reading materials. The students also ranked course organization, examination system, student communication and group dynamics, availability of course materials, instructor performance, and academic values as top factors that could affect their educational quality. Conclusion: Obstetrics and gynecology students' perceived factors that affected the provision of quality education were explored, incorporating four categories named the organization, student, instructor, and course-related factors. The study recommended that all institutions and departments use self-evaluation as an essential tool in striving for educational quality and consider the students' perception of factors that might affect their educational quality. Further research is expected to shed light on the number of higher-order factors that could affect educational quality

So, who\u27s in charge?! : Managing Differences in Perceived Leaders Among Volunteers

Volunteers contribute greatly to the success of many organizations in the nation; this is especially true for nonprofit organizations that often find themselves stretched thin financially. Interestingly, although the importance of volunteers is generally acknowledged, there is little research investigating volunteers\u27 perceptions of their leaders. When it comes to volunteers, expectations for leadership may be different than for employees. To address this gap in the literature, we take a step back and seek to understand the underlying nature of leadership for volunteers in nonprofit organizations. Studies have often bypassed the usefulness of qualitative research in examining new phenomenon. In an effort to avoid simply drawing comparisons between volunteers and employees, we sought to understand how volunteer leadership looks to volunteers by analyzing the perceived strengths and weaknesses of their leaders through a series of open-ended questions. Given previous robust work on leadership in organizations, we anticipated that we would see different leadership styles emerge across different organizations. The responses to the open-ended questions were coded for emergent themes which were then analyzed. We found evidence that volunteers\u27 perceptions of their leaders primarily align with task- and relations-oriented leadership styles. This study provided insight to how volunteer leadership looks to volunteers in nonprofit organizations. The results of this study highlight the importance of gaining a deeper understanding into how leadership is perceived by volunteers in nonprofit organizations, as well as how this perception may differ from paid employees in other organizations

Behavioral Problems among Visually Impaired Children Studying at Special School for Blindness

Context: Visual impairment and blindness are significant ophthalmic disorders around the world. Behavioral problems in visually impaired children are considered one of the most serious health problems.Aim: The study aimed to assess behavioral problems among visually impaired children studying at a special school for blindness and assess the association between behavioral problems scores and selected demographic variables of studied children. Methods: The research design adopted for this study was a descriptive correlational design. A purposive sample was composed of one hundred and one (101) parents of children with visual impairment. The children were studying at El Nour School for blindness in Minia city. The data were collected using the parents' interview questionnaire and Child Behavior Checklist/4-18 (CBCL/4-18).Results: Withdrawn syndrome represented the highest clinical level among the studied children, followed by aggressive clinical behavior. Also, less than a fifth of them had to internalize clinical problems, and 17.8% of them had to externalize clinical problems. A highly statistically significant correlation was revealed between the score of total behavior syndromes and the age of studied children. Conclusion: Visually impaired children had problems in the total social competence score and all its subscales. About one-third of them had borderline and clinical problems regarding the total score of behavioral syndromes. Also, internalized and externalized problems had reported. The study recommended that further intervention studies are necessary, including parents' classes about behavioral problems of visually impaired children and methods to limit its effect on children's lives

