Digging up crimes: Forensic perspectives on perpetrator-led exhumations

Android is one of the most popular and widely used mobile operating systems and one of the most actively researched products in the field of mobile forensics. However, analysis of Android caches has been, to date, an understudied research topic, which limits its potential use in forensic investigations. Due to the diversity of cache formats on Android, we propose a cache taxonomy based on app usage. Using this taxonomy as a base, a systematic process, known as the Android Cache Forensic Process, is proposed to forensically classify, extract and analyze Android caches. Various cache formats utilized by 11 popular Android apps are analyzed. As part of this analysis, a number of cache formats are decoded and several cache formats commonly used by Android apps are documented from a forensic perspective. Based on our technical findings, an Android Cache Viewer prototype was also developed. This prototype is able to decode a number of Android cache formats and display the contents in an accessible manner.

BackgroundHumanitarian health care organizations and health workers working in contexts of armed or violent conflict experience challenges in fulfilling ethical obligations and humanitarian principles. To better understand the types of challenges experienced in these contexts, we conducted a systematic literature review.MethodsA broad search strategy was developed for English language publications available in PubMed, Ovid/EMBASE, and Scopus. The search relied upon three key concept blocks: conflict settings, humanitarian or relief organizations, and non-clinical or non-military ethics. To be included, publications had to (1) refer implicitly or explicitly to ethics and/or humanitarian principle(s), (2) relate to non-military relief work in active conflict or conflict-affected settings, (3) relate to organizational mission and/or delivery of services, and (4) relate to events after 1900. Records were qualitatively analyzed using an emergent thematic analysis approach that mapped challenges onto recognized ethical obligations and humanitarian principles.ResultsA total of 66 out of a possible 2077 retrieved records met inclusion criteria. The most frequently noted ethical challenges for organizations working in conflict settings were (1) providing the highest attainable quality of care, (2) protecting workers, and (3) minimizing unintended harms. The humanitarian principle most frequently noted as challenging to uphold was neutrality (the duty that humanitarian actors must not take sides in a conflict). Ethical challenges and humanitarian principles were commonly co-coded. For example, the challenge of providing the highest attainable quality of care frequently intersected with the humanitarian principle of humanity.ConclusionsBy categorizing the types of ethical challenges experienced by humanitarian care organizations, this review can help organizations anticipate issues that might arise in conflict settings. The identified relationships between ethical challenges and humanitarian principles suggests that frameworks and guidance for ethical decision-making, if adapted for conflict settings, could support organizational capacity to fulfill ethical and humanitarian commitments.

Chapter 7 explores the idea that the media campaigns analyzed are not exclusive to the Chinese context. By drawing comparisons between China’s propaganda tactics and those employed by other authoritarian regimes, the chapter expands its comparative analysis, particularly focusing on similarities and differences with Vietnam’s approach. Central to this discussion is a detailed case study: Vietnam’s media strategy during the 2014 oil rig crisis. This case study serves to illustrate the overarching argument, demonstrating how Vietnam’s media behavior offers valuable insights into the operation and impact of media within authoritarian settings, thereby expanding the scope of the argument to other comparable authoritarian states.

This essay examines the role of mini-publics in enhancing policy legitimacy and the effectiveness of policy implementation through a comparative analysis of two case studies: deliberative polling on energy futures in Vermont, USA, and democratic consultation meetings in the Xinxing community, Dongying, China. The essay explores how mini-publics, as democratic innovations, contribute to policy-making by engaging citizens in decision-making processes, ensuring inclusivity, and providing policymakers with a broader range of public needs. It also considers the different functions and outcomes of mini-publics in representative democracies and authoritarian contexts, highlighting their potential to complement existing political structures and enhance public trust in governance. The analysis concludes that while mini-publics offer significant benefits in both democratic and authoritarian settings, their long-term impact on political systems may vary depending on the broader context of governance and public engagement.

Over the past decade, several environmental protests against hazardous projects have been mounted across China. Though extensive scholarship has been devoted to the outcomes of environmental contention, a significant distinction between local government's one-off decision change regarding the specific project and long-term, locked-in policy change towards better governance has largely been overlooked. Meanwhile, environmental contention in authoritarian China has largely been studied in terms of disparate episodes, making systematic observation and effective comparison difficult. Using crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA), this article investigates the effect of social contention on shaping environmental governance, analysing 20 influential cases of environmental protests in China from 2007 to 2014. It demonstrates that environmental contention efforts often yield different fruits in their “project battles” than in their “policy wars.” Moreover, this study argues that environmental protests necessitate ample effort of public policy from a variety of social agents with multifaceted mechanisms and strategies, highlighting the significance of the protest–advocacy linkage in extracting better governance from local states in authoritarian settings.

A vast new world of transnational standards has emerged, covering issues from human rights to sustainability to food safety. This chapter develops a framework for making sense of this new global order. It is tempting to imagine that global rules can and should bypass corrupt, incapacitated, or illegitimate governments in poor and middle-income countries. This assumption must be rejected if we want to understand the consequences of global rules and the prospects for improvement. After showing how a combination of social movements, global production networks, and neoliberalism gave rise to transnational private regulation, the chapter builds the foundations for the comparative approach of this book. The book’s comparative analysis of land and labor in Indonesia and China sheds light on two key fields of transnational governance, their implications in democratic and authoritarian settings, and the problems of governing the global economy through private regulation.

The Android platform accounts for 83% of the global smartphone operating system market share. Android smartphones store personal information and smartphone usage data. In order to prevent cyber security threats, it is important to manage data stored in Android smartphones. In this paper, we analyze the deleted data and recovery possibilities remaining in smartphones using Android 9 and 10. The deleted data recoverability analysis is performed based on the scenario of deleting data using the app's own features. We confirmed that deleted data can be recovered from the android messenger application. This paper result is expected to be applicable to IoT devices based on Android platform and we found that sustained research on Android platform should be conducted from the perspective of forensics.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the presence of mummification in an indoor setting, with an emphasis on the forensic perspective. A dataset of 102 forensic autopsy cases was assessed for distribution of desiccation of skin and soft tissue (i.e., subcutaneous fat and musculature) and for moist decompositional (i.e., putrefactive) changes. Further, possible correlation with the post-mortem interval (PMI) was evaluated, as well as the effects of clothing coverage of the body. The results indicated that yellow to orange parchment-like desiccated skin was found at significantly shorter PMIs than reddish brown to black leathery desiccated skin, even when soft tissue desiccation was included in the comparative analysis. Clothing appeared to have a significant decelerating effect on the extent of desiccation on the legs, but findings in regard to whole body or torso/arms were inconclusive. A large variation in PMIs was evident as regards fully desiccated skin (PMI 18–217 days), indicating difficulties in PMI estimation due to a variable repressive effect on the decompositional process per se in an indoor setting. For the specific case in forensic practice, no definite conclusion can be drawn from the observed desiccation changes to the PMI. One way forward might be creating a systematic and standardized method for describing different desiccation types, as well as other cooccurring decompositional changes and how they relate to the PMI, as a foundation for a future quantification model.

Objectives/Scope The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a healthy workplace as "one in which workers and managers collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of workers." The WHO suggests that this is achieved by addressing the physical and psychological work environments, and by providing personal workplace health resources and community participation opportunities. Even with high-performing organizations touting workplace health as a best buy for prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), controversy still surrounds the ability to prove the business value of workplace wellness programs. One principle in establishing the business case in support of investing workplace health efforts is quantifying the economic cost of poor health. Premature death due to NCDs results in a financial impact of $2 trillion and the loss of 18 million people still in their productive years. This paper will describe the development and implementation of Chevron's award winning, evidence-based approach to achieving healthy workplaces. Business unit examples describe cost implications of and approaches for addressing ill- health in order to demonstrate the business value of health. Methods, Procedures, Process We describe our systematic engagement, assessment and planning process for implementing a global workplace wellness strategy. Business value of implemented programs are described in terms of health outcomes and the elements that contribute to the cost of evacuating and/or repatriating personnel from two remote business settings in the oil and gas industry - offshore, Angola and the Gulf of Mexico. Results, Observations, Conclusions Implementation of Chevron's systematic process incorporates validated theoretical foundations. The extent that these processes are followed depends on the organization's capacity and available resources. Seeking medical care in our offshore or remote locations adds complexity, cost, and delayed time for care - all of which can have negative impacts on prognosis and outcome. Given the observation that cardiovascular-related conditions (heart attack, stroke and diabetes) are a frequent cause of premature death and disability, we provide estimations of lost time, business loss and loss of intellectual capital. Risk prevention programs that target lifestyle choices (nutrition, physical activity, smoking etc.) can reduce incidence of illness, injury and risk of death from CVD and other NCDs in employee populations. Novel/Additive Information Prevention-focused health and wellness programs can have a long-term positive impact on workforce health. Utilizing a leader-driven systematic process can aid organizations in establishing priorities and well-executed plans that improve employee health, reduce costs and enhance safety and productivity. This paper provides direction for assessing worksite wellness capabilities and developing and evaluating an organization's global wellness strategy, while demonstrating the business value of health and wellness programs through relevant industry-specific data.

