Malign Intent Research Articles

Markets of protection: religious rivalry, insecurity, and illegality in Cape Town’s urban fringes

ABSTRACT This article explores the multiple links between Pentecostalism and the production of security in Cape Town’s isiXhosa-speaking townships and traces the ways in which Pentecostal churches have become embroiled with Cape Town’s criminal economies, illegality and violence. In these marginalised urban spaces, which are also territories of relegation, Pentecostal pastors compete with other spiritual specialists who lay claims to spiritual protection just like the state’s law-enforcement agencies over the meanings of crime and violence and legitimate ways to counter them. This competition thrives on the fact that physical harm and the associated states of victimhood are seen as resulting not only from criminal assaults but also from the congeries of spiritual forces that enable them. Simultaneously, there is mounting competition within the religious field and increasingly strenuous assertions of religious sovereignty vis-à-vis the secular state. I argue that all of these developments have contributed to Pentecostalism’s links with illegality. Importantly, capacities to wield spiritual power are as central for understanding the dynamics of the market of spiritual protection against risks as are accusations that those wielding them do so with malign intent. The ambivalent perceptions of Pentecostalism with regard to crime and protection against harm therefore echo those of witchcraft.

Temporal Theory and US-China Relations

This article explains why existing great powers can engage in cooperative relations with rising great powers that fuel the rise of the latter into competitors. By adopting a temporal theoretical lens and providing an examination of US-China relations in the post-Cold War era, it is argued that uncertainty about Chinese long-term intentions, economic benefits from cooperation, and the existence of other clear and imminent challenges to address incentivized the US to adopt a cooperative policy towards China. Assertive moves by China from the late 2000s onwards that the United States perceived to be indications of long-term malign intentions, the emergence of economic competition, and the fading of other challenges to US interests by the 2010s, removed these incentives for engagement and consequently led to a change from cooperative to competitive policies. This article is aimed to address the crucial questions of why the United States helped accelerate the rise of China into a peer competitor, and why that policy has changed to one in which the United States now has engaged in strategic competition with China.

Impact of the COVID-19-pandemic on patients with gynecological malignancies undergoing surgery: A Dutch population-based study using data from the ‘Dutch Gynecological Oncology Audit’

ObjectiveThe COVID-19-pandemic caused drastic healthcare changes worldwide. To date, the impact of these changes on gynecological cancer healthcare is relatively unknown. This study aimed to assess the impact of the COVID-19-pandemic on surgical gynecological-oncology healthcare. MethodsThis population-based cohort study included all surgical procedures with curative intent for gynecological malignancies, registered in the Dutch Gynecological Oncology Audit, in 2018–2020. Four periods were identified based on COVID-19 hospital admission rates: ‘Pre-COVID-19’, ‘First wave’, ‘Interim period’, and ‘Second wave’. Surgical volume, perioperative care processes, and postoperative outcomes from 2020 were compared with 2018–2019. ResultsA total of 11,488 surgical procedures were analyzed. For cervical cancer, surgical volume decreased by 17.2% in 2020 compared to 2018–2019 (mean 2018–2019: n = 542.5, 2020: n = 449). At nadir (interim period), only 51% of the expected cervical cancer procedures were performed. For ovarian, vulvar, and endometrial cancer, volumes remained stable. Patients with advanced-stage ovarian cancer more frequently received neoadjuvant chemotherapy in 2020 compared to 2018–2019 (67.7% (n = 432) vs. 61.8% (n = 783), p = 0.011). Median time to first treatment was significantly shorter in all four malignancies in 2020. For vulvar and endometrial cancer, the length of hospital stay was significantly shorter in 2020. No significant differences in complicated course and 30-day-mortality were observed. ConclusionsThe COVID-19-pandemic impacted surgical gynecological-oncology healthcare: in 2020, surgical volume for cervical cancer dropped considerably, waiting time was significantly shorter for all malignancies, while neoadjuvant chemotherapy administration for advanced-stage ovarian cancer increased. The safety of perioperative healthcare was not negatively impacted by the pandemic, as complications and 30-day-mortality remained stable.

