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This chapter focuses on the international aspects of auditing in the context of the airline industry for the year 2018. This chapter finds that International Standards on Auditing have been widely adopted in the global context. This chapter also analyses several observations related to the composition of audit firms (Big 4 vs. non-Big 4), types of audit opinions, emphasis of matter, other matters, material uncertainty related to going-concern, and types of auditors (single or joint auditor). This chapter covers the frequency of the four elements of describing key audit matters (KAM) in the audit reports in the global and auditor context as well as the KAMs observed in the airline industry and classifies them as industry-specific KAMs and entity-specific KAMs. In addition, this chapter analyses the requirements of the expanded audit report of the UK which includes the declaration of materiality threshold and scope of the audit in connection with the materiality and KAMs considering UK and non-UK airlines.

X = multiple interpretations

This article considers the independent liberty interests of children in foster care and their mothers in parental termination proceedings. Recent federal reforms impose a mandatory deadline for the state to terminate parental rights. That policy erroneously presumes that the passage of time alone establishes parental fault and satisfies a parent’s due process rights. It also fails to protect the minority of children who assert an interest in preserving a safe relationship with mothers who are unlikely to meet the state’s schedule – including many substance abusers and victims of domestic violence.

In acknowledgment of the demands of studying state secrecy, this chapter asks how novel possibilities for knowing can be fashioned. It does so in relation to the place of secrecy within international diplomatic and security negotiations associated with humanitarian disarmament. A conversational account is given regarding how “cluster bombs” become subject to a major international ban in 2008. Tensions, uncertainties, and contradictions associated with knowing and conveying matters that cannot be wholly known or conveyed are worked through. With these moves, a form of writing is sought that sensitizes readers to how absences figure within debates about social problems and the study of those debates, as well as how ignorance born out of secrecy helps secure an understanding of the world. Uncertainties, no-go areas, and blind spots are looked to as analytical and practical resources.

In recent years, there have been major changes in educational governance and the organization and management of primary and secondary education. This is particularly the case as indicated by debates and deliberations over notions of “good governance” and “public management,” accountability, transparency, effectiveness of public services, performance, and the generation of benchmarks and cross-national comparative data. Among these trends is the debate over educational decentralization, which in the past several decades has become a mode of governance strongly advocated by international policy organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural (UNESCO).

Bertil Ohlin was a most active commentator on current economic events in the interwar period, combining his academic work with a journalistic output of an impressive scale. He published more than a thousand newspaper articles in the 1920s and 1930s, more than any other professor in economics in Sweden.

Here we have collected 10 articles by Ohlin, translated from Swedish and originally published in Stockholms-Tidningen, to trace the evolution of his thinking during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These articles, spanning roughly half a decade, bring out his response to the stock market crisis in New York in 1929, his views on monetary policy in 1931, on fiscal policy and public works in 1932, his reaction to Keynes’ ideas in 1932 and 1933 and to Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, and, finally, his stand against state socialism in 1935.

At the beginning of the depression, Ohlin was quite optimistic in his outlook. But as the downturn in the world economy deepened, his optimism waned. He dealt with proposals for bringing the Swedish economy out of the depression, and reported positively on the policy views of Keynes. At an early stage, he recommended expansionary fiscal and monetary policies including public works. This approach permeated the contributions of the young generation of Swedish economists arising in the 1930s, eventually forming the Stockholm School of Economics. He was critical of passive Manchester liberalism, ‘folded-arms evangelism’ as well of socialism while promoting his own brand of ‘active social liberalism’.

During the four years of preliminary meetings that led to the 1977 Protocols Additional I and II governing internal armed conflict, the prohibitions against superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering – two concepts that gird the regulation and moderation of war and limit the use of certain means and methods of warfare – were invoked as a means of calling into account the actions of imperial states. These meetings took place in the context of the conflicts in Southeast Asia, following the wars of decolonization and national liberation in the 1950s and 1960s. The participants in these meetings were freedom fighters and liberation movements who used this forum, which was open to them for the first time, to push for a wider understanding of the concepts of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. Their intention was to hold imperialism and imperial states accountable for suffering and injury beyond that of physical death or wounding and to recognize the violence of colonization and the social and cultural devastation it brought. These interventions were a critical attempt to broaden and deepen the meaning of the laws of war, to make them responsive to more than established sovereign state violence, and to ensure that they reflected the experience of colonization/decolonization. This episode matters because the prohibitions against unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury are two elements that detail the general prohibition first codified in 1907 Hague Convention IV, Article 22, namely that the “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” However, the history and formulation of these two concepts has yet to be fully explored, the meaning of each is debated, and taken together the two are among “the most unclear and controversial rules of warfare.”

Most criminal justice scholars agree that the past three decades have witnessed a punitive shift in criminal justice policy, public opinion, and political rhetoric. Have these political trends also left their mark on policy approaches to due process rights? The provision of counsel to indigent defendants is a signature issue in debates over due process rights. The Supreme Court expanded dramatically the circumstances under which states were required to provide counsel in the 1960s and 1970s, though decisions about the implementation of this mandate were left to individual states. We examine the evolution of indigent defense policy, at the state and local level, over the past three decades, and ask two questions: First, did policies evolve in the directions expected by reform advocates? Second, to the extent that policies developed differently across states, how can we account for those differences? We find that refomers' optimistic projections about structure and funding have not been realized, and that adoption of progressive policies has been uneven across states. Most importantly, we find evidence that the politics of ideology and racial conflict have played a significant role in states' indigent defense policy over the past three decades.

In a number of recent multi-billion dollar cases brought against cigarette manufacturers, plaintiffs have in part alleged that the cigarette manufacturers (1) conspired not to compete on the basis of health claims or the introduction of potentially safer cigarettes since the 1950s, and (2) engaged in fraudulent advertising by making implied health claims in advertisements selling ‘low tar’/‘light’ cigarettes. In this type of litigation, defendants’ actions could be due to alleged illegal behaviour as asserted by plaintiffs, or be the result of market forces that may have nothing to do with allegedly inappropriate acts. We examine the economic evidence relating to these allegations, taking into account some of the major influences on cigarette company behaviour. In particular, our analyses show that much of the cigarette manufactures’ behaviour can be explained by Federal Trade Commission and related government actions, rather than conspiracy or fraudulent acts. We find the economic evidence is inconsistent with an effective conspiracy to suppress information on either smoking and health or the development and marketing of potentially safer cigarettes. Regarding ‘lower tar’ and ‘light’ cigarettes, the economic evidence indicates that the cigarette manufacturers responded to government and public health initiatives, and that disclosing more information on smoking compensation earlier than the cigarette companies did would not have had any significant impact on smoking behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the question of parents’ rights to make choices regarding the education and upbringing of their children.

Article 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children’. However, authors including Joel Feinberg also argue children have a right to an ‘open future’, implying parents and the state have obligations to ensure certain elements are present in a child’s care and education. Commodifying education and early childhood care where it occurs in many developed societies, ostensibly provides parents with greater choice regarding the education and upbringing of their children. However, following the work of Brenda Almond, I argue that parents do have some rights to make choices about the care and education of their children. But just having the freedom to choose from alternative schooling or caring options may be insufficient to provide a choice in any significant sense, if one is only choosing between service providers all offering essentially the same service.

It would seem then, that responsible leadership and ethical decision-making by the state and by service providers requires them to engage in consultation with parents and facilitate their participation in determining the nature and content of educational and developmental programmes for children.

Leaders in these roles will also need to have a strong sense of the competing demands on content coming from this array of ethical requirements.