A Forensic Autopsy Study of Dead Foetuses and Newborns

Background: The term abandonment refers to babies or foetuses which are found abandoned at various unwanted places such as gutter, rubbish dumps, railway tracts and bushes. It does not refer to live born babies left in places, such as hospitals where care can be given by someone other than the mother. Aims and Objectives: To find out the distribution of death cases of newborns/feotuses and to trace its probable reason and its relationship with female foeticide.Methods:A retrospective study of all the medico-legal autopsies of foetuses and newborns was conducted in Forensic medicine and Toxicology department, Government Medical College, Amritsar (Punjab) from Jan 1, 2014 to Jul 31, 2021. During this period, 46 cases of fetal and newborn deaths had been studied.Results:The dead bodies of known foetuses/newborns is 43.5% cases while total unknown cases were 56.5% cases. 32.6% cases were non viable foetuses while 10.8% cases died as a result of prematurity. All the unknown cases (56.5%) were found from the abandoned places like street, bushes, canal side, water bodies that mainly includes pond and railway tract.Conclusion:Despite, the problem is present in every corner of the nation, there is dearth of research studies on this issue. Stringent measures and strict checks are required against antenatal sex determination. The motive behind the abandonment of foetuses can be any, but this grave issue needs urgent attention.

Electric infrastructure poses a significant threat at congregation sites of the globally threatened Steppe Eagle Aquila nipalensis in Saudi Arabia

Summary Saudi Arabia is the fastest growing electricity consumer in the Middle East, with a rapidly expanding network of powerlines. Bird mortality through electrocution and collision has been recorded in the country, but so far there is little information as to how much the electricity infrastructure affects globally threatened raptor populations that migrate to Saudi Arabia. In 2019, the world’s largest wintering congregation of Steppe Eagles Aquila nipalensis was discovered near a rubbish dump in central Saudi Arabia. We evaluated whether powerlines in the vicinity of this, and another congregation site, caused mortality of large birds. In November 2019, we surveyed powerlines within 6 km of two focal rubbish dumps at Al Qunfudhah (12.4 km) and Ushaiqer (2 km). We found 52 carcasses of five species, of which 85% were Steppe Eagles. Based on the age of these carcasses, we coarsely extrapolate that 14.4 km of powerlines near these two congregation sites may kill 94–240 Steppe Eagles per winter, representing up to 0.3% of their global population. We call for the urgent safeguarding of powerlines that cause mortality near known Steppe Eagle congregation sites, and the adoption and implementation of regulations that ensure that future infrastructure is constructed with designs that are safe for birds.

Libraries from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.800 BCE–250 CE

This chapter is a survey of collections of literary texts from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.750 BCE–250 CE, effectively the last millennium of the ancient Egyptian culture. Examples of different forms of collections are described and discussed in detail: temple libraries and private libraries, as well as groups of literary texts found in tombs, in rubbish dumps, in waste paper collections, and re-used in cartonnage. The texts include narratives, wisdom instructions, science (esp. divination and medicine), and cultic texts (esp. ritual guidelines, religious treatises, and hymns). Additional paragraphs concern the use of master copies, different types of storage, the abduction of libraries, and the so-called House of Life.

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.

Italska terra sigillata iz rimske vile rustike u uvali Caska na otoku Pagu

The following article presents the results of the study of one part of the archaeological material found during the excavations of the villa rustica in Caska on the island of Pag. The investigations were conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the company Geoarheo d.o.o. from Sesvete. Two square underground storage rooms and earthenware jars (dolia), reused as rubbish dumps, contained a big quantity of ceramic vessels. Among them, the Italian terra sigillata stands out, imported during the Augustan age mainly from the northern Italian area (Po Valley), but also from central Italy. Of particular significance are the bottoms of plates and cups bearing the potters’ stamps, important in the attempt of reconstructing the trade routes in Antiquity. The graffiti engraved on several vessels could be interpreted as the first two or three letters of the names of slaves or freedmen of Greek origin, laboring for a big land owner. The epigraphic monuments found in Caska bay suggest that the land property with the villa rustica was owned by one branch of the senatorial family of the Calpurnii Pisones.