Powder Keg Research Articles

Network analysis of trait aggression among community youths and juvenile offenders

ObjectiveThe mainstream view in trait aggression research has regarded the structure as representing the latent cause of the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors that supposedly reflect its nature. Under network perspective, trait aggression is not a latent cause of its features but a dynamic system of interacting elements. The current study uses network theory to explain the structure of relationships between trait aggression features in juvenile offenders and their peers.MethodsNetwork analysis was applied to investigate the dynamic system of trait aggression operationalized by the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire in a sample of community youths (Mage = 17.46, N = 715) and juvenile offenders (Mage = 18.36, N = 834).ResultsThe facet level networks showed that anger is a particularly effective mechanism for activating all other traits. In addition, anger was more strongly associated with physical aggression and the overall network strength was greater in juvenile delinquency networks than in their peers. The item level networks revealed that A4 and A6 exhibited the highest predictability and strength centrality in both samples. Also, the Bayesian network indicated that these two items were positioned at the highest level in the model. There are similarities and differences between juvenile delinquents and community adolescents in trait aggression.ConclusionTrait aggression was primarily activated by difficulty controlling one’s temper and feeling like a powder keg.

How often and under what circumstances do escapes from prison and jail result in violence? An examination of the “powder keg” theory

Little research has examined the “powder keg” theory (that escapes are inherently violent), which has been used in U.S. courts to apply sentencing enhancements to people convicted of escaping. We examine open-source data on 610 escapees from jails and prisons to understand the prevalence and scope of escape-related violence, and the relationship between theoretically relevant covariates and these outcomes. Though our data is not representative of all U.S. escapes, we found that 19.2% of the incidents in our sample resulted in violence, with more violence occurring at the breakout (10.9%) than in the community (8.4%) or during recapture (5.7%). Escapees were more likely to use violence when they were in secure custody or outside the facility, if they fled during morning or evening hours, or if they were incarcerated in a jail rather than a lower security prison. These findings yield numerous implications for theory, policy, and practice.

The Xenology of the Powder Keg of Europe: the Reflection of the Peculiarities of the Friend Oo Foe Dichotomy intThe Balkan Model of the World in the Xenopejorative Vocabulary of the Languages of The Balkan Sprachbund. Articulation of Issue

This article discusses the reflection of the features of the “friend or foe” dichotomy in the Balkan model of the world in the xenologic pejorative vocabulary of the Balkan sprachbund languages: Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Romanian and Serbo-Croatian. The author gives a brief review of the historical, cultural and geopolitical specifics of the Balkan-Carpathian region, which influenced the local peoples’ ideas about strangers; some traditional mythological beliefs of the Balkan peoples related to the conceptual field of otherness are also presented. Based on the analysis of the internal history of the word, an attempt is made to define the main models for constructing derogatory names for strangers in order to compare the data for various Balkan languages and, to the extent possible, build an integral image of the concept of alien in the Balkan conceptual worldview. According to the results of the study, the xenopejorative vocabulary of languages of the Balkan sprachbund shows significant similarities both in terms of form and content. Pejoratives with undifferentiated evaluativity predominate, which could account for the richness of the Balkan derivational morphology and a large number of lexical borrowings in each of the languages; pejoratives with an indication of appearance, features of language and peculiarities of behaviour are also widely represented; however, the first are referentially limited, while the second and the third are universal, from which it is concluded that the prototypical Balkan alien is someone who speaks differently and behaves different-y. At the same time, the most common target for pejorative vocabulary in the Balkan languages among all strangers is the Romani people, which is due both to a number of stereotypical ideas about the physical and behavioural features of this ethnic group, and to the historical isolation caused by the nomadic way of life and the closedness of the Romani community from outsiders.

Playing with fire in a powder keg. The Haitian left in the process of consolidation and decline of the Latin American left (1991-2021).

El presente artículo busca hacer un recuento del desarrollo, evolución y disgregación de las agrupaciones políticas de izquierda en Haití, desde la transición democrática hasta el presente, en el marco de la historia política haitiana reciente. Se examinará, asimismo, la relación de las políticas planteadas y ejecutadas por estos movimientos y la relación de estas con los objetivos de los organismos de la izquierda internacional, en especial el Foro de Sao Paulo (FSP) y los entes patrocinados por el chavismo, como el ALBA y Petrocaribe. Buscaremos responder cuál fue la actuación de la izquierda haitiana, y las relaciones que ésta tuvo con la izquierda latinoamericana, en la crisis que vive Haití desde 2018 hasta la actualidad y que cobró la vida de su joven mandatario Jovenel Moïse, dejando al país en una situación anárquica.

“What Do We Want? Housing! When Do We Want It? Now!” Building a Social Movement in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and Housing Injustice

Homelessness and housing insecurity are often isolating experiences in the United States, where housing and well-being are constructed as individual responsibilities. In this context, mobilization around housing injustice can be challenging. The authors argue that the intersection of the Black Lives Matter protests, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, and housing injustice created a powder keg for social action that was capitalized upon by a local tenant union and social movement organization called Kansas City Tenants. Through a real-time analysis of Kansas City Tenants, a grassroots organization with national reach, the authors explore how it managed to recruit diverse members to the organization, direct sustainable and impactful action toward the needs of those in crisis, and lay the groundwork for future policy and revolutionary initiatives both institutionally and extrainstitutionally.

Re-Evaluation of the Barbarian and the Primitive in the (Pre) Avant-Garde

The heteroimage of the Southeast European semiperiphery was subjected for centuries to geopolitical stereotypes of the Slav, either as a noble savage, as in the works of Fortis and Herder in the 18th and 19th centuries, or as a political “powder keg”, as a Balkan barbarian in more recent perspective. In such a geopolitical imaginary, the Balkans were perceived (described) primarily negatively, representing not only an Oriental Other, but above all a European semi-Other, a barbaric and primitive “Other within” (Todorova). The image of the “noble savage” in the exotic vision, which sets the world in binary oppositions, is used and reinterpreted by the artists of the (pre) Avant-Garde. The movement's inherent impulse to resist and re-evaluate traditional aesthetics, history and institutions, as well as to transgressively redefine both the instances of authorship and the criteria for creating and evaluating artworks, is evident in the way barbarism and primitivism are used as counterparts to the bourgeois normative value system. Their artistic texts and performances have an inherent orientation towards the primitive and the barbaric, which are traditionally presented in opposition to Western culture and civilisation, i.e. the politics of globalisation. At the level of artistic transgression, this transposed “otherness” is treated as a dialogical opponent, an object of fascination and identification, and a site of appropriation of time. This article deals with the way the primitive and the barbaric were treated in the Yugoslav avant-garde, either in some collective undertakings (Zenitism, Surrealism) or in individual creations (Ujević, Krleža). This topic will be addressed in three steps: 1. in the context of reflections on literature as a response to geopolitical prejudices (stereotypes); more specifically, in the concepts of the centre (especially Eurocentrism), civilisation and primitivism; 2. in a consideration of the use of primitivism, barbarism and bohemianism as expressions of aesthetic and public (political) resistance to regulated social practises and value systems; 3. an interpretation of these phenomena in the context of either imaginary or actual literary and social transformations.

NATO and European security in the context of the deteriorating situation in the Black Sea area

Euro-Atlantic security has always been a priority for the North Atlantic Alliance, especially at the beginning of the 21st century, when mankind is facing a complex, dynamic and unpredictable security environment, one of profound economic and social imbalances. The conflict in Ukraine is and will remain a hot topic of the utmost interest, due to its political-military and economic-social implications, both regionally and internationally. For some years now, the entire Black Sea region has been boiling over from a geostrategic point of view, thus becoming Europe's new powder keg. Romania is deeply interested in a stable, democratic Black Sea region, closely linked to Euro-Atlantic structures.

