Grievous Harm Research Articles

Dynamic feature selection model for adaptive cross site scripting attack detection using developed multi-agent deep Q learning model

Web applications’ popularity has raised attention in various service domains, which increased the concern about cyber-attacks. One of these most serious and frequent web application attacks is a Cross-site scripting attack (XSS). It causes grievous harm to victims. Existing security methods against XSS fail due to the evolving nature of XSS attacks. One evolving aspect of XSS attacks is feature drift which changes the feature relevancy and causes degradation in the performance. Unfortunately, dynamic awareness of drift occurrence is missing. Thus, this study attempts to fill the gap by proposing a feature drift-aware algorithm for detecting the evolved XSS attacks. The proposed approach is a dynamic feature selection based on a deep Q-network multi-agent feature selection (DQN-MAFS) framework. Each agent is associated with one feature and is responsible for selecting or deselecting its feature. DQN-MAFS provides a sub-model for reward distribution over agents, which is named as fair agent reward distribution based dynamic feature selection FARD-DFS. This framework is capable of supporting real-time, dynamic updates and adjustment of embedded knowledge as long as new labelled data arrives. DQN-MAFS has been evaluated using four real XSS attack datasets with various feature length sizes. The evaluation process was conducted and compared with state-of-the-art works. The obtained results show the superiority of our FARD-DFS over the benchmarks in terms of the majority of metrics. The improvement percentages of the mean accuracy and F1-measure ranged from 1.01% to 12.1% and from 0.55% to 6.88%, respectively, in comparison with the benchmarks. This approach can be deployed as an autonomous detection system without the need for any offline retraining process of the model to detect the evolved XSS attack.

Victimological aspects of crimes against the person: Sociological analysis

The article deals with the analysis of the victimological aspects of crimes against persons. The main attention is paid to the most dangerous acts: murders, intentional infliction of grievous harm to health and rape. These crimes cause not only irreparable harm to the victims, but also cause moral suffering to their relatives, reduce the safety of society, are characterized by the most base motives and means of achieving the criminal purposes — violence. The peculiarities of victims’ behavior became the basis of the research, since it is the behavior of a person that concentrates all the main factors forming his/her personality (social, demographic, biological, etc.). Behavior of a potential victim can be corrected most of all, so the obtained data will undoubtedly help to increase the effectiveness of crime prevention.

Terrifying laughter: interrogation in Pinter’s The Birthday Party and the CIA’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’

ABSTRACT The interrogation scenes of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party are often interpreted as absurd or symbolic. However, I argue that the scenes provoke recognition of complicity and theatrically position the audience as interrogator and interrogated through use of indeterminacy, laughter, nonsense, and terror. Moreover, torture techniques from the CIA Interrogation & Manipulation Manual are presciently executed in the play. The play’s interrogators deploy nonsense and indeterminacy as torture, destroying the ontological certainty of the interrogated, and these methods mirror the CIA Manual’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ technique and ‘theory’ of ‘regression’. In this essay, real interrogations emerge as dangerously theatrical, and nonsense as a potential means of grievous harm. Additionally, I consider the implications of this analysis in relation to Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir Guantánamo Diary. Slahi’s memoir includes multiple instances of how unsettling metaphors of fictional works are invoked or paralleled by actual interrogation and torture. Furthermore, analysis of the memoir complicates this essay’s examination of the roles of nonsense, laughter, and indeterminacy, as Slahi shows how laughter ties to normalisation, how nonsense relates to incompetence, and how that incompetence is a corollary of the fantasy of order and absolutes that interrogators enact, a fantasy with irreparable consequences.