Securing IP Mobility Management for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The proliferation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) applications, such as Internet access and Infotainment, highlights the requirements for improving the underlying mobility management protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Mobility management protocols in VANETs are envisioned to support mobile nodes (MNs), i.e., vehicles, with seamless communications, in which service continuity is guaranteed while vehicles are roaming through different RoadSide Units (RSUs) with heterogeneous wireless technologies. Due to its standardization and widely deployment, IP mobility (also called Mobile IP (MIP)) is the most popular mobility management protocol used for mobile networks including VANETs. In addition, because of the diversity of possible applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issues many MIP's standardizations, such as MIPv6 and NEMO for global mobility, and Proxy MIP (PMIPv6) for localized mobility. However, many challenges have been posed for integrating IP mobility with VANETs, including the vehicle's high speeds, multi-hop communications, scalability, and ef ficiency. From a security perspective, we observe three main challenges: 1) each vehicle's anonymity and location privacy, 2) authenticating vehicles in multi-hop communications, and 3) physical-layer location privacy. In transmitting mobile IPv6 binding update signaling messages, the mobile node's Home Address (HoA) and Care-of Address (CoA) are transmitted as plain-text, hence they can be revealed by other network entities and attackers. The mobile node's HoA and CoA represent its identity and its current location, respectively, therefore revealing an MN's HoA means breaking its anonymity while revealing an MN's CoA means breaking its location privacy. On one hand, some existing anonymity and location privacy schemes require intensive computations, which means they cannot be used in such time-restricted seamless communications. On the other hand, some schemes only achieve seamless communication through low anonymity and location privacy levels. Therefore, the trade-off between the network performance, on one side, and the MN's anonymity and location privacy, on the other side, makes preservation of privacy a challenging issue. In addition, for PMIPv6 to provide IP mobility in an infrastructure-connected multi-hop VANET, an MN uses a relay node (RN) for communicating with its Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). Therefore, a mutual authentication between the MN and RN is required to thwart authentication attacks early in such scenarios. Furthermore, for a NEMO-based VANET infrastructure, which is used in public hotspots installed inside moving vehicles, protecting physical-layer location privacy is a prerequisite for achieving privacy in upper-layers such as the IP-layer. Due to the open nature of the wireless environment, a physical-layer attacker can easily localize users by employing signals transmitted from these users. In this dissertation, we address those security challenges by proposing three security schemes to be employed for different mobility management scenarios in VANETs, namely, the MIPv6, PMIPv6, and Network Mobility (NEMO) protocols. First, for MIPv6 protocol and based on the onion routing and anonymizer, we propose an anonymous and location privacy-preserving scheme (ALPP) that involves two complementary sub-schemes: anonymous home binding update (AHBU) and anonymous return routability (ARR). In addition, anonymous mutual authentication and key establishment schemes have been proposed, to authenticate a mobile node to its foreign gateway and create a shared key between them. Unlike existing schemes, ALPP alleviates the tradeoff between the networking performance and the achieved privacy level. Combining onion routing and the anonymizer in the ALPP scheme increases the achieved location privacy level, in which no entity in the network except the mobile node itself can identify this node's location. Using the entropy model, we show that ALPP achieves a higher degree of anonymity than that achieved by the mix-based scheme. Compared to existing schemes, the AHBU and ARR sub-schemes achieve smaller computation overheads and thwart both internal and external adversaries. Simulation results demonstrate that our sub-schemes have low control-packets routing delays, and are suitable for seamless communications. Second, for the multi-hop authentication problem in PMIPv6-based VANET, we propose EM3A, a novel mutual authentication scheme that guarantees the authenticity of both MN and RN. EM3A thwarts authentication attacks, including Denial of service (DoS), collusion, impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. EM3A works in conjunction with a proposed scheme for key establishment based on symmetric polynomials, to generate a shared secret key between an MN and an RN. This scheme achieves lower revocation overhead than that achieved by existing symmetric polynomial-based schemes. For a PMIP domain with n points of attachment and a symmetric polynomial of degree t, our scheme achieves t x 2^n-secrecy, whereas the existing symmetric polynomial-based authentication schemes achieve only t-secrecy. Computation and communication overhead analysis as well as simulation results show that EM3A achieves low authentication delay and is suitable for seamless multi-hop IP communications. Furthermore, we present a case study of a multi-hop authentication PMIP (MA-PMIP) implemented in vehicular networks. EM3A represents the multi-hop authentication in MA-PMIP to mutually authenticate the roaming vehicle and its relay vehicle. Compared to other authentication schemes, we show that our MA-PMIP protocol with EM3A achieves 99.6% and 96.8% reductions in authentication delay and communication overhead, respectively. Finally, we consider the physical-layer location privacy attacks in the NEMO-based VANETs scenario, such as would be presented by a public hotspot installed inside a moving vehicle. We modify the obfuscation, i.e., concealment, and power variability ideas and propose a new physical-layer location privacy scheme, the fake point-cluster based scheme, to prevent attackers from localizing users inside NEMO-based VANET hotspots. Involving the fake point and cluster based sub-schemes, the proposed scheme can: 1) confuse the attackers by increasing the estimation errors of their Received Signal Strength (RSSs) measurements, and 2) prevent attackers' monitoring devices from detecting the user's transmitted signals. We show that our scheme not only achieves higher location privacy, but also increases the overall network performance. Employing correctness, accuracy, and certainty as three different metrics, we analytically measure the location privacy achieved by our proposed scheme. In addition, using extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the fake point-cluster based scheme can be practically implemented in high-speed VANETs' scenarios

Workplace violence against nurses at Minia district hospitals

Introduction: Violence against nurses at the workplace is an alarming problem in both developed and developing countries affecting the quality of their work. The aim of this study is to assess the prevalence of external (patient initiated) and internal violence (initiated by staff members) against nurses and studying the violence-associated factors such as perpetrators, the attitude of nurses following aggression incidents, consequences, and impact on nurses and work. Methods: A cross-sectional study included 385 nurses from three different hospitals in Minia district was agreed to participate in the study. These hospitals included Health Insurance Hospital, Minia University Hospitals (Minia University Gynecological, Obstetric, and Pediatric Hospital and Minia Renal Hospital), and Minia general hospital. The well-structured questionnaire covered four main domains; sociodemographics, lifetime working experience of violence, external and internal violence and its effects on work, the perpetrators of violence, and attitude of nurses following violent incidents. Results: More than half of nurses (55.8%) were exposed to workplace violence during their working lifetime. Experiencing external violence (patient initiated) during the past year was significantly higher (57.4%) than the internal (staff initiated) type (33.5%). Verbal violence was the most common type of violence. Reporting violence incidents were done by 68.3% and 38.7% of the nurses who were exposed to external and internal violence, respectively. Conclusion: Violence against nurses working in different health-care facilities at Minia district was prevalent and has a significant impact on nurses and their work