National Scandal Research Articles

The dispossessed in our system

Tinkering with the exam system misses the mark and does nothing to help the underbelly of underachievers that is our national scandal, says Geoff Barton

Ongoing pay cap is nothing short of a national scandal.

The cost of living rose by 2.5% during 2016, as inflation climbed to its highest level since June 2014. Yet the vast majority of nurses received pay rises of only 1% and - as we all know - 1% of not much works out to very little indeed.

John Buchanan's Philadelphia Diploma Mill and the Rise of State Medical Boards.

The absence of medical licensing laws in most states during the years following the American Civil War made it possible for unscrupulous individuals to capitalize upon the weak governmental role in medical practice and educational charters. The practices of John Buchanan during much of his tenure at the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania, in issuing thousands of dubiously earned diplomas, caused a national and international scandal. The traffic in diplomas became so flagrant that regulatory oversight of physicians and their practice, such as that conducted by the Illinois Board of Health led by Dr. John Rauch, developed rapidly across the United States. Though multiple factors prompted the rebirth of medical licensing laws, professional, educational, journalistic, and public concerns for bogus diplomas played an important role.

El Temor a Las Multitudes: La Formación Del Proyecto Conservador En México, 1808–1834

El Temor a Las Multitudes: La Formación Del Proyecto Conservador En México, 1808–1834

Failure to tackle FGM is a national scandal, MPs say

Failure to tackle FGM is a national scandal, MPs say

The Nigerian Prisons as a Punitive Rather than Reformatory Institution

The Nigerian prisons are fast becoming an immense embarrassment and a national scandal. This short paper attempts to theoretically showcase not only; the extent to which the Nigerian Prison is more punitive than reformatory, but also, suggests measures to be put in place with a view to improving or reforming the prison system.

The Constitutional Referendum of 1866: Andrew Johnson and the Original Meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause

Fourteenth Amendment scholars commonly assume that there is a relative silence in the historical record regarding public discussion of the proposed Amendment. In fact there was rich and extended public debate regarding the meaning of the Section One of the Amendment and the need to protect the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. These robust debates did not take place in state legislative assemblies, but in the campaign speeches, newspaper editorials and public documents accompanying the mid-term elections of 1866. Both Democrats and Republicans made the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a central part of their party’s platform, with the election itself serving as a national referendum on the merits of the text. Because originalist accounts of the Fourteenth Amendment have tended to focus on the framing debates in the Thirty-Ninth Congress, they have both undervalued and underexplored the public political debates of 1866. Most critically, they have completely missed President Andrew Johnson’s important role as leader of the Anti-Amendment Party in the drama of the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson’s sustained attempt to defeat the Amendment deepened public understanding of the proposed text and its impact on the autonomy of the States. Viewing ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment through the lens of a national election also allows us to see how politically salient events during the summer of 1866 transformed a dry theoretical discussion of the Amendment’s merits into an argument over what was literally a matter of life and death in the southern States. The July 30 massacre of freedmen meeting in convention in New Orleans became a national scandal, particularly when it became clear that state officials had led the attack. Republicans used the New Orleans riot and Johnson’s feckless response as stark examples of the need to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect the rights of speech and assembly against state abridgement — rights that were widely accepted examples of the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.

After Lawrence: racial violence and policing in the UK

As the UK celebrates the conviction of two men for the racist murder nineteen years ago of Stephen Lawrence, the author draws on research into racial violence being carried out by the Institute of Race Relations to show that violence is still at very high levels and is becoming dispersed to new areas. The Macpherson Report may have brought in changes to police practices, but violent, popular racism, encouraged by wider government policies, such as the war on terror, is still a national scandal.

‘Dirty little secret’: Journalism, privacy and the case of Sharleen Spiteri

In both the Australian and British debates about media ethics and accountability, a key question about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal was whether or not the law should provide stronger protection for individuals from invasion of their privacy by news organisations. There is no explicit reference to privacy in the terms of reference of either Britain’s Leveson or Australia’s Finkelstein inquiries. It can safely be said, however, that invasions of personal privacy by NOTW journalists were an important element in the political atmospherics which lead to their establishment. This article also asks where that dividing line should be drawn. However, it approaches the issue of privacy from a rather different perspective, drawing on a case study from relatively recent history involving Sharleen Spiteri, an HIV+ sex worker who caused a national scandal when she appeared on television in Australia in 1989 and revealed that she sometimes had unprotected sex with her clients.