Kite string injury: a thin line between harmless sport and grievous injury

Background: Kite flying is a common hobby and sport in many countries. Injuries related to kites are on the rise, but there is a relative paucity of data and literature on this subject.Methods: A retrospective review of all patients who presented with injuries directly related to kite strings was done. All such cases presenting in January 2018 were included. Other indirect or secondary injuries were excluded.Results: A total of 187 patients were identified. Males were most commonly affected. The most common age group affected was 16-20 years and head and neck was most frequently involved. There were no cases of mortality.Conclusions: A seemingly harmless game of kite flying a kite can cause grievous harm - even death - not only to the flyer, but also to innocent others. This study attempts to highlight these dangers and emphasizes that potential threats have to be understood and addressed adequately.

Managing Tribalism within Nigeria’s Democratic Challenges

Tribalism is coined from ‘tribes’, an alternative word for ethnic or linguistic groups or in some countries ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’. Tribes supply a lot of Nigeria’s diversity providing traditional costumes, dress, music, dancing, indigenous language, arts, folklore, religion, all of which can constitute an asset to a people. It is naturally regarded as a small group, a human social organization defined by ‘traditions of common descent’ having temporary or permanent political integration above the family level with a shared language, culture or ideology. Encyclopedia Britannica asserts that tribe members ‘share a tribe name in a contiguous territory, and engage in joint endeavours such as trade, agriculture, house construction, warfare, economic and business activities and warfare. They often stay in small cluster-communities which can grow into large communities and even a nation. This paper attempts to critically examine the multiple play-outs of Nigeria’s many tribes and nationalities during and after colonialism, the intricate connection between tribalism and politics, leadership and the evolution of the Nigerian polity, the grievous harm as well as advantages of tribalism to Nigeria’s evolution. The tribe is always a major factor in the country and in its people. It ends with specific prognosis and a few recommendations.

Chronic Granulomatous Disease: A Rare Hereditary Immuno-deficiency Disorder in a Young Boy with Its Adverse Consequences

Chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) is a primary immunodeficiency disease which results from absence of the NADPH oxidase in the professional phagocytic cells neutrophils, monocytes, macrophages and eosinophils. Deficiency of this oxidase renders the patient liable to infection by bacteria and fungi, and, as the name of the disease suggests, to chronic granulomatous inflammation. Here, a young boy presented with increasing breathlessness and productive cough had recurrent episode of pulmonary infection since his childhood. Repeated Chest X-ray and CT scan showed homogenous opacities at different places of lung in different occasions with bilateral reticulo-nodular opacities. Mulipleoraganisms were isolated from sputum at different times. A nitroblu-tetrazolium test (NBT) was done abroad which was positive and confirmed his diagnosis. Since then, He had prophylactic fluconazol and sulphamethoxazoltrimethoprime daily and pneumocaccal and influenza vaccination regularly and proper treatment of acute infective episodes accordingly. In spite all these measures, repeated infection caused grievous harm to his lung leading to irreversible pulmonary fibrosis and bronchiectasis. As a consequence, he became home bound, oxygen dependant and dependant on regular use of long acting bronchodilators in different form. Hematopoeitic stem cell transplantation was advised which was not affordable for his parents. Now, this young boy is waiting for further assaults to his lungs and further deterioration and ultimate hopeless outcomes.J Bangladesh Coll Phys Surg 2015; 33(3): 156-160

Fear of crime amongst elders in India

Purpose – Crime against elderly people is a matter of grave concern in contemporary India. Today, they are being attacked with grievous harm, murder, and abusive behaviour by known and unknown persons. These cases have certainly had a negative impact on their way of life and sense of well-being. Consequently, fear of crime is being recognised as an emerging social problem among the elderly population in India. The purpose of this paper is to examine different types of crime that are being committed against the elderly, leading to a fear of crime. And, to identify the victim offender relationship. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed method approach has been applied in this paper. This study has been designed as an exploratory lead-in to a planned wider study. It examines the factors shaping the victimisation experience of the elderly. The study has been conducted from October 2012 to January 2013 on a sample of 220 elderly people living in both rural and urban areas of Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Findings – The findings suggest that emotional crime is a major problem among the elderly and more prevalent than crime against the body and property. The study has also found that elderly people have a fear of crime in their own houses due to victimisation. Originality/value – This is an original paper, which is based on the experiences of elderly people living in Indian society and discussed the impact of prior victimisation.

