James boasts to the other engines that he is never late. Then one day Toby blocks the line when he tries to get through with the express.

The story of a little boy who really does run away to join the merriment and miseries of circus life.

Here is the story of how Thomas and Toby became such good friends. Soon after Sir Topham Hatt saves Toby from retirement, Toby and Thomas are running the smoothest branch line on the Island of Sodor.

As the party that championed trade union rights, the creation of the NHS and the establishment of a national minimum wage, Labour has played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm - from Keir Hardie to Ed Miliband, via Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Tony Blair - have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success. With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Labour leadership since the party's turn-of-the twentieth- century inception have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition - and not all its leaders have managed to keep up. This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the country's foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves. An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Labour Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections. The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested and involved in electoral integrity and elections, and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, international relations and democracy studies. Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Rev. Charles H. Roman is a retired minister with 45 years in the ministry. He attended West Virginia State College and Howard University. He has pastor churches in both South and North Carolina. He also pastor in Virginia, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. As president of the Statesville NC Branch of the NAACP, Spartanburg, SC Branch and serving as First Vice-president of the South Carolina Branches of the NAACP Rev Roman was a force in identifying, investigation, publicizing and mediating Civil Rights, injustices and inequities. He also led the fight in suing both the cities of Statesville, NC and Spartanburg, SC about changing their method in election and won.

The way in which elections are run is changing, as radical reforms or experiments have been introduced across the world. This book establishes why election administration might be used by political elites to win and maintain power. It identifies the role of elite interests in shaping election administration in USA, UK and Ireland.

An award-winning journalist reveals the dramatic true story of the CIA's Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11. America is reeling; Al-Qaeda has struck and thousands are dead. The country scrambles to respond, but the Pentagon has no plan for Afghanistan—where Osama bin Laden masterminded the attack and is protected by the Taliban. Instead, the CIA steps forward to spearhead the war. Eight CIA officers are dropped into the mountains of northern Afghanistan on October 17, 2001. They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the first Americans to operate inside Taliban territory. Their covert mission is to track down Al- Qaeda and stop the terrorists from infiltrating the United States again. First Casualty places you with Team Alpha as the CIA rides into battle on horseback alongside the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. In Washington, DC, few trust that the CIA men, the Green Berets, and the Americans’ outnumbered Afghan allies can prevail before winter sets in. On the ground, Team Alpha is undeterred. The Taliban is routed but hatches a plot with Al-Qaeda to hit back. Hundreds of suicidal fighters, many hiding weapons, fake a surrender and are transported to Qala-i Jangi—the “Fort of War.” Team Alpha’s Mike Spann, an ex-Marine, and David Tyson, a polyglot former Central Asian studies academic, seize America’s initial opportunity to extract intelligence from men trained by bin Laden—among them a young Muslim convert from California. The prisoners revolt and one CIA officer falls—the first casualty in America’s longest war, which will last two decades. The other CIA man shoots dead the Al-Qaeda jihadists attacking his comrade. To survive, he must fight his way out against overwhelming odds. Award-winning author Toby Harnden gained unprecedented access to all living Team Alpha members and every level of the CIA. Superbly researched, First Casualty draws on extensive interviews, secret documents, and deep reporting inside Afghanistan. As gripping as any adventure novel, yet intimate and profoundly moving, it tells how America found a winning strategy only to abandon it. Harnden reveals that the lessons of early victory and the haunting foretelling it contained—unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks, and errant US bombs—were ignored, tragically fueling a twenty-year conflict. "Masterful, complex, and heartfelt, from the deeply personal to the critically strategic. Captures many lessons on many levels." —Ambassador Hank Crumpton, former senior CIA officer