The best available predictor of domestic homicide is offender’s prior suicidal behaviour. Compared to a range of other risk factors, domestic murders (both completed and attempted) are most powerfully associated with an offender’s history of suicide attempts, threats, ideation, or self-harm.
Most domestic homicides occur without any prior police contact involving the victim and offender in a relationship. The idea of preventing domestic homicide by responding better to domestic abuse is not consistent with the facts: police have very few opportunities to prevent domestic homicide with no prior police contacts unless they can proactively detect couples at high risk through predictors like suicide. Current information systems are inadequate for identifying suicidal behavior among couples with abuse problems known to police. Police have no means at present for instant queries of operational IT as to whether a suspect has a prior history of suicidal ideation. Such queries could be a useful means for identifying dangerous offenders more accurately, and preventing more homicides.
Organizations other than police hold suicidal behaviour intelligence that could help predict homicide, but do not share it with police. Bridger’s analysis of post-mortem Domestic Homicide Reviews found that someone had prior knowledge of suicidal behavior by 40% of men who killed women, but much of that knowledge was never made available to the police until after the death. Legislators may want to re-examine any privacy laws that require this information to be concealed from police and debate the privacy rights of individuals versus the rights of people they may kill.
Key Facts About Domestic Abuse: Lessons from Eight Studies
Global Warming Policy Foundation.- The report, by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels, have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder” — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.
As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:
“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”
What is worse, the greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on power stations, industry and cars, as a way to prevent any shift to industrial power production. As Dr Paunio makes clear, most air pollution in poor countries is in fact caused by burning low-quality biofuels and coal in domestic stoves:
“Trying to blame power stations for indoor air pollution might make greens feel they are saving the planet, but the reality is that they are allowing millions of deaths from air pollution to continue. The body count is going to rival that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.”
Executive Summary: 200 Million At Risk
Domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels is by far the number one global pollution problem. 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution (IAP) according to the World Health Organization. Domestic combustion of solid biofuels kills almost six million people per year when its effects on ambient air quality are also taken into consideration.
The so called ‘energy ladder’ was introduced as a way of understanding how deaths from IAP might be prevented. The energy ladder seeks to reproduce the experience of rich countries, where households moved away from biofuels and were increasingly connected to electric grids or district heating systems, solving the IAP problem for good.
However, ever-growing resistance from the environmental movement has removed this beneficial approach from the development agenda. Environmentalists fear that by taking steps upwards on the energy ladder, from dirty solid fuels such as cow dung or crop residues, and towards use of electricity, poor countries would become wealthier and so increase their energy use and their carbon intensity. They have managed to persuade all important multilateral development bodies and the WHO to drop the energy ladder entirely. Instead, they are now coercing the poorest countries to adopt utopian energy policies based on renewables. The result is that combatting IAP in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, is becoming impossible.
Aggressive decarbonization is now high on the political agenda. Contrary to the widely disseminated claims of important global actors, this will not solve the problem of IAP. Moreover, it will hamper the expansion of electric grids, which is a critical prerequisite for delivering adequate water supplies, without which it will be impossible to reproduce the public health miracle experienced in the rich countries.
These ‘ambitious’ global climate mitigation policies leave environmental health problems amongst the poor unaddressed and will result in the loss of over 200 million lives by 2050. They are also unlikely – even in theory – to prevent the 250,000 annual deaths that the WHO speculates will be attributable to climate change between 2030 and 2050: high-quality IPCC-linked research has recently shown that solid biomass combustion actually increases CO2 emissions, at least over the next 100 years, compared to fossil fuels.
Schools in the United Kingdom are beginning to remove analog clocks from the classroom — because students are complaining that they can’t read them, reports say.
Officials have begun replacing the traditional clocks with digital ones as children have been unable to tell the correct time on analog clocks, The Telegraph reports.
“The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders in England, told the publication. “Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere.”
According to a report from the Times Educational Supplement, — a weekly newspaper for teachers in the U.K. — one educator said during a conference in London that many high schoolers were only able to tell the time on digital devices.
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