The Presidential Statutory Stretch

This paper, prepared for a Fall, 2015 conference in honor of Professor Harold Bruff, argues that, in certain circumstances, a "statutory stretch" in defense of a presidential initiative may be both justified and more protective of the rule of law than would be bolder claims of exclusive executive authority under Article II. Such a rhetorical strategy may be superior in preserving an ethos of legal accountability within the executive branch and implicitly invites Congress to respond with legislative change if it disapproves the presidential action. It is a strategy that should be reserved, however, for truly exigent circumstances in which the Administration is willing to expose its argument to public scrutiny. Government lawyers assisting in the "stretch" should insure that their clients understand the vulnerabilities to their argument and should not knowingly offer weak arguments to avoid legal constraints aimed at avoiding grievous harm to individuals.

Intoxication as a defence to murder in Seychelles

In Seychelles, the mens rea of murder can be established, as an alternative to an intention to cause death or grievous harm, on the basis of the defendant’s ‘knowledge’ that the act or omission causing death will probably cause death or grievous harm. However, a defendant is only allowed to plead intoxication as a defence where it had become impossible for him to form the necessary ‘intention’ due to intoxication. This article highlights the difficulties in the application of the defence of intoxication to cases where the mens rea for murder is based purely on a defendant’s ‘knowledge’. In analysing the defence of intoxication in Seychelles in cases of murder, the article examines the position under English and Australian law.

Medication Shortages

Medication Shortages

Chemicals Policy in the 2008–2009 President's Cancer Panel Report

The President's Cancer Panel 2008-2009 report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, was a watershed event in the U.S. chemicals policy process. The report, which was released after two years of public meetings and input from a variety of scientists and organizations, concluded that the national cancer program has not adequately addressed "grievous harm" from chemical carcinogens. Consistent with public health principles, it recommended that a prevention-oriented approach to regulating chemicals should replace the current "reactionary" approach. Various responses of cancer organizations and spokespeople in the aftermath of the release of the report are described. The report explicitly supports the type of policy reform contemplated in the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act of 2010, which failed to pass in the 111th Congressional session. In the absence of meaningful action at the federal level, the report will still provide strong support for state and local policy initiatives in coming years.

Idowu: The Nigerian Supreme Court Erred!

In the shocking case of Idowu, the appellant raped his four-year-old niece Shade Pelemo. She died the next day from the injuries sustained from the rape. The trial court found the appellant guilty of murder, and this verdict was upheld on appeal to the Court of Appeal. On final appeal to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, however, the verdict was upturned and one of manslaughter substituted. The ratio decidendi of the Nigerian Supreme Court was that, in the absence of evidence that rape of a four-year-old girl was likely to endanger her life, the appellant could not be convicted of murder by virtue of section 316(3) of the Criminal Code of Nigeria. The following factors marred the legal logic of Idowu and rendered the Supreme Court decision unsupportable:1. The appellant was charged and convicted under the wrong statutory provision: section 316(3) of the Nigerian Criminal Code.2. The appellant should have been charged under section 316(2). Had the appellant been charged under this clause, he would have been rightly convicted. The appellant should have been convicted under this provision anyway, even where charged under another clause.3. The precedents relied on by the Supreme Court are not on all fours with, and indeed are distinguishable from, Idowu’s case.Grievous harm, at least, if not death, is certainly a natural and probable consequence of the rape of a four-year-old girl. The appellant in Idowu ought to have been held to have intended this result of his rape of tiny, tender Shade. In such scenarios, Nigerian criminal law fastens such an intention on the defendant.In Idowu, the appellant should be presumed to have intended to cause grievous harm to four-year-old Shade. Grievous harm, at least, is a natural and probable consequence of the rape by a grown man of a four-year-old child. The Supreme Court of Nigeria should have upheld the appellant’s murder conviction by virtue of section 316(2) of the Nigerian Criminal Code.