African Land, Up for Grabs

Sheikh Saudi and Ethiopia, Arabia, Mohammed where spends Hussein he his was time born Ali shuttling Al in a Amoudi, village between 64 a years citizen Riyadh ago. of Sheikh Saudi A abia, spends his time shuttlin between Ri adh d Ethiopia, where he was born i a village 64 ye rs ago. The son of a Yemeni father and Ethiopian mother, Al Amoudi boasts an estimated net worth of $10 billion. He is the richest Ethiopian and, according to Forbes, the 64th richest man in the world. Fortyfive years ago, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia and built his fortune in oil refineries and the booming construction industry. But Al Amoudi never lost touch with his homeland. In fact, Ethiopian real-estate has become a key part of his burgeoning portfolio. In 2009, Al Amoudi's company, Saudi Star Agricultural Development, signed long-term leases for nearly 25,000 acres in the country's northeastern regional state, Gambella, to produce

Toxic algal blooms and the rhetoric of sustainability

There is growing public concern with water pollution in Australia. The degradation of our waterways is seen by many as a national scandal. It is timely, in view of the fixation of various Governments with sustainability, to consider how we should manage this fundamental resource in a sustainable manner. Eutrophication comes about when nutrients enter water and stimulate excessive plant growth. The nutrients drive eutrophication and cause the excessive growth of nuisance algal that degrade the user of the water. Algae may cause an obvious scum on the surface. They give a distinct odour and/or colouration to the water which is unpleasant to consumers and may be costly and difficult to remove from water supplies. Cyanobacteria (Blue-green algae) may be toxic to stock, insects and to humans (May, 1978, Falconer et al., 1983).

A working-class hero is something to be: the American Musicians’ Union's attempt to ban the Beatles, 1964

AbstractThis article examines the historical and cultural significance of the attempted ban on the Beatles’ concerts in the US by the American Federation of Musicians and the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States government in 1964. While there has been much attention given to the court case against John Lennon waged by the INS and the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, much less is known about the earlier case brought against the Beatles by the INS and the Department of Labor on behalf of the AFM, which became a national scandal in 1964, pitting fans of the Beatles against the AFM and the INS. Fans framed the controversy over the Beatles as a cultural conflict between generations, while the AFM framed the problem as a labour market issue. My examination of the incident reveals the way in which a submerged cultural problem embedded in a putatively economic discourse rose to the surface through conflicts over the discursive framing of the Beatles controversy. This case is important not only in terms of expanding our empirical knowledge of the internal history of the Beatles and rock and roll music, but also more generally as an episode that foreshadowed the cultural conflict between the American labour union bureaucracy and the counter-culture that emerged in the late 1960s. This essay analyses heretofore-unexamined documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration.

Opening and Closing the Jury Room Door: A Sociohistorical Consideration of the 1955 Chicago Jury Project Scandal

In 1954 social scientists and legal scholars from the University of Chicago Law School's Jury Project recorded six jury deliberations in Wichita, Kansas. Over a year later, news of the recordings erupted into a national scandal, and the researchers were subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. This article examines how the recordings came to be viewed as a violation of the tradition of trial by jury and a “stepping stone to wrecking the entire system of justice.” I begin by reviewing letters exchanged among the researchers, which illustrate how they easily arranged the jury recordings with the help of both judges and lawyers. I then analyze arguments against the jury recordings expressed in more than 100 newspaper editorials about the incident. Vehement criticisms of the jury recordings indicate that secret deliberations are viewed as both practical and symbolic underpinnings of the tradition of trial by jury. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this case for more recent revelations of jury room discussions.

