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The effect of COVID-19 on informant use and management, during the peak of the imposed Government lockdown measures was felt across English and Welsh police Dedicated Source Units. Within these restrictions, staff managing informants had to develop and then implement new strategies that delivered safe, yet effective, informant handling capacity and capability. Based on a survey of 205 respondents directly involved in the handling, control or authorisation of informants, this article examined their perceptions of the effect of COVID-19 in this highly specialised policing activity. The research findings revealed five broad themes associated with the impact of COVID-19 on informant management practices: (i) health protection; (ii) governance; (iii) innovation and technology; (iv) recruitment, communication and informant development and (v) tradecraft and intelligence. The article explored the organisational responses to initiating and maintaining informant-handler relationships and ensuring the flow of intelligence within this unique operational environment. Participants perceived that handler-informant relationships were strengthened, and also indications of a willingness to adapt policy and procedure associated with the informant management cycle: targeting, initial recruitment contact, assessment and evaluation, tasking and deployment and payment of informant rewards. It also highlighted a wider consensus that there was further scope for enhancing resilience to similar future pandemics including the use of enabling technology and responsive policy adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates the changes in the perception about the Democratic Security Policy of Colombia (psd) and its effect on the security at the border between Tachiray Norte de Santander (tns) during 2002-2010. Following the theoretical revision from the disciplines that focus on analyzing security and border studies and their local, regional, national and international perspectives, a qualitative research was carried out by interviewing informers on both sides of the border in order to know their perspectives and compare them with the literature. The results show the emergence of three main categories: ambivalences about the capacity of the State, oscillations on the credibility of the State and the worsening of the quality of life. These categories are divided up into dimensions such as strengthening and weakening of the Sate, violence, population exodus, unemployment, lack of State support concerning development policies and loss of liberties and public security, among others. In all, the categories show that psd strengthened the State capacity but it still needs to rescue and build institutionality. It also changed perceptions about border security and life dynamics at the tns border. A more appropriate evaluation demands more research, with a longer time frame in order to avoid current complexities. Therefore, it is important to continue deepening and evaluating roads of research about the PDD at the Colombian borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies of Lithuania's History is the property of Lietuvos Istorijos Studijos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Theatralia is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Sovietization of Romania and the installation of the communist regime were the consequences of two events which took place towards the end of WW II: the first was "The Agreement of Percentage" in October 1944 and the second was the advance of the Red Army towards the centre of Europe. That was supported by the force of weapons and the result was the establishment of political regimes fully controlled by and obedient to Moscow. Gheorghe P. Dinu had a career as a lawyer and as a Police commissioner during a period of great changes in the history of Romania, 1938-1945. He worked at the Police departments of Arad, Lipova and Timişoara, where he was involved in the discovery of some legionary and communist organizations and in the arrest of their members, activity which led to his arrest and sentence in 1954 to 25 years of heavy prison. He was freed in 1964 from the prison of Gherla. Since he knew many former police officers, he was recruited as a Security informer in September 1964. In this position, he made 198 informative notes regarding former working or detention colleagues. This ended in 1973 when his collaboration with the Securitate ended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion of women and politics in Indonesia has been mostly confined to the national and regional levels since a law requiring a minimum of 30% female candidates in legislative elections took effect. There are, however, only a few studies of women and politics at the village level, examining women's contributions to village development. This study aims to explain the gap between the lack of representation of coastal women in rural politics and the extensive contributions of women to rural economic development. This is a qualitative study that involves informants in village administration, women managing business groups, an empowerment program manager, and others. The study's results show that women's representation in politics and village administration is low, even though the female population is comparable to the male population. However, women contribute substantially to development of the rural economy in several sectors. These include empowerment programs, in which women act as managers, initiators, actors, and beneficiaries, as well as the management of fishing, tourism, and environmental conservation groups. The involvement of women in rural economic development is an extension of their traditional domestic role, while they lack the experience and social capital to enable them to actively participate in rural politics. The study highlights the importance of supporting women's representation through affirmative inclusion policies and political education for village women regarding political rights, the functions of village deliberation boards, the rules of village administration, etc. It also identifies a need to train government officials in gender sensitivity, so they can support the goal of equal representation in rural politics. Keywords: coastal women, rural development, rural politics, Java, Indonesia, Introduction Few studies discuss women, politics, and development in Indonesia at the lowest level of government, namely the village level, particularly in coastal areas. The coastal zone is an area [...]

Plants are important in traditional Inuit life. They are used for food, tea, medicine, etc. Based on semi-structured interviews with 35 informants, we documented and compared plant names and uses in Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik, and in Nain, Nunatsiavut. Plant names and uses were expected to be similar between communities owing to common boreal-subarctic environments and cultural ties. Both communities reported the same number of taxa, with equivalent proportions of vascular and nonvascular plants, growth forms, use categories, and medicinal uses. Forty-three species were used in each community, for a total of 78 species from 39 families. Despite a high overlap in species distributions, only 35% of nonvascular and 56% of vascular species were used in both communities. Correspondence was higher at the family level (64% of nonvascular and 75% of vascular families shared). The Ericaceae family was the most used, followed by Rosaceae. Thirteen of 30 medicinal species were shared between communities. There was a low correspondence regarding the conditions for which the medicinal species were used. Edible taxa were shared the most (52%). Plant uses unique to either Nain or Kangiqsualujjuaq may reveal separate bodies of traditional knowledge, or may reflect an overall loss of ethnobotanical knowledge in the Subarctic due to recent lifestyle changes. Key words: Inuit, Inuktitut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, traditional knowledge. Les plantes sont importantes dans le mode de vie traditionnel des Inuits. Elles sont utilisees comme aliments, infusions, medicaments, etc. A partir d'entrevues semi-dirigees de 35 personnes, les auteurs ont documente et compare les noms et l'utilisation des plantes a Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik, et a Nain, Nunatsiavut. Il etait attendu que les noms et l'utilisation des plantes soient similaires entre les communautes en raison des environnements boreaux/subarctiques et des liens culturels communs. Les deux communautes rapportaient le meme nombre de taxons et des proportions equivalentes de plantes vasculaires/non vasculaires, de formes de croissance, de categories d'utilisation et d'usages medicinaux. Quarante-trois especes etaient utilisees par chaque communaute, pour un total de 78 especes de 39 familles. Malgre un chevauchement eleve dans les distributions des especes, 35 % d'especes non vasculaires et 56 % d'especes vasculaires seulement etaient utilisees par les deux communautes. La correspondance etait plus elevee a l'echelle de la famille (64 % de familles non vasculaires et 75 % de familles vasculaires partagees). La famille des Ericaceae etait la plus utilisee, suivie des Rosaceae. Treize des 30 especes medicinales etaient partagees par les deux communautes. La correspondance etait faible en ce qui concerne les conditions dans lesquelles les especes medicinales etaient utilisees. Les taxons comestibles etaient les plus partages (52 %). L'utilisation des plantes unique a Nain ou a Kangiqsualujjuaq peut reveler des corpus de savoirs traditionnels distincts, ou elle peut refleter une perte generale de savoirs ethnobotaniques en region subarctique a cause des changements recents du mode de vie. [Traduit par la Redaction] Mots-cles : Inuit, inuktitut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, savoir traditionnel., Introduction Biocultural diversity is at risk throughout the world (Maffi 2005; Cuerrier and Arnason 2008). Indigenous languages worldwide are declining, and Inuktitut (the language of Inuit) in the Canadian Subartic [...]

In the 1970s, the leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and future Prime Minister of Australia, Robert J. "Bob" Hawke, was an informer of the United States of America. Using diplomatic cables from official archives, this article shows that Hawke gifted information about the Australian government, the Australian Labor Party and the labour movement, assisting the intelligence gathering efforts of the foreign power. In turn, the relationship influenced the development of Australian policy, including the abandonment of Keynesian economics and embrace of neoliberalism. His discreet relationship — discussed in detail for the first time — was not unusual among elites in the post‐war period. However, Hawke was especially entrenched in the practise. This article will also show, through historiography and memoir, that the act of informing by elites began in the 1940s, as the United States was becoming Australia's key strategic ally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, the use of different means of investigation is enabling the authorities to clarify the facts and to arrest the perpetrator of the crime more quickly and effectively, within the different means of investigation available to police authorities, one of which and the most common in all countries is the police informer, being a person of particular importance during the police investigation, as he or she provides confidential and essential information in order to learn important facts about the crime and its perpetrators. The problem with this research tool is that it is not uniform in its treatment, in different countries, the informant is treated differently, and as a result of this, the product or the investigation that is offered to the judges, as a result of these confidences, is different. Likewise, when working with police informants, it is very important to take into account a series of precautions so as not to violate any human rights, as well as not to being manipulated by the informer. As an example of the above, this article studies the treatment of police informants in different countries, considering the legislation of each one, sentences and documents that establish the guidelines for the use of police informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Autobiografia is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The searching shows the method who followed him the prophet in builder personal of Companions of the Prophet Mohammed Radwan Allah on them, and your his lowness through one of of situations is peace be upon him who [syq] for his period the interview raved (the Islam rises followed rises on him) and male of characteristics Muslim benefited blessing modern and her blessing of important; The Islamic glory, scarfs Muslim in debt his, and his hatred for the invalid beliefs [w'ie'raaDh] about her, and the invitations to Allah, and his the envy for debt, and to go away from himself about the similar disbeliever. Just as the searching shows that height of the Islam and glory Muslim in debt his injustice does not require last in any situation, [w'inmaa] appears the height in the heights in the characters raved the dealing with the people branded whatever their drinks were and in next despotic dispute of dealing Muslim with changes them from disbelieving, and the Islamic informers important for this nation clarify and which from produced her raised her on changes her from the nations, and her slavery [llh] rose and her faith her faith in the celestial letters which the invitation to unification Allah united in rose and worldwide her Islamic letter and her observance in right path of the revelations her the book and the age in all live matters with no exclusion and worldwide her Arabic language and her balconies and her place raised. Just as the searching shows that height of the Islam and glory Muslim in debt his injustice does not require last in any situation, [w'inmaa] appears the height in the heights in the characters raved the dealing with the people branded whatever their drinks were and in next despotic dispute of dealing Muslim with changes them from disbelieving, and the Islamic informers important for this nation clarify and which from produced her raised her on changes her from the nations, and her slavery [llh] rose and her faith her faith in the celestial letters which the invitation to unification Allah united in rose and worldwide her Islamic letter and her observance in right path of the revelations her the book and the age in all live matters with no exclusion and worldwide her Arabic language and her balconies and her place raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Academy is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses informant testimony and its impact or contribution to wrongful conviction. Also cited are the various cases of wrongful convictions due to false informant testimony in the U.S., how courts handle informant testimony, how unreliable testimony guided judges' wrongful convictions, and the types of informants, namely, jailhouse informants, accomplice witnesses, and cooperating witnesses.