This article presents a literature-based framework for analysing parliamentary diplomacy in conflict settings, grounded in European responses to the Russia–Ukraine war. While parliaments’ international activities in promoting democracy and human rights are well studied, their contributions to conflict resolution remain underexplored. This article develops and applies an original categorisation of the objectives and means of parliamentary diplomacy in conflict settings by systematically reviewing the literature on the activities of European national parliaments and international parliamentary institutions – the European Parliament, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and OSCE Parliamentary Assembly – regarding the Russia–Ukraine war from 2010 to Q1 2024. To test the framework’s applicability, it is applied to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, where scholarly literature is scarce, using primary sources. This dual approach demonstrates the framework’s utility as a structured tool for future empirical research and comparative analyses of parliamentary diplomacy in conflict settings.

The role of emotions and conflicting online reviews on consumers' purchase intentions

The subject. The relevance of the topic chosen by the author of the article lies in its understudied nature in Russian historical and legal scholarship. While contemporaries may study the issue more broadly from a medical or forensic perspective, or delve deeper into legislation from the nineteenth century and Soviet periods, the author's article focuses on a specific aspect of this topic that has not been extensively explored.The purpose of this article is to examine the development of abortion legislation in relation to changes in human ideas about the world and social order, the complex structure of society, and changes in the system of inheritance in society.The research methodology is based on the fundamental principles of historical and legal knowledge: historicism and objectivity. While working with historical legal documents, the specific characteristics of law and legal thinking in the studied time period and the national legal traditions of the country were taken into consideration. Comparative legal analysis, system analysis, and interdisciplinary research methods were also employed.Main results. The article provides examples of changing attitudes towards abortion through

When large hydropower dams are planned in conflict-affected regions, these projects can exacerbate pre-existing tensions and conflicts. This article focuses on the conflicts surrounding Myanmar’s controversial Myitsone and Hatgyi dam projects. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the findings demonstrate how politicized identities influence local mobilization and grassroots efforts to resist dams amid violent conflicts. Comparative analysis reveals the multifaceted nature of resistance mobilization in conflict settings, highlighting the role of ethnic solidarity, identity-based framing, alliance building, and social imaginaries. In both cases, civil society activists sought to generate support among co-ethnic populations by invoking their shared lived experiences and suffering from protracted conflicts. This framing succeeded in amplifying emotions and solidarity, and strengthening grassroots resistance. In addition, powerful ethnic resistance organizations lent their support to opposing dams, thereby boosting the significance of the resistance. However, the involvement of armed groups can undermine cooperation between civilian populations living under different political authorities, as shown in the Hatgyi case. Differing social imaginaries of a river—whether it is considered nationally significant or peripheral—have distinct political ramifications for resistance. The article underscores the centrality of underlying social psychological processes as the drivers of local resistance and environmental conflicts in conflict settings.

This article argues that the crisis of governance generated by the Syrian civil war presents both a challenge and an opportunity to practitioners of international criminal justice. The article also argues that, irrespective of the Syrian case, international criminal law (ICL) institutions are in need of innovation and that increasingly ICL discourses display a blurring between public and private idioms. Evaluating the contribution of the Commission of International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is one way then of assessing how ICL might evolve. This article characterizes CIJA’s work as exemplifying ‘entrepreneurial justice’, not only in Syria but also in a range of other (post-)conflict settings. We can define entrepreneurial justice as the identification of a gap or weakness in existing public accountability fora and the creation of a new private or privatized organization and/or approach that seeks to address (at least part of) this gap. Although questions remain about CIJA’s own accountability, along with its potential contribution to realizing accountability, this article suggests that its presence within the ICL field is a necessary one and that it has already started to have effects within Syria and beyond.

Ancestry markers from the human chromosome 6: Alu repeats from the MHC in autochthonous Basques