A Betrayal of Trust

An examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French history indicates that the relationship between the Jesuits and Quietism was shaped by politics as well as by concerns of theological orthodoxy. During the late 1690s, the Jesuits championed François Fénelon accused of Quietism at the same time as they spearheaded an attack against Quietism in Burgundy, emphasizing crimes of spiritual incest or the abuse of clerical authority. Such ambiguity indicates that the Jesuits were motivated by a desire to consolidate political power in Louis XIV... trades court. However, the fusion of Quietist heresy, charges of spiritual incest, and political gamesmanship would ultimately make the Jesuits themselves vulnerable to claims of heresy and abuse when the Girard/Cadière affair became a national scandal in 1731. This essay argues that this disquiet over clerical behavior and power was articulated in a changing political culture between the late seventeenth century and the 1730s. Growing dissatisfaction against the crown established a new political consciousness, one that regarded the politics of secrecy as problematic if not outright illegitimate. The secrecy of the confession, the emphasis on interiority seemingly at the expense of morality, and the enigmatic language of mysticism, all associated with Quietism played into fears of clerical (or “Jesuit”) cabal and conspiracy. When Jesuit opponents linked the order to Quietism, they presented the Jesuits as threats to an emerging set of political values in which legitimate authority was transparent and open while illegitimate power operated in the shadows.

Does Anyone Have the Right to Say, “I Don’t Care”?: Resistance and Reverence at Schindler’s List

On Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1 994, a group of sixty-nine mostly black and Latino high school students from Oakland's Castlemont High were ejected from the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland after patrons complained to the management that they were talking and laughing during a matinee of Schindler 's List (Rich 17). The students, who ranged in age from fourteen to eighteen, had been brought there on a fieldtrip by Mark Rader, a science teacher who had hoped that exposure to the film would encourage them to think about racial injustice and discrimination (Spolar Cl). Although the Jewish Community Relations Council had prepared a study guide in conjunction with the Holocaust Center of Northern California and sent it to the Oakland School District, it did not arrive in time for Rader to use, and according to his own account, he did little to prepare the students for what they were about to see outside of warning them to be on their best behavior (Levin 3). Some students later claimed that the majority of them didn't know about the Holocaust and had completed no lessons on the subject at Castlemont (Blacks and Jews). Matinee attendees that day remember the talking and laughter as going on continuously until the projector was turned off one hour into the film (BlacL· and Jews). Students and their chaperons later claimed that the behavior that caused the most outrage, a comment and laughter after a Nazi shot a female Jewish architect in the head, involved only ten of the students at the most (Spolar Cl). Among the group of offended theater patrons were Holocaust survivors, according to the theater manager (Rich 17). As the students were marched out of the theater, about half of the remaining 450 spectators burst into spontaneous applause (Mowatt AlO). Both the students and the majority of the remaining authence may have thought they could put the incident behind them and continue with their field trip or the film, but someone tipped off the local Bay Area news media, and that applause became the opening shot in a salvo of accusations and recriminations that eventually became a national scandal, culminating nearly three months later in director Steven Spielberg's appearance, along with California Governor Pete Wilson, at a Castlemont school assembly. This paper examines how a conflict within an authence at a single movie screening became the subject of a national news scandal. The witness testimony I use as support should be read not as definitive accounts of the incident, but rather as symptomatic of the very discourses that generated and sustained the scandal. Since most of the interviews were made after significant attention had already been given the incident, it is impossible to determine to what extent the controversy reflected the rhetoric of the students and other authence members or vice versa. What is clear, though, is that very specific events and discourses in the contemporary historical context predisposed the media to portray the incident as an example of outrageously inappropriate and insensitive behavior by possible anti-Semitic black youth while ignoring questions of the appropriateness of the film for students that age, the educational value of the film in general, and, most crucially, the nature of ordinary youth, and particularly black youth, behavior in movie theaters. The Castlemont story appeared during a time of widespread reporting about a perceived crisis in relations between blacks and Jews. This rift had first come into the national consciousness during the 1991 series of riots that took place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood largely inhabited by Hassidic Jews and Afro-Caribbeans.1 Concerns about relations between the two communities had been reactivated just a month and a half before the Castlemont incident when Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a former officer in the Nation of Islam, gave a speech at Kean College in New Jersey, during which he notoriously referred to Jews as the bloodsuckers of the black community (Martello 3). …

AMA Calls for Remedies for Psychiatric-Bed Shortage

AMA Calls for Remedies for Psychiatric-Bed Shortage

A fall between goalposts

The news that it is getting harder to secure state funded social care for people with moderate needs will not have surprised anyone working with older people. But the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) report on The State of Social Care in England in 2005/6 has turned a hidden trend into a national scandal.