Accurate wind speed forecasting can improve energy management efficiency and promote the use of renewable energy. However, the inherent nonlinearity and fluctuation of wind speed make prediction challenging. To address these issues, we design an efficient Informer-based model, with improved calculation speed, forecasting accuracy and generalization ability. The proposed model in this paper reasonably integrates the Weibull-Gaussian transform, Informer and kernel mean square error loss and addresses the combination of various components. The Weibull-Gaussian transform is used as the data preprocessing module, which can remove non-Gaussian characteristics from the original data, and thus achieve noise reduction. The Informer is used as the main predictor, which can efficiently output accurate forecasting results based on an encoder-decoder architecture and self-attention mechanism. The kernel mean square error loss function, which shows strong robustness to outliers, is used to evaluate the nonlinearity of errors in reproducing kernel Hilbert space. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, it is compared with several widely used models and state-of-the-art models. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model weakens the effect of outliers, yields high forecasting accuracy with mean square error = 0.35, and outperforms the baselines up to 8.5% on three datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional risk analysis models often struggle to provide effective insights into real-time and objective risk assessment of ship navigation. Therefore, this paper introduces a ship navigation risk online prediction model (NROPM) based on the fusion of multi-source data. Firstly, this paper extracts risk feature information from multiple sensors, such as AIS data, wind, and water currents. These data are integrated through feature fusion to create the research dataset. Subsequently, the entropy weight-cloud model is constructed to calculate the risk and generate a set of test samples. An emerging informer network is introduced to train the model and predict the risk of ship navigation. Finally, this paper compares the proposed model with traditional neural network models through comparative experimental. The research was conducted using a real dataset from the Pearl River area over a period of three months. Model performance was assessed in terms of mean squared error and training time consumption. The experimental results indicate that the proposed NROPM outperforms traditional models like the BP (backpropagation) neural network and transformer in both accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time ship navigation risk prediction. • This paper proposes a ship navigation risk online prediction model using multi-source data. • An improved informer network is used to achieve the real-time risk prediction. • A quantification method for ship navigation risk is introduced, and the accuracy of the evaluation results is verified using entropy-weighted cloud models. • Experimental results show this model's superior accuracy over traditional methods, enabling objective, dynamic ship navigation risk assessment in busy waters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Innovative use of Informer network for streamflow forecasting in data-scarce regions. • Enhancing long-term forecasting models with satellite-derived hydroclimate data. • Comparative assessment of PCA-, MDS-, and tSNE-Informer on geo-spatiotemporal inputs. • Novel concurrent fine-tuning method significantly enhanced transfer learning efficacy. • Validation of Informer models capabilities across multiple case studies and scenarios. Accurate multistep forecasting of the long-term streamflow (Q flow) in poorly gauged basins is pivotal for sustainable water resource management and decision-making. The purpose of this study is to improve the performance of Q flow predictions in data-scarce regions. To achieve this, we employed geo-spatiotemporal satellite-derived datasets, advanced Informer architecture, and transfer learning methodologies. The deep-transfer-learning-based Informer model enables the perception of time dependencies and is specifically tailored to facilitate multistep-ahead Q flow prediction. Initial investigations identified correlations between historical Q flow records and geo-spatiotemporal satellite metrics, and this helped select grids that encapsulated the highest correlation between Q flow and climatic parameters. Subsequent assessments contrasted three main dimensionality reduction techniques—principal component analysis (PCA), t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)—to craft deep-learning-amenable endogenous inputs. The introduction of the current fine-tuning transfer learning (CFTL) methodology, augmented with incremental learning, which was evaluated against conventional transfer learning (CTL) across two distinct target domains with varying similarities to the source domain, was central to this study. A holistic comparison involving a range of univariate multistep-ahead prediction models including DNN, CNN, LSTM, AR-LSTM, and Transformer, was also undertaken. In addition, multivariate models, notably CFTL and CTL, were set against the two former models under different data availability scenarios for each target domain. The findings revealed that the MDS-Informer model significantly outperformed the t-SNE-Informer and PCA-Informer models, showing an improvement of approximately 23 % and 40 % in terms of MAE, respectively. Moreover, the results confirmed that the CFTL approach effectively enhanced long-term Q flow prediction accuracy compared to conventional transfer learning (CTL) and the limited data scenario (LD) without TL by approximately 30 and 47 % improvement in terms of MAE, respectively. This study demonstrates that a target domain possessing a higher similarity index with the source domain is more likely to facilitate the transfer of positive noise, thereby enhancing the predictability of the model. This phenomenon underscores the importance of domain similarity in the efficacy of TL approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]