Predictive preoperative and intraoperative factors of anastomotic leak in gastrectomy patients

BackgroundThe preoperative and intraoperative factors that could predict a higher risk of anastomotic/staple line leak for gastric cancer patients has not been accurately defined. MethodsPatients who underwent surgery with curative intent for gastric malignancies between 2002 and 2018 were evaluated from a single prospective database. ResultsA total of 195 patients were evaluated with an overall complication rate of 40%. Anastomotic/staple line leak occurred in 13%, with 4% undergoing reoperation during the same hospitalization. Significant risk factors affecting postoperative complications (POC) were identified in the patients including number of comorbidities (≥2) (HR, 5.30; 95% CI, 1.1–15.3; P = 0.037) and operation type (Total vs Distal) (HR, 2.5; CI 1.08–8.5; p = 0.048). Subset analysis of gastric adenocarcinoma patients demonstrates a five-year overall survival (OS) for patients without perioperative complications was 68%, compared with 41% for patients with POCs (p 0.001). ConclusionsIn a large single-institutional study, POCs were associated with decreased survival in patients undergoing surgery for gastric adenocarcinoma. Optimizing these patients post-operatively with limited anastomotic stress and enteral feeding tube may allow for a less complicated course.

Social Risk and the Dimensionality of Intentions

Previous research has documented a behavioral distinction between “social risk,” or risk caused by human factors, and natural risk. In particular, people tend to demand a premium on the probability of a favorable outcome in order to expose themselves to a social source of risk rather than a natural source of risk. Several explanations for what drives this social risk premium have been offered—most prominently, (i)an aversion to a counterparty’s potentially malign intentions and (ii) a more general aversion to ceding control to someone with conflicting interests. We propose that a fundamental determinant of the social risk premium may relate to a counterparty’s capacity to engage in intentional action. We employ a between-subjects experimental design in which we manipulate subjects’ capacity for intentional action. Our design allows us to identify the component of the social risk premium related to an aversion to betrayal, independent of any aversion to ceding control. Furthermore, our results show that intentions are a crucial determinant of the social risk premium. We identify factors that eliminate, and may even change the sign of, the social risk premium. Our results contribute to our understanding of the factors that influence the perception of social risk and have implications for optimal contract design in a wide variety of situations involving social risk. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2694 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Vaccine Rejecting Parents' Engagement With Expert Systems That Inform Vaccination Programs.

In attempting to provide protection to individuals and communities, childhood immunization has benefits that far outweigh disease risks. However, some parents decide not to immunize their children with some or all vaccines for reasons including lack of trust in governments, health professionals, and vaccine manufacturers. This article employs a theoretical analysis of trust and distrust to explore how twenty-seven parents with a history of vaccine rejection in two Australian cities view the expert systems central to vaccination policy and practice. Our data show how perceptions of the profit motive generate distrust in the expert systems pertaining to vaccination. Our participants perceived that pharmaceutical companies had a pernicious influence over the systems driving vaccination: research, health professionals, and government. Accordingly, they saw vaccine recommendations in conflict with the interests of their child and "the system" underscored by malign intent, even if individual representatives of this system were not equally tainted. This perspective was common to parents who declined all vaccines and those who accepted some. We regard the differences between these parents-and indeed the differences between vaccine decliners and those whose Western medical epistemology informs reflexive trust-as arising from the internalization of countering views, which facilitates nuance.

The Irrelevance of the Security Dilemma for Civil Wars

This article revisits the security dilemma theory and its application to civil conflict. Based on a careful reading of existing studies, it exposes the deviations from the original theory developed in the 1950s and more recent amendments, which have substantially reduced the explanatory value of the theory. The article shows that when the original and the amended versions of the theory are applied to civil conflict, neither can explain the outbreak of armed conflict. While anarchy might be present as a precondition for the dilemma to operate, a previous history of violent interaction often leaves little room for misperception of intentions. Absent uncertainty about malign intentions toward the other group, the security dilemma theory loses relevance to explain the outbreak of civil conflict.