An Air that Kills: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal

By Andrew Schneider and David McCumber New York:G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004. 440 pp. ISBN: 0-399-15095-1, $25.95 cloth. Asbestos has tragically affected communities throughout the world, largely through its effects on workers. This powerful history is presented with dramatic flair in the new investigative book by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber. An Air That Kills provides a compelling update on what should now be a closed chapter in occupational health in the United States. More remarkably, it also asserts the potential impact of the long-feared environmental health disaster arising from negligent use of asbestos. This book explores new territory in nonoccupational asbestos exposure. The book records the history of some of the heroes of occupational medicine in the United States and also names some of the “black hats.” It also addresses risk and risk reduction related to nonoccupational exposure to asbestos. Here it lands on thin ice, and may even fall through it by omitting results of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) survey that could validate its thesis, as well as by making some extreme statements. Schneider and McCumber note that the federal government “did the biggest public health survey in its history. A third of the town got . . . the ‘death sentence.’” The data from the survey, not presented in this book although published in EHP (111:1753–1759), do not substantiate this statement. The nonrandom sample of 6,668 adults in Libby showed 17.8% with pleural abnormalities and < 1% with interstitial abnormalities. These findings are hard to reconcile with certain asbestos-related mortality of one-third of the town. A wealth of investigative reporting exposes how environmental asbestos concerns were neglected by the Bush–Whitman Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the desire to get Wall Street going after September 11. The authors also describe vermiculite shipments to over 750 locations, 293 major users, and 45–73 expansion facilities throughout North America. Attic insulation, concrete, wallboard, roofing, crayons, and potting soil, as well as tremolite-contaminated talc, taconite ore, and Sierra foothill soil, contain contaminated vermiculite or other “naturally occurring asbestos.” No one has epidemiologically established the risk of mesothelioma from these environmental exposures. This book amply documents “an enormous hole in the safety net that people assume is out there in modern life” for toxic substance regulation and enforcement. The allegation that Libby’s doctors rarely diagnosed asbestosis because doctors were high in the town’s caste system is telling but not documented. The story that W.R. Grace & Co. and others conspired to intimidate a doctor who was willing to diagnose asbestosis is convincing, as are other claims of Grace’s unethical behavior. The lack of chapter titles decreases the utility and approachability of this book. There are too many silly errors of fact, and it is frustrating to read a provocative statement characterizing the World Trade Center cleanup without a source citation. Such a source might likely be an interview rather than a report that could be reviewed by readers. This is not an academic book, but a popular and, to some extent, a muckraking book based on a lot of journalistic research. While U.S. EPA scientists and investigators were struggling to document the Libby problem in the late 1990s, they uncovered reports from 1980 and 1982 that had already characterized the problem. But neither miners nor the public had been warned. The book alleges that 15 years before it took any concrete action, the U.S. EPA knew that asbestos was killing residents of Libby, stonewalled, and then in an about-face requested an investigation, eventually giving an award to the local administrators who had publicized both the situation and the U.S. EPA’s period of inaction. There are even implications that close ties between W.R. Grace CEO J. Peter Grace and the Reagan White House might have led to downplaying the earlier knowledge. The U.S. EPA had knowledge that could have begun a reduction in exposure, for miners and the town, 15–20 years sooner. W.R. Grace made denials until they declared bankruptcy. Beyond the hyperbole and the melodrama of the individual tragedies, there is much new history and political insight to recommend this book. This is important material in the unfortunately still unfolding scientific and historical chapters on asbestos and disease.

Linking Theory to Practice: A ‘Grand Challenge’ for Management Research in the 21stCentury?

There is much to be done to meet the challenge of undertaking high quality research, rigorously produced yet in a form and manner that makes it accessible and utilisable by practitioners. In our view, healing the division between theory and practice constitutes a 'grand challenge' for everyone involved in the management field. Ignoring such a divide would be unthinkable in other professional fields, such as medicine or engineering, where a national scandal would ensue if science base and practice were not inextricably and necessarily interlinked.

Avoid another cold scandal

THOUSANDS of deaths caused by the heat wave this summer were a tragic reminder of how vulnerable many older people are to extreme temperatures. The hot weather casualties were hopefully a one-off with record high temperatures catching everyone unawares. But when it comes to seasonal changes in the opposite direction, there is no real excuse for lack of action. Every year, between 20,000 and 50,000 older people still die from cold-related illnesses in the UK, a figure that has not changed since 1990. Our record is the worst in Europe and, bearing in mind that the numbers exclude people who live in cold misery, it is nothing short of a national scandal. We should be ashamed of this neglect.