Idowu: The Supreme Court Erred

In the shocking case of Idowu , the appellant raped his four-year-old niece Shade Pelemo. She died the next day from the injuries sustained from the rape. The trial court found the appellant guilty of murder, and this verdict was upheld on appeal to the Court of Appeal. On final appeal to the Supreme Court, however, the verdict was upturned and one of manslaughter substituted. The ratio decidendi of the Supreme Court was that, in the absence of evidence that rape of a four-year-old girl was likely to endanger her life, the appellant could not be convicted of murder by virtue of section 316(3) of the Criminal Code.The following factors marred the legal logic of Idowu and rendered the Supreme Court decision unsupportable:The appellant was charged and convicted under the wrong statutory provision: section 316(3) of the Criminal Code. The appellant should have been charged under section 316(2). Had the appellant been charged under this clause, he would have been rightly convicted. The appellant should have been convicted under this provision anyway, even where charged under another clause. The precedents relied on by the Supreme Court are not on all fours with, and indeed are distinguishable from, Idowu’s case.Grievous harm, at least, if not death, is certainly a natural and probable consequence of the rape of a four-year-old girl. The appellant in Idowu ought to have been held to have intended this result of his rape of tiny, tender Shade. In such scenarios, the criminal law fastens such an intention on the defendant.In Idowu, the appellant should be presumed to have intended to cause grievous harm to four-year-old Shade. Grievous harm, at least, is a natural and probable consequence of the rape by a grown man of a four-year-old child. The Supreme Court should have upheld the appellant’s murder conviction by virtue of section 316(2) of the Criminal Code.

Panel Finds Environmental Risks Neglected

A flap has erupted among health experts over a report last week from a presidential advisory group that concludes environmental pollutants are an underappreciated cause of cancer that is inflicting "grievous harm" on Americans.

Conflict and Commerce: Maritime Archaeological Site Distribution as Cultural Change on the Roanoke River, North Carolina

For centuries, the transportation provided by the Roanoke River, North Carolina, has played a vital role in the economic and military history of the area. The Civil War illustrated the importance of the waterway as a military consideration, when both the Union and the Confederacy strove to control the river. The conflict inflicted grievous harm upon the region’s maritime transportation. Taken as a whole, the shipwrecks and abandoned vessels of the river provide an exceptional vantage point regarding questions of technology and economy, both in times of peace and when these tranquil periods are juxtaposed against warfare and upheaval. This research uses statistical and geo-spatial analyses of the shipwrecks and abandoned vessels of the Roanoke River in an attempt to discern anthropological patterns. Both historical and archaeological data are the subject of investigation. Three major themes: manner of loss, trade, and technology, are explored primarily to interpret how cultural change is reflected in the assemblage of shipwrecked and abandoned vessels of the waterway. The trends that emerge are often interwoven among these themes, and through them, this paper attempts to explain such diverse phenomena as shifting trade patterns, wreck clustering, vessel dimensions, and the dichotomy of behavior between times of war and times of peace.

From Chinese Exclusion to Guantanamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State. By Natsu Taylor Saito. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. xii, 497 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-87081-851-6.)

