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Scenario building is one of the most important instruments of long-term economic and regional planning, even at European level. With the help of scenarios one can explore the manoeuvring space of economic policies and make more conscious the choice of political action. The scenarios described below, have been prepared for the ESPON programme of the European Union, where I participated as a member of a team working on scenarios of the future of the European regional development with special respect to the economic aspects. The four scenarios described are introduced from the aspects of driving forces, supporting EU policies, the enlargement, migration, rural and urban development and regional disparities.

The crisis of 2008 was a surprise for both the neoclassical and the Marxist branches of economic science, which could not predict the exact timing of its onset. The crisis contributed to the revival of interest in the «Capital» of Marx, whose model can be brought into line with the modern level of natural sciences. General economy – a hierarchical multi-level model of the market economy – a significant «upgrade» of the «Capital» of Marx on the basis of the method of constructing the genome of biological species (in it the commodity is not a «cell» but a «DNA molecule») – explains the various micro- and macroeconomic processes in including crises. The model contains an algorithm for forecasting global crises. The crisis is the result of periodic overaccumulation of capital. Harbingers of absolute overaccumulation, or global crisis are investment growth, employment growth, lower investment growth rates, unemployment reduction, and wage growth. Such dynamics of the linkage of indicators was observed in 2003–2007. It serves as a basis for forecasting the crisis and developing an indicator of the danger of the crisis

This article tells the story of the 2003 resignation of Peter Hollingworth as Governor-General as part of an ongoing hyper-anxiety in Australia about the state and status of 'the child'. The sexually abused child sits at the centre of this story and carries a heavy burden with respect to the past and future of the white Australian nation. The recuperation of that child to a state of innocence, repeatedly, as stories of its abuse keep returning to our front pages and political agendas, is necessary for the reproduction of the white nation. This article shows that the Hollingworth drama is entwined with the current politics of motherhood and fatherhood and the carriage of national feeling and temporality through the performances of these always racialised identities. Attending to the politics of the historical construction of the child, and the idealised parents who abuse or protect it (but never allow this child a voice or a sexuality of her or his own), thus becomes a part of the project of accountability to the past which has also occupied public life in Australia over recent years.

A paradigm is presented for developing and extending Cohen and Machalek's evolutionary ecological theory of expropriative crime to encompass all criminal behavior. The paradigm uses well‐understood concepts from evolutionary ecology to identify the scope and scale necessary for a holistic understanding of crime. It demonstrates how consistent empirical findings and insights from the many disciplines that study crime may be integrated into a single comprehensive theoretical framework. At the micro level, it explains how individual criminal behavior is influenced, but not determined, by systematic interactions between factors at ecological, individual, and societal levels over the life course. At the macro level, it explains the evolution of population‐level characteristics such as the frequency and type of crime—and approaches to crime control—as the cumulative result of the behaviors of individuals and their interactions with one another and the environment. If the proposed relationships between domains of variables can be refined, it appears possible to develop a truly general theory of criminal behavior. Research and policy implications of this approach to understanding crime are discussed.