The Impact of Nationalism in the 1990s Yugoslav Crisis

For centuries, the Balkans was the border of the Western world and the Eastern world. It was the region of conflict between large empires; the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Austrian empire set their sight wanting to conquer this area. It gained a nickname for its features, as the Powder keg of Europe. Located in the Balkans, Yugoslavia is an ethnically diverse country. Under doctrines and principle of nationalism, ethnical tension within the country grows, and it reached a peak during the Yugoslav Crisis, which atrocities and war crime against humanity were committed. This paper aims to collect and summarize the role of nationalism in the course of the Yugoslav Crisis in the 1990s. It shows that former Yugoslavias issue appears to have been resolved. The sole outcome was redrawing the political map based on violence and terror.

Religious and Political Antagonism Between Greece and Bulgaria in the Context of the Church Dispute, the Treaty of San Stefano, and the Treaty of Berlin

This paper deals with the question of the driving forces of the religious, ecclesiastic, and political antagonism between Greece and Bulgaria in the context of the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, in combination with the national awakening and ethnic rivalries of the period. As a result, the study investigates the Greek-Bulgarian Church Dispute, which involved the quest for an autonomous Bulgarian Church, the schism from the Patriarchate, and the antagonism for religious loyalties connected to ethnic identities after the pre-national era and the emergence of nationalism. Consequently, the paper examines the political and nationalistic aspects of Greek-Bulgarian antagonism, with a special focus on the politico-territorial disputes resulting from the San Stefano and Berlin Treaties. Lastly, the paper showcases the connection this antagonism had to the Macedonian Question regarding the cause of the never-ending turmoil in the Balkans, the powder keg of Europe.

Nights of Plague: A Novel by Orhan Pamuk

Reviewed by: Nights of Plague: A Novel by Orhan Pamuk Matt A. Hanson ORHAN PAMUK Nights of Plague: A Novel Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York. Knopf. 2022. 704 pages. TO PASS BETWEEN history and fiction is to walk a road so wide that either side is almost always inconspicuous from the other. But, at times, they converge along one-way streets, through invisible cities built with books, populated by intellectuals, ruled, as it were, by historians. Novels, there, are at the mercy of historical discipline, such as the canonization of art, the fixing of time to a master record of events, the search for facts that can be upheld in a court of law. Turkey's Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, has, especially since winning the prize in 2006, indulged his readers in the evocative, multilayered, and still-contested historiography that gurgles up from the wells and springs of the former Ottoman Empire, the sphere of influence that radiates from the decadence of its late capital, Istanbul, the largest Turkish metropolis, stamping the ink of its legacy, as yet unfaded, from the postmodern, orientalist imagination. His eleventh novel, Nights of Plague—translated with a neoclassical bent by the exceptionally talented Ekin Okalp, ostensibly to capture the temporal harmony of the turn-of-the-century plot—pivots around the year 1901 on the fictitious island of Mingheria in the Aegean Sea, a sedate yet restive Ottoman province. The trigger of its native discontent is a particularly timely trope in literary history—namely, pandemics—from Boccaccio to Camus. Distinct from Turkey's earlier contenders for the Nobel, the magical realism of Kurdish folklore in Yaşar Kemal or the avant-garde feminism of Leyla Erbil, Pamuk assumes establishment airs. His voice competently and craftily parallels the tone of state function with its bureaucratic armies of armchair intellectuals, proper and appropriate for a contemporary man [End Page 66] of letters steeped in the dusty troves that beset all who feast on the behemoth grandiloquence of the Ottoman era. Mingheria is a theater for Pamuk's fantasy of world-building realism. His clean sentences are fortified with the self-styled authority of scholarship, at times risking documentary dryness. Amid a host of well-articulated and often seamlessly intertwined metafictional devices, referring to the memoirs and histories of the personalities he invents, he conjures the roving, meticulous observations of society, architecture, and fashion that inspired the modern, social novel. The themes of Nights of Plague are common to the last years of Ottoman decline, particularly during Abdul Hamid's infamous reign when the sultan lost his dynasty's remaining territories in Europe to burgeoning nationalist movements in the Balkans. Pamuk novelizes the making of the fractious political identities that ignited the powder keg of World War I and which later supported the foundations of the Turkish republic up from the ashes of its sick, old-man imperialism. As a Turkish novel, Nights of Plague remains topical, perhaps even prescient. Pamuk, despite his tendency to rarified elitism, is a bold critic of present-day Turkey. The story of the novel reflects certain political currents that hold fast. A key character, known as Bonkowski Pasha, working directly for the sultan as chief inspector of public health and sanitation, is dispatched to Mingheria—which is half-Muslim, half-Christian—prior to the declaration of outbreak. The cloak-and-dagger assassination of Bonkowski Pasha, a chemist of Polish extraction whose surname is a measure of integration into palace service, is revealed to have been perpetrated by the gang of a pernicious man named Ramiz, who is also the nephew of the religious sectarian, Sheikh Hamdullah. Before the end of the novel, Hamdullah rules the post-revolutionary island like a strongman reminiscent of Turkey's populist, Islamist president. Pamuk frequently recalls Abdul Hamid's fascination with Sherlock Holmes, and webs of intrigue spin out to encompass the emperor as part of the murderous scheme. The narrator speaks of herself in the first-person as great-granddaughter to the Ottoman princess, who quite diplomatically helped Mingheria transition from imperial province to independent nation. "I am a direct descendant of one of this novel's principal characters," Pamuk writes, as her. Subjective identification...

Better Particularizing Solutions to Defuse the Infant Formula Powder Keg

Better Particularizing Solutions to Defuse the Infant Formula Powder Keg

БАЛКАНЫ: РАЗДЕЛЕННЫЕ ИЛИ РАЗДЕЛИВШИЕСЯ? АНАЛИЗ НАРРАТИВОВ БАЛКАНСКОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ НА ПОСТЪЮГОСЛАВСКОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ

The states of the former Yugoslavia and, more broadly, the Balkans today remain one of the reference points of world politics. In many ways, the Balkan Peninsula is still considered the “powder keg of Europe” due to the political division of its communities. However, the well-established toolkit for analyzing political processes in the region often reveals its predictive failure. One of the solutions in constructing trajectories for the political development of the Balkans can be an identity prism of research. In the context of the exacerbation of ethno-political conflicts after the disintegration of the SFRY, the competition of national projects and discourses of the development of newly formed polities, wars of memory and the struggle of historical narratives, economic crises and the global reorganization of the world, this paper presents a classification of post-Yugoslav states according to the nature of the politicization of social divisions that accompany identification processes in the region. Exploring the historical and political development of the Balkans and its modern narratives, the article proposes a new approach to the identity analysis of the former Yugoslavia countries - the “Center - Frontier” polarity, as well as a cognitive map of the region based on this approach.

Prelude to genocide: “the Armenian question” and the massacres in the Ottoman Empire

The faith of the Ottoman Armenians was closely linked to the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the last decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. The interests of the European diplomacy, the bundle of religious and ethnic communities competing for status and resources, the administrative inefficiency and corruption of state officials and a mischievous rule of Abdul Hamid II created the powder keg that led to a political deterioration for all parties involved in the Ottoman “millet system”. The status-quo of centuries of Muslim ascendancy was succumbing and the sultan’s authority was menaced by the lack of unity between the different state constituents. The Ottoman elite started looking for someone to blame for the fall back and since the Armenians were eager to improve their condition, even working together with the external enemies of the Porte, they gradually became the excellent scapegoat. The political fragility of the Ottoman state made the massacres against the Armenians possible, opening the path for a prospect to better homogenize and strengthen the state: the physical exclusion of Armenians through annihilation or ottomanization/turkification.

Carmina Balcanica – o revistă a dialogului intercultural

The international cultural magazine Carmina Balcanica has been intiated in 2008. It has as main goals to promote the South-Eastern culture, to establish an intercultural dialogue between people from the East and West, and from the East and East as well. In its pages, the editors delimited the concept of Balkanism, emphasizing the mixture of elements which imbue the psychology, mentality and, correspondingly, the forms of artistic creation specific to the sensitiveness of Southern man, past and present. The editors are trying to reopen the horizon of realities wherein Iorga had envisaged South-Eastern Europe as a historical, spiritual, religious, ethnographic, artistic, cultural, folkloric unity of morals and manners, institutions and influences. At the same time, the editors’ aim is to soften the pejorative, quite demonizing, image of the Levant as Europe’s powder keg. Their intention is also to recall the fact that, above and beyond the tragedies which have been haunting it, the Levant was – and still is – the cradle of a great civilization.