Natsu Taylor Saito's From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay, seeks to “reveal in broad strokes” the “significance” of the plenary power doctrine to “American law” (p. 15). Saito argues that the progress of the doctrine reveals much about the way America deals with “those not explicitly enslaved but [who are] the subjugated Other under U.S. law—the people in external colonies, those subject to internal colonial rule, and those explicitly recognized as subjects of another sovereign” (ibid.). Working along with its doctrinal cousin “military necessity,” the doctrine allows the American government to deprive relatively powerless groups of protections of judicial review. Presenting itself as “a nation of laws that gives optimal protection to human rights and democratic processes,” the United States eschews the jurisdiction of international decision-making bodies,” leaving those injured by abusive government policy without effective remedies (p. 14). Saito traces the history of the plenary power doctrine in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. After the Civil War and the subjugation of American Indians, the country addressed two principal concerns: “the place of those deemed Other within American Society, and the extent to which the United States would follow the path of European imperialism” (p. 16). The plenary power doctrine emerged as a way to resolve these crucial issues, doing grievous harm to many in the process. The infamous Chinese exclusion cases, The Cherokee Tobacco case (1870) (in which the Court declined to strike down a federal act that violated a treaty with American Indians), and the so-called Insular Cases (in which the Court held that those living in American territories were not entitled to the full protections of the U.S. Constitution) were all products of the extreme judicial deference given to the political branches of government. Those measures were enacted and tolerated by the majority of American citizens because the people being deprived of their rights were racial or ethnic minorities: hence the national acceptance later of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the refusal to prohibit “immigration laws that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion” (p. 26). What gives Saito's critique of plenary power its particular urgency, of course, is what has happened to the country since September 11, 2001. The perpetrators of the attack were Arab, Muslim, and foreign. It was easy to cast those who shared their ethnic and religious identities as, in Saito's term, “the Other,” whose rights could be abrogated without much recourse.

Priest, Parish, and People: Saving the Faith in Philadelphia's "Little Italy" (review)

Priest, Parish, and People: Saving the Faith in Philadelphia's Italy. By Richard N. Juliani. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2007. Pp. xu, 396. $35.00 paperback.) The beginning of Richard Juliani's latest work overlaps the end of his earlier Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians before Mass Migration (1998), and brings the story forward into the twentieth century. But it is so much more. As we have come to expect from Juliani, a sociologist, his work is exhaustively researched in the best historical and sociological traditions. In addition to the conventional Census, Immigration and Naturalization Services, and newspaper sources, the author brings to our attention some very unique, and heretofore untapped, materials. These include the more than 20,000 pages of handwritten sermons, letters, poems, plays, and other notes of the pastor of the first Italian-nationality parish in the United States. Juliani tells us convincingly that, to fully understand the phenomenon which is, above all else, the central experience of America-immigration/assimilationwe cannot, and should not, separate biographical, institutional, and sociocultural realities. These realities he illustrates for us in the Little Italy section of Philadelphia by interweaving the histories of a priest, a parish, and a people. At the center of this intersection is Father Antonio Isoleri, pastor of Saint Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi Church in Philadelphia's Little Italy from 1870 until 1926. Rarely do we get the opportunity to delve into the life of an ordinary individual such as this. The voluminous writings of this priest, unearthed by Juliani in the 1980s, provide us with a unique window on a subject often viewed through the lens of official quantitative records. The Grand Old Man of Little Italy, as he known in his waning years, is portrayed through these manuscripts as combative ... proud, intellectual, creative, and deeply spiritual. Juliani reveals that he could be arbitrary, inconsistent, and imperious, to the extent that he stirred the anger of anticlerical Socialists and Anarchists, who may have even plotted his assassination, but also drove nuns and fellow priests to contemplate doing him grievous harm. And here no Bird of Passage. Isoleri said good-bye to his home and family at the age of twenty-four and never saw them again. Passionately devoted to his homeland then being torn between creating a nation and loyalty to the papacy, he courageously put aside his personal feelings to shepherd his people, in his American parish, as they suffered similar anguish both personal and national. Despite his publicly expressed preference for national, rather than regional goals, Isoleri showed himself in many actions to be thoroughly Northern in his thinking. Even though, in chapter 7, Juliani notes that Isoleri was not dismayed by an influx of more Italians, even from Southern Italy, subsequent chapters chronicle his struggles to accommodate people, albeit Italian, he considered strange. Isoleri tried his best to be a mediator for his people at three levels. He saw himself as a bridge between traditional popular devotions brought from the Old World and newer forms favored by church authorities. He fought to better the physical conditions of the immigrants by attacking the exploitation of their children by padrone masters. And he worked constantly to convince his people that there no essential irreconcilability between being a good Catholic and being a good nationalist. The intersection of the biographical, institutional, and sociocultural is perhaps seen most concretely in what Juliani calls the Pastor's Dilemma, which paralleled and intersected with the Italian Problem. …

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Tactical emergency medical support

As increases in criminal activity collide with more aggressive law enforcement postures, there is more contact between police officers and violent felons. Civilian law enforcement special operations teams routinely engage suspects in these violent, dynamic, and complex interdiction activities. Along with these activities comes the substantial and foreseeable risk of death or grievous harm to law officers, bystanders, hostages, or perpetrators. Further, law enforcement agencies who attempt to apprehend dangerous, heavily armed criminals with a special operations team that lacks the expertise to treat the medical consequences that may arise from such a confrontation may be negligent of deliberate indifference. Meanwhile, evidence exists within the military, civilian law enforcement, and medical literature that on-scene TEMS serves to improve mission success and team safety and health, while decreasing morbidity and mortality in the event of an injury or illness suffered during operations. National professional organizations within law enforcement and emergency medicine have identified and support the fundamental need for mission safety and the development of a standard model to train and incorporate TEMS into law enforcement special operations. The overall objective of TEMS is to minimize the potential for injury and illness and to promote optimal medical care from the scene of operations to a definitive care facility. The design, staffing, and implementation of a TEMS program that maximally uses the community resources integrates previously disparate law enforcement, EMS, and emergency medical/trauma center functions to form a new continuum of care [55].

Criminal Prosecution for HMO Treatment Denial

When people deliberately do things that are almost certain to cause death, and someone then dies, prosecutions for homicide are normally appropriate. However, the administrative conduct of HMOs seems to be an exception. Unwarranted delays and denials of medical treatment are not prosecuted even in cases where the HMO's responsible personnel must have foreseen that their actions would probably lead to death or grievous harm. This article considers the basis for this exception, analyzing the existing criminal law of omissions and surrounding policy considerations. HMOs are subject to powerful market incentives. In the eyes of a rational HMO executive, the company's clientele can be divided into two groups, the net-positive and the subscribers. The net-positives are the people who will probably pay more in future premiums than they will cost the HMO in future medical services. The net-negative group contains those who will probably cost the HMO more in future medical services than they will ever pay in future premiums (e.g., the seriously and chronically ill). From the HMO's economic perspective, any money spent to extend the lives of net-negative patients is merely prolonging an already losing proposition. Most large HMOs are traded on national stock exchanges and their financial results are closely scrutinized by securities analysts and others. This public market activity means HMO executives are under steady pressure to keep medical costs down and profits up. At the same time, individual medical decisions are necessarily discretionary and never exact. Therefore, a quiet and low-key bias against treatment authorizations to net-negative subscribers might be relatively hard to detect but potentially very lucrative. Given the normal economic incentives, it is no surprise that older and chronically ill people (the net-negatives) do much worse under HMOs than under traditional insurance plans. One study found, for example, that elderly, chronically ill patients in HMOs were nearly twice as likely to decline in physical health over time as those with traditional medical insurance. To state the problem bluntly, there is a potentially lethal economic flaw in the HMO concept. The market does not reward HMO executives for saving lives at stockholder expense. Criminal sanctions may work better than civil damages to motivate HMOs to authorize the medical treatments their subscribers are contractually entitled to. Whereas the burden of civil damage awards can be shifted, in the form of higher premiums and reduced medical expenditures, the criminal sanction of imprisonment cannot. The only way to prevent HMOs from shifting the penalties of wrongful denials back to subscribers and patients may be to impose a cost that the HMO's personnel cannot shift. This is, of course, the classic function of the criminal law--to impose costs on bad behavior that harm-doers cannot shift. Unlike civil damage actions, moreover, criminal prosecutions are already permitted by ERISA. Under the prevailing categories and definitions of the criminal law, prosecutions for wrongful HMO treatment denials would seem a straightforward application of the principle that, when death is foreseeable, lethal behavior is a crime.