Explaining the Absence of a Japanese Central Intelligence Agency: Alliance Politics, Sectionalism, and Antimilitarism

I examine a relatively underexplored aspect of Japan's early postwar history and seek to explain why attempts to establish a Japanese-style central intelligence agency (JCIA) in the 1950s were unsuccessful. I evaluate three competing explanations drawn from the level of international politics, focusing on US power resources and influence as well as liberal and constructivist styles of analysis—alliance politics, sectionalism, and the norm of antimilitarism—in order to shed light on the historical origins of Japan's intelligence apparatus, which is relatively underdeveloped and underfunded compared to other middle powers. It highlights the primacy of domestic factors over structural causes in explaining the decision not to establish a JCIA. In particular, I argue that the JCIA proposal failed primarily because of attacks on important proponents that, while sometimes driven by seemingly rational organizational interests, were nevertheless legitimated by growing antimilitaristic sentiments shared by elites from the political center to the left of the ideological spectrum. The newly emerging norm of antimilitarism was predicated largely on a fear of constraints on recently acquired civil and political liberties. These fears, manifested most prominently in vocal Diet and media opposition, were compounded by the norm of secrecy—an important element of intelligence activities—which served to heighten further speculation about the malign intent of postwar Japan's reconstituted intelligence system.

3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat”

3. Nature as Protagonist in “The Open Boat” Anthony Channell Hilfer The bottom of the sea is cruel. —Hart Crane, “Voyages” As many critics have argued, questions of perspective and epistemology are central to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (Kent; Hutchinson). The story’s first sentence famously clues us to this: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (68). But behind the uncertainties of perspective is a determinable ontology, a presence, or rather, I shall argue, a sort of presence, the existence of which implies a rectified aesthetic response. This response emerges, however, from negations, denials, and occultations: what is not seen, who is not there, and what does not happen.3 Here again, when we look at nature we behold things that are not there and miss “the nothing that is.” Fully as much as Stevens in “The Snow Man,” Crane is concerned with certain conventions of representation: personification, the picturesque, the American sublime, and the melodramatic, which although it does not inform “The Snow Man” is played on in Stevens’s “The American Sublime.” Crane’s story is intertextual with nature poetry, sentimental poetry, hymns, and landscape art, as well as with Darwinism, theological clichés, and, less obviously, theological actualities. For the most part these conventions add up to what the Stevens poem declares is “not there.” To get to “the nothing that is” we must first traverse this ocean of error. Doing so helps keep our perspective not on the men in the boat but on the “real” (with the scare quotes actually meant to be scary) ocean. If the story is at least as much about Nature as about men in nature, if nature is a central character in the story, then one of the story’s central questions is how to see nature from a natural rather than human perspective. In a passage in section 1 of “The Open Boat” the sea is depicted in an orgy of hyperbolic personifications: A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut out all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. (69) Nature here has malign intent, being “nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.” Nature has more agency, and an [End Page 248] agency more primary, than that of the men in the boat, who are merely in a reactive relation to the waves. In the final section of the story the correspondent is shown in an ironically passive relation to his own survival: Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics and a true miracle of the sea. An overturned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man. (91) As J. C. Levenson precisely observes, “Though the correspondent may be said ambiguously to have performed his little marvel, the wave and not the man has controlled the event” (lxv). In the men’s apprehension the waves are making an “effort” to kill them, threateningly “snarling” at them, the water “grim” in its resolve (69). Yet the heightened emotions attributed to Nature are rhetorically offset by the understated, calculatedly stilted, legalistic language of “a singular disadvantage” and “do something effective in the way of.” Crane is squaring the circle, on the one hand showing Nature as an effective presence and agency and on the other mocking the all-too-human tendency to personify nature...

A Reasonable Frugality

1. I begin with a citation from Our Final Century. Its author is Sir Martin Rees, the current President of the Royal Society. A race of scientifically advanced extra-terrestrials watching our solar system could confidently [have predicted] that Earth would face doom in another 6 billion years, when the sun in its death throes swells up into a ‘red giant’ and vaporizes everything remaining on our planet's surface. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spasm [visible already] less than half way through Earth's life – these million human-induced alterations occupying, overall, less than a millionth of our planet's elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? ….It may not be absurd hyperbole – indeed, it may not be an overstatement – to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I think that the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century without a serious setback….Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life… or, in contrast, through malign intent or through misadventure, misdirected technology could jeopardize life's potential, foreclosing its human and post-human future.

Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (review)

Leon Surette. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens up, 2011. 363 pp. US$59.95. In this new volume, Leon Surette historicizes troubling political commentaries made by T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound between run up to World War I and years following World War II. Surette's methodology represents a departure from prior studies of these authors, which, according to Surette, have suffered from biases of changing literary debates or from excessive derision for their subjects. While insisting these authors must be held to account for supporting authoritarian movements, Surette believes a historical account can spare these men reputations for malign intentions (283). Although often foolish, Eliot, Lewis, and Pound were, Surette suggests, quite conventionally skeptical of democratic capitalism in years that bore witness to trench warfare, Depression, and expansion of mass culture. Their turn, toward royalism of Charles Maurras in case of Eliot, and toward Italian and German fascism, respectively, in cases of Pound and Lewis, was consistent with reformist fashion of era's critical output. And like many of their peers, writes Surette, they harboured no fundamental predilection for authoritarian power. They did, however, feel an understandable antagonism for rise of a modern democracy they saw as defined by oligarchy, industrialism, and influence of popular culture. As Surette puts it: The aim of this study is to demonstrate that social and political views of Lewis, Eliot, and Pound were not primarily motivated by a hope to establish any particular social or political model--at least not initially--but rather by distaste for social and political status-quo in which they found (4). Surette identifies two principal factors responsible for particular shape of commentary by Eliot, Lewis, and Pound: need for an avant-garde that would break with past and, simultaneously, an awareness of how period's rapid changes in technology and mass culture threatened European cultural tradition (274). In focusing on such factors, Surette engages that which continues to fascinate readers of modernism: authors like Eliot, Lewis, and Pound pioneered a new mix of aesthetic formula that today still feels radically invented, yet they often resisted key revolutions in cultural production. Further, they championed collective but resented collectivity's new popular forms. Their works are fragmented responses to kitsch, but they desired for themselves role of master-artist who might provide clear cultural orientation. Surette quite lucidly unravels these knotted interests, which do not always accommodate plain or easy explanation. Surette parses various critical strains in which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis participated by labeling each author a Pollyanna or a Cassandra depending upon their attraction to theories of cultural ascension or decline. In years before first war, he shows his three subjects navigating between Cassandras like Oswald Spengler, who perceived an endemic malaise in European culture and civilization (37), and Pollyannas, often communists, who expected next-stage progressions in political economy to move away from failed institutions. It appears both Eliot and Pound were optimistic Pollyannas. Pound came to Europe to pursue an energetic new art that lay latent but unexplored in America. Eliot, forever cool to his home country, embraced British manners in order to separate himself from American experience and its cultural deprivations, even while noticing widespread cultural diminishment among British. Lewis, although later a Cassandra who feared a second war, objected to Spengler's aggressive historicizing of cultural phenomena and labeled him a relativist hostile to essential truth. In sum, the rejection of Spengler by our trio reflects their adherence to Enlightenment conviction that human beings create their own destiny, a conviction which Eliot, Pound, and Lewis share--however much they may diverge on just whither society is headed or toward what it should strive (40). …

Interests, Identities, and Synthetic Biology

It's too soon to know what the most important disagreements over synthetic biology will look like: how the disputes will be framed, what the stakes will be, and who will line up against whom. Some public policy disputes, even those with a great deal at stake, can be brought to apparent closure. Others continue to fester despite repeated efforts to reach a compromise. So far, synthetic biology has not ignited any raging policy conflagrations. The report of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was generally enthusiastic about the technology, sober about the risks that could come from inadvertence or malign intent, and focused mainly on fostering sensible processes for managing risk and encouraging professional and public education and dialogue. Recommendation 10 in the report hints at concerns not exhausted by the usual lists of risks and benefits: Discussions of moral objections to synthetic biology should be revisited periodically as research in the field advances in novel directions. Reassessment of concerns regarding the implications of synthetic biology for humans, other species, nature, and the environment should track the development of the field. (1) The report notes briefly a variety of arguments offered that synthetic biology somehow alters our conception of human agency and responsibility, blurs the line between the living and nonliving, the natural and the unnatural, or threatens humankind's relationship to The commission refers to such concerns as objections; it notes that similar concerns have had a long and important place in bioethical discussions and debates and acknowledges that they deserve ongoing consideration as part of comprehensive efforts to assure that this field progresses within appropriate ethical boundaries. (2) It finds none of these claims particularly compelling or persuasive in the current context of synthetic biology. But Recommendation 10 leaves the door open to resurrect or recast such arguments. Efforts to articulate intrinsic or nonphysical concerns can seem strained and abstract, with overly subtle distinctions and rather grand pronouncements. a provocative essay, Joachim Boldt and Oliver Muller claim that synthetic biology alters humankind's role in the cosmos from manipulatio to ex existendo and that this change results in a fundamentally altered relationship to They identify what they take to be the crucial distinction: Using the abilities of nature through cultivation, manipulation or even exploitation differs from reinventing nature. (3) an effort to reinforce the distinction between old-fashioned genetic engineering and the grand ambitions of synthetic biology, they write: In synthetic biology, the aim is not to amend an organism with a certain quantity of altered characteristics (that is, to manipulate); instead, it is to equip a completely unqualified organism with a new quality of being (that is, to create a new form of life). (4) Try to imagine a broad political movement organized around the slogan Manipulatio, OK; creatio ex existendo, no! Hard to see that happening. But there are times when philosophical subtleties and not-easy-to-articulate ideas become powerful--when they are enlisted in what I want to describe as disputes over identities. Identities and Interests When then-President George W Bush ordered that federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells would be allowed, but only on cell lines created prior to the moment his policy was announced, a fierce battle over public policy and public opinion was formally launched It took the election in 2008 of President Barack Obama for any change in that policy. Within weeks of his inauguration, President Obama rescinded the Bush policy and permitted, with limits, federal funding for research on cell lines created after August 9, 2001. Legal challenges swiftly followed. …

NEUROLOGIC ASPECTS OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL TERRORIST THREATS

ABSTRACT Several chemical and biological agents that could be used with malign intent have specifically neurologic manifestations. Two chemical, four biological, and one toxin threat are reviewed, with specific attention to their clinical neurologic manifestations. Of these threats, the most relevant to neurologists, and the ones about which neurologists are most likely to be consulted, are the organophosphonate nerve agents. Community and academic neurologists should expect to play a role in devising community response plans to attacks using these agents.

Impact of hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) for hematologic malignancies on self-reported fatigue and vigor

9620 Background: HCT is used increasingly with curative intent for hematologic malignancies, creating a need to examine factors which impact survivors’ quality of life (QOL). Energy impairment is a debilitating outcome, yet few studies have examined long-term trends in fatigue and vigor after HCT. Objective: To determine the trajectories of fatigue and vigor in HCT recipients; to assess the contribution of demographic and medical factors on fatigue and vigor; and to determine the impact of energy impairment on QOL. Methods: Using a longitudinal study design, fatigue and vigor levels were evaluated in 211 adult City of Hope HCT recipients using the Profile of Moods States at pre-HCT, six months, and 1 year post-HCT. Four QOL domains (physical, psychological, social, and spiritual) were assessed at the same time points using the City of Hope QOL Instrument. Generalized Estimating Equation was used to estimate longitudinal trends adjusting for potential confounders. The cohort included 60% males, 36% undergoing allogeneic HCT, with a mean age of 51y at HCT. Seventy-nine patients completed 1y follow-up. Results: Mean fatigue and vigor scores were within the normal range before and after HCT. Fatigue did not change over time, but vigor increased over the 1y after HCT (p<0.05). Lower vigor after HCT was reported by older (>45y) patients (p=0.03), college graduates (p=0.05), those with chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD) (p=0.04), and those with higher levels of depression (p<0.0001). Fatigue after HCT was greater in males (p<0.001), and those with less than college degrees (p<0.05). Additionally, higher fatigue occurred in those with greater depression (p<0.0001), higher pain (p<0.003), and cGVHD (p<0.003). Low vigor and high fatigue significantly reduced all domains of QOL (p<0.003), demonstrating the impact of treatment-related energy impairments on QOL. Conclusions: Although there were subgroups with lowered energy, overall, patients were within the normal ranges of fatigue and vigor. Vigor improved over time after HCT; however, in those with lower levels after HCT, QOL was significantly diminished. Patients with depression and cGVHD represent vulnerable subgroups that may benefit from targeted intervention. No significant financial relationships to disclose.

Bad Avatar!

Bad Avatar!

Rashomon in the Middle East

This article presents the contending narratives of the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The narratives refer to the ‘Oslo’ peace process of 1993-2000, the negotiations at Camp David (July 2000) and Taba (January 2001), and the ongoing asymmetrical war between Israel and the Palestinians since September 2000.They encompass the ‘official’ social reconstructions of how the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the PLO present the facts and interpret the attitudes of both parties. Moreover, those narratives are almost identical in their logic, though diametrically opposed to each other. Each party blames, totally and unconditionally, the failure of the peace process upon the malign intentions of political destruction and annihilation of the other.The rationale for the paper is that narratives, which are ‘stories with a plot’, do matter, since they shape our identity and our norms, which are crucial components of our reconstruction of social reality. In other words, narratives help to recreate self-perpetuating processes of wishful thinking and self-fulfilling prophecies by providing us with a moral and practical justification, ex post facto, for our acts.

Realism, absence and the man booker shortlist: Damon Galgut's the good doctor

The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut was widely received as a text typifying the South African tradition of politically engaged realism, and its favourable reception was based to some degree on this perception. However, the novel projects apartheid‐era literary tropes into a representation of a post‐apartheid society; in consequence, these tropes draw on conditions which are absented from the narrative. This principle of absence is systematised in that the malign intent, and indeed the facticity, of all the apartheid‐derived actions, sites and characters are represented as suppositional. This system of narrative choices is related to Michael Green's question: “How can a body of texts generated within, and in terms of dissemination and reception still held within, the episteme of anti‐apartheid… be meaningfully related to one beyond apartheid?” (1997:7). The Good Doctor, by virtue of its narrative choices, fails in its attempt to position itself as a post‐apartheid text.

GRIT, Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War is a story that will no doubt be written and rewritten as historians discover evidence that casts light on presently unknown facts, and provide new ‘spins’ on those already known. Indeed, it is quite likely that, like its origins, the end of the Cold War will have its equivalents of orthodoxy and revisionism. Of all the players in this story it is Mikhail Gorbachev who will take the leading role; for some the hero and for others the villain. The story of the Gorbachev era is a controversial one, with the answers to many questions in dispute. Did the West win due to ‘peace through strength’? Was new thinking primarily driven by the need for economic recovery? Was the West too hesitant in its response to Soviet initiatives? For some, the end of the Cold War brought to a conclusion a tragedy in which the two superpowers had embarked upon defensive measures which had led each to believe that the other harboured malign intent; hence Robert Jervis’s assertion that the ‘Cold War may . . . have been an unavoidable tragedy rather than the result of an evil Soviet Union, as the orthodox school has it, or an evil United States, as most revisionists argue’.Robert Jervis, 'The End of the Cold War?', Diplomatic History, 17 (Fall 1993), p. 659. On this interpretation the Cold War was a security dilemma in which ‘each side, in pursuing its own clearly indicated and deeply cherished principles, was only confirming the fear of the other that it was bent on aggression’.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, 'Origins of the Cold War', Foreign Affairs, 46 (Oct. 1967), p. 45. In this article the story of how this tragedy was ended will be told from the perspective of graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT). It will focus on whether Gorbachev employed such a strategy and whether it had a role in ending over forty years of hostility.

Effects of Sucralfate on Mucositis During and Following Radiotherapy of Malignancies in the Head and Neck Region: A double-blind placebo-controlled study

Radiotherapy of head and neck malignancies is accompanied by oral discomforts, such as epithelitis, pain and functional impairment. This can lead to chronic sequalae with subjective distress such as loss of taste and xerostomia and pronounced decrease in quality of life. Thus, the need to reduce the mucosal damage following radiotherapy is obvious. Therefore, we investigated the possible ability of sucralfate, an aluminium hydroxide complex of sulphated sucrose used in the treatment of gastric ulcer, in preventing oral discomfort in patients treated with curative intent for malignancies in the head and neck region. The study was double-blind, placebo-controlled and randomized and included 50 consecutive patients. The study demonstrated that the proportion of patients with severe mucosal reactions was significantly lower in the sucralfate group than in the placebo group.

Count Joseph Kemeny: the Virus and the Beetle

Computer viruses presuppose computers. Viruses which feed upon and corrupt information do not. All that these need are individuals of sufficiently malign intent and a medium of transmission. To be most effective, the medium of transmission must be capable of replicating infinitely the corrupted cell.