Privatization and Its Discontents: The Troubling Record of Privatized Prison Health Care

As part of a decades-long national trend towards privatization, local governments have turned to private contractors to provide health care in American prisons and jails. Ostensibly, the driving force behind this phenomenon is a desire to cut costs in an era of expanding prison health care expenditures and contracting governmental revenue streams. Local government officials build the cost-cutting incentive directly into their contracts via fixed-rate payment structures and cost-sharing provisions for off-site emergency treatment. While these contracts encourage cost-reduction, they simultaneously discourage proper oversight; their indemnification clauses render local governments largely immune from financial consequences when contractors deny emergency care to inmates in crisis. The predictable and tragic result of this combination of incentives and disincentives is unnecessary injury and death. A § 1983 lawsuit against the contracting local government, however, could force officials to reform their prison health care contracts-to elevate the goal of quality health care provision to the priority it should be

1945’s Forgotten Insight: Multilateralism as Realist Necessity

The 70th anniversary of the signing and entry into force of the UN Charter provided an occasion to explore the historical underpinnings of contemporary global governance. This article redresses the neglect of the United Nations as a multilateral structure before the conference that drafted the Charter in 1945. It rehabilitates an underappreciated aspect of the period that began on January 1, 1942, with the “Declaration by United Nations,” namely, the combination of multilateral strategies for military and human security to achieve victory in war and peace. The wide substantive and geographic resonance suggests the extent to which the pressures of the second war to end all wars helped states to overcome their disinclination to collaborate. Today’s fashionable calls for “good enough” global governance abandon the strategy of constructing robust intergovernmental organizations; they are not good enough, especially, because our forebears did much better. Many insights and operational approaches from 1942 to 1945 remain valid for addressing twenty-first-century global challenges

The UN War Crimes Commission and International Law: Revisiting World War II Precedents and Practice

The history of international legal institutions has largely ignored the early activities of the United Nations, specifically of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Based on an assessment of its work and with access to new archival evidence, contemporary international legal institutional design could benefit significantly from revisiting the commission’s achievements, particularly the principle of complementarity identified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and support for domestic tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The article begins by examining the history, multilateral basis for, and practical activities of the commission. Subsequently, it assesses its contemporary relevance. Finally, it analyses—with reference to modern literature on complementarity—the degree to which the commission’s wartime model provides positive examples of implementation of the principle that could be replicated today, with particular reference to domestic capacity-building and international coordination

Decision table for classifying point sources based on FIRST and 2MASS databases

With the availability of multiwavelength, multiscale and multiepoch astronomical catalogues, the number of features to describe astronomical objects has increases. The better features we select to classify objects, the higher the classification accuracy is. In this paper, we have used data sets of stars and quasars from near infrared band and radio band. Then best-first search method was applied to select features. For the data with selected features, the algorithm of decision table was implemented. The classification accuracy is more than 95.9%. As a result, the feature selection method improves the effectiveness and efficiency of the classification method. Moreover the result shows that decision table is robust and effective for discrimination of celestial objects and used for preselecting quasar candidates for large survey projects.Comment: 10 pages. accepted by Advances in Space Researc

Itk and Fyn Make Independent Contributions to T Cell Activation

Itk is a member of the Btk/Tec/Itk family of nonreceptor protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs), and has been implicated in T cell antigen receptor (TCR) signal transduction. Lck and Fyn are the Src-family nonreceptor PTKs that are involved in TCR signaling. To address the question of how these members of different families of PTKs functionally contribute to T cell development and to T cell activation, mice deficient for both Itk and either Lck or Fyn were generated. The Itk/Lck doubly deficient mice exhibited a phenotype similar to that of Lck-deficient mice. The phenotype of the Itk/Fyn doubly deficient mice was similar to that of Itk deficient mice. However the Itk/Fyn doubly deficient mice exhibited a more severe defect in TCR-induced proliferation of thymocytes and peripheral T cells than did mice deficient in either kinase alone. These data support the notion that Itk and Fyn both make independent contributions to TCR-induced T cell activation