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Following Ghana's December 2012 elections, there was a protracted election petition process at the nation's Supreme Court challenging the declaration of the winner as the duly elected presidential candidate. Even though the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the declared winner, it made several recommendations that paved the way for numerous interventions aimed at putting together proposals for electoral reform to fine-tune Ghana's electoral processes. Several such reform proposals were submitted to the Electoral Commission by the end of 2013. Nevertheless, these were not implemented to guide the 2016 general elections. The successful conduct of the 2016 elections has therefore been described as a "miracle." Why were the reform proposals not implemented? What is the current state of reform proposals submitted to the Electoral Commission? What is the way forward? This article addresses these questions.

Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to determining whether the State Office of Risk Management (Office) is accurately reporting the selected performance measures to ABEST and has adequate control systems in place over the collection, calculation, and reporting of the selected performance measures.

Shane Miller reviews American Exception: Empire and the Deep State by Aaron Good

AbstractIn Turkey during Ramadan in the 2000s, a group of Sunni Muslims attacked a Kurdish Alevi family that was not fasting. The Alevis, Turkey's second‐largest religious group, do not fast during Ramadan, creating tensions in mixed neighborhoods in which Sunni Islam is the reigning religion. This article analyzes how an Alevi‐run television station covered this event, from its location in a provincial town to related protests in Istanbul, to show how minority media may partake in the reproduction of the dominant norms that perpetuate such discriminatory acts. They do so by producing a "presentist" temporal perspective on discrimination that prioritizes more contemporary problems of the minoritized community at the expense of a longer history of structural violence. In this case, this temporalization portrayed Alevis as exclusively Turks, neglecting, therefore, Kurdish Alevis, and it disguised the state's long‐term involvement in Alevis' marginalization. This article presents an alternative perspective on minority media in anthropology, which often interprets state alignments as strategic leverage to defend community rights. The article argues that minority media producers can also be strategic in their alignments with their communities and may use this alignment as a façade when securing their ties with states.

"This is a fascinating account of frontier Stalinism told through the previously unexplored history of a campaign to attract female settlers to the socialist frontiers of the Soviet Far East in the late 1930s. Elena Shulman reveals the instrumental part these migrants played in the extension of Soviet state power and cultural dominion in the region. Their remarkable stories, recovered from archival letters, party documents, memoirs, press coverage, and films, shed new light on Soviet women's roles in state formation, the role of frontier Stalinism in structuring gender ideals, and the nature of Soviet society and Stalinism in the 1930s. Through these narratives, Elena Shulman offers a nuanced and complex picture of the "subcultures" of Stalinism--generational, regional, and semi-criminal--as well as the complexities of women's lives under Stalin and the limits of Moscow's rule over the periphery and even the Gulag."--Publisher's description