The Plan Nord in Northern Québec, Canada: Pathway to Peace and Prosperity or Powder Keg?

ABSTRACT In 2011, the Government of Québec, Canada announced an ambitious twenty-five-year plan to develop the province’s northern region—an area nearly twice the size of France. A centrepiece of the Plan Nord is to integrate the province’s various Indigenous peoples in the sustainable development of the region. However, there are early warning signs of the potential for future conflict as some Indigenous groups mobilized opposition against proposed developments. This raises important questions: could the plan enhance prospects for improved cooperation between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous groups or is it likely to engender conflict? Which factors explain the diverging levels of support for the plan between the region’s principal Indigenous peoples (i.e. Cree, Inuit, Innu)? The paper uses the ‘sons of the soil’ (SoS) conflict framework to theorize the mechanisms that can give rise to—or prevent the escalation of—Indigenous and non-Indigenous conflict in northern Québec. Though typically applied to case studies in the Global South, the SoS conflict framework provides a novel approach for understanding the contentious politics surrounding land, territory, and natural resource development in settler-colonial contexts.

Jamail A. Kamlian and Juvanni A. Caballero. Informal Credit (Pagsanda) Among the Tausug of Sulu, Mindanao, Philippines: The Interrelation of Economic, Social and Religious Factors (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2018). A Book Review

Focusing on an indigenously evolved informal credit system (pagsanda), the book dwells on the centrality of money-lending and indebtedness as the fulcrum of the dynamics of society. How is it that the pagsanda as a communal self-help mechanism intended to lend a hand in moments of need is tied up with, or even central to the dynamics of conflict among the Tausugs in Sulu? How can something so condemned as un-Islamic become so prevalent and widespread among the Muslims in the area? The book opens the discourse to help find answers to these questions. And it did so by weaving a narrative that captures the interplay of various issue areas that feed on the other to create a self-sustaining system that becomes a precarious social powder keg. The pagsanda’s pristine form of unselfish assistance has clearly morphed through time into many variants of exploitative and even oppressive callous social exchange. By analyzing the complex network of connections between the pagsanda, local politics, economics, socio-cultural practices and violent conflict, the book sheds light into the nature and causes of the social dynamics in Sulu.

The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories by Andreas Karkavitsas

Reviewed by: The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories by Andreas Karkavitsas Patricia Felisa Barbeito (bio) Andreas Karkavitsas, The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories. Translated by Johanna Hanink. New York: Penguin Books, 2021. Pp. ix + 220. Paper $17.00. The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories belatedly but brilliantly brings to an English readership long-overlooked works by Andreas Karkavitsas. One of the most prominent authors of Greece’s generation of the 1880s and a practitioner of ethografia, a form of Greek naturalism focused on the rural experience, Karkavitsas was known for his masterful blend of folk and literary traditions, as well as his keen eye for the texture and tenor of the life and vernaculars of the common folk, all set against the backdrop of the turbulent political and social upheaval that caused Greece and the wider Balkan region to be dubbed the “powder keg” of Europe during this period. Coinciding in its release with the bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence (1821) and the centennial of the outbreak of the second Greco-Turkish war (1921), this volume brings together what can be considered two main axes of Karkavitsas’s reflections on evolving nationalist debates: on the one hand, his final, historically significant [End Page 487] albeit, at the time, negatively reviewed novel, The Archeologist (1904), with its treatment of the territorial aspirations and anxieties prompted by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; on the other, four of the best-known stories from his celebrated collection Tales from the Prow (1899), with the transnational and transcultural ethos that animates the maritime life they describe. Whether digging up ancient relics from the ground or diving down into the oral traditions of the sea, the works in this volume plumb the potentialities of the modern Greek novel. An allegory-cum-folktale-cum-morality play, The Archeologist presents us with the disparate forces shaping an emergent Greek modernity via the tale of two brothers, their romances, and the homosocial patterns of desire to which those romances attest. The elder brother, Aristodemus, literally succumbs to the cold dead weight of his obsession with antiquity and the fatal romanticizing of the foreign philhellene scholars with whom he consorts. The younger, Dimitrakis, smitten by the peasant vitality of the “bastardized” Elpida, promises, through the anticipated literal and figurative fruitfulness of this union, to hold at bay the encroachments of the Ottoman, Bulgarian, Serb, and Vlach neighbors he is in competition with. Similar themes of fraternal competition, betrayal, and commemoration shape the selections from Tales from the Prow, stories gleaned from the yarns told to Karkavitsas by the salty seafarers he encountered during his time as a ship’s physician; as Johanna Hanink writes in her introduction, they attest to Karkavitsas’s reclamation of “the deep as the literary territory of the modern Greek nation-state” (xxxix) and the inauguration of a rich and lasting tradition of modern Greek maritime writing. Situated on two resonant frontiers of Greek modernity, the volume presents us with worlds within worlds—worlds both central and marginal, modern and ancient, that undergird just as much as they unsettle some of that modernity’s central discourses. Hanink’s training as a classicist and her work focusing on the legacies of antiquity inform a remarkable introduction that contextualizes and frames her translations by means of the two aforementioned axes. In other words, the introduction locates Karkavitsas not only in terms of his national contexts but also in terms of his broader transnational literary and cultural concerns, which range from the role of the distant past in the conception of the modern nation to the evolution of maritime literature. If, as Anthony Burgess famously said, “translation . . . is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture,” the pleasures of reading this volume are very much deepened by a pedagogical positioning that elucidates not only the role of Karkavitsas in the development of the modern Greek novel, but also, in tandem, the intersections and dialogues—from Phil-hellenism to naturalism—that animate global literary cultures. [End Page 488] Of course, no discussion of works in translation ought to overlook the question of language, of language as culture—a point of particular significance to any discussion of these...

A CASE OF INCOMPATIBILITY DUE TO MATERNAL ANTI-C

Hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn (HDN) is a condition in which the lifespan of an infant's red blood cells (RBCs) is shortened by the action of specific IgG antibody (ies) derived from the mother directed against Rhesus or other blood group antigens on fetal RBCs that are inherited from the father but are not expressed by the mother. The widespread use of Rh immune globulin has dramatically decreased the occurrence of anti D-HDN among D negative pregnant women, but has not eliminated the problem. No measures are available to prevent sensitization to other blood groups, most notably other Rhesus (C,c,E,e), Kell and Duffy antigens. In this article, a case of anti-c incompatibility is presented and the issue of risks involving Rh negative blood transfusion in aloimmunized patients with anti-c is discussed. Twin live babies named newborn1, sex female, and newborn2 were born from the 8th pregnancy of a 38 year-old brazilian mother from Pinhão-Paraná-Brazil through a normal vaginal route. Medical report of newborn1 during twenty days described levels of indirect bilirubin oscillating between 7 to 11 mg/dl and hemoglobin dropping from 13,9 to 10,1 g/dl without jaundice, phototherapy or transfusion registered. Thirty days postnatal, newborn1 had hemoglobin 7,7 g/dl and indirect bilirubin 11,3mg/dl and a blood transfusion was required. Antibody screen of the mother was positive and crossmatching with O negative blood was not compatible. Other tests, performed at Hemocentro Regional de Guarapuava-Paraná, identified mother's blood as A positive, phenotype C(+)c(-)E(-)e(+)K1(-), antibody screen detected anti-c antibodies with 1:256 titre. Baby's blood sample was identified as O positive, phenotype C(+)c(+)E(-)e(+)K1(-) with the direct anti-globulin test (DAT) positive (2+). After centrifugation with saline solution baby's sample after showed yellowed supernatant. A blood transfusion with 30 ml of O positive, c antigen negative blood, match compatible with the mother's serum, was transfused without reactions. At the hospital the mother revealed that these were her 8th and 9th children. Also, she said to be illiterate and that ignored her pregnancy until the 8th month and for it she simply did not have antenatal care. Unfortunately details about her other pregnancies could not be got. Anti-c is an important Rh antibody that may cause severe HDN, and in some cases may be as severe as anti-D HDN. In a series of 1022 cases of non Rh D aloimmunization Kenneth found that only anti-c was associated with severe HDN that ended in hydropic stillbirth or necessitated intrauterine blood transfusion[1]. This was not the case presented in the article. Nevertheless, an important aspect embedded issue along with anti-c that goes unnoticed by many refers to the matter of Rh negative blood available for transfusion, including aloimmunized anti-c patients. The stereotype held by Rh negative blood as universal blood not applies to anti-c. If ones take into account the high incidence of c antigen both in Rh positive and Rh negative blood among the population, we can suppose that people having anti c antibodies, like the mother in the article, are sitted on an authentic powder keg where a transfusional mistake, either for misinformation or any reason can bring unexpected results.

The Xenology of the Powder Keg of Europe: the Reflection of the Peculiarities of Own — Alien Dichotomy in the Balkan Model of the World in the Xenopejorative Vocabulary of the Languages of the Balkan Sprachbund — Articulation of Issue

The article discusses the reflection of the features of the own — alien dichotomy in the Balkan model of the world in the xenologic pejorative vocabulary of the Balkan sprachbund languages: Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Romanian and Serbo-Croatian. The author gives a brief review of the historical, cultural and geopolitical specifics of the Balkan-Carpathian region, which influenced the local peoples’ ideas about strangers; some traditional mythological beliefs of the Balkanians related to the conceptual field of otherness are also presented. Based on the analysis of the internal history of the word, an attempt is made to define the main models for constructing derogatory names for strangers in order to compare the data for various Balkan languages and, to the extent possible, build an integral image of the concept of alien in the Balkan conceptual worldview. According to the results of the study, the xenopejorative vocabulary of languages of the Balkan sprachbund shows significant similarities both in terms of form and content. Pejoratives with undifferentiated evaluativity absolutely predominate, which could account for the richness of the Balkan derivational morphology and a large number of lexical borrowings in each of the languages; pejoratives with an indication of appearance, features of language and peculiarities of behavior are also widely represented, however, the first are referentially limited, while the second and the third are universal, from which it is concluded that the prototypical Balkan alien is someone who speaks differently and behaves differently. At the same time, the most common target for pejorative vocabulary in the Balkan languages among all strangers is Roma people, which is bound both to a number of stereotyped ideas about the physical and behavioral distinctive features of this ethnic group, and to the historical isolation caused by the nomadic way of life and the closedness of the Roma community from outsiders.

A spark to the powder keg: Microneedle-based antitumor nanomedicine targeting reactive oxygen species accumulation for chemodynamic/photothermal/chemotherapy

Hypothesis.Chemodynamic therapy (CDT) can efficiently kill cancer cells by producing hydroxyl radical (•OH), a kind of high-toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS), via Fenton or Fenton-like reactions. This study involved a versatile nanomedicine, MSN@DOX/GA-Fe/PDA (M@DGP), delivered via microneedles, which was expected to combine chemodynamic/photothermal/chemotherapy and efficiently increase ROS accumulation to achieve significant therapeutic efficacy against melanoma.Experiments.The composition of the synthesized nanoparticles was confirmed by a series of characterizations including transmission electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and zeta potential. The photothermal properties of the nanomedicine was evaluated via infrared imaging, and •OH-producing ability was evaluated by UV–Vis and electron spin resonance. The mechanisms of ROS accumulation were studied in B16 cells by detecting intracellular •OH, glutathione, and ROS levels. The drug-loaded microneedles (M@DGP-MNs) were prepared, and their morphology and mechanical strength were characterized. The in vivo antimelanoma effect and biosafety evaluation of the nanomedicine were investigated in tumor-bearing C57 mice.Findings.M@DGP was successfully prepared and could achieve ROS accumulation through a photothermal-enhanced Fenton reaction, polydopamine-induced glutathione consumption, and doxorubicin-mediated mitochondrial dysfunction which induced oxidative stress and apoptosis of tumor cells. M@DGP-MNs showed superior antitumor efficacy and good biosafety, providing a promising strategy for melanoma treatment.