Less than a month after the September 11th attacks, a tiny, CIA-controlled Predator drone flew over Kandahar, searching out the home of the Taliban supreme commander Mullah Mohammed Omar. A lack of understanding of the drone's capabilities combined with a messy chain of command allowed Omar to escape, but the strike on a nearby convoy vehicle became the Predator's first lethal action. Since then, the use of armed drones has become the dominant American way of war. In Sudden Justice, award-winning investigative journalist Chris Woods explores the secretive history of the United States' use of armed drones and their key role not only on today's battlefields, but also in a covert targeted killing project that has led to the deaths of thousands. The CIA nurtured and developed drones before the War on Terror ever began, seeking a platform from which it could monitor its targets and act lethally and instantly on the intelligence it gathered. Since then, remotely piloted aircraft have played a critical role in America's global counter-terrorism operations and have been deployed to devastating effect in conventional wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Drone crews, analysts, intelligence officials and military commanders all speak frankly to the author about how armed drones revolutionized warfare--and the unexpected costs to some of those involved. But there is another, secret war--one in which drones scour the skies of Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia in search of militant and terrorist targets. The American government insists that this hidden war is legal. The CIA even claims that its armed drones are "the most precise weapon ever invented," so perfect that civilians are no longer killed. Sudden Justice describes the reality of this secret drone war, one in which hundreds of civilians have died, and the wider strategic interests of the United States may have been jeopardized. The ability to target its enemies from the safety of headquarters thousands of miles from the battlefield has profound implications for how America conducts its foreign policy, and for how it is seen in the world. As the first book to comprehensively assemble and analyze the facts about the U.S. drone program, Sudden Justice is the essential guide for understanding its implications.

Sudden Justice explores the secretive history of the United States' use of armed drones and their key role not only on today's battlefields, but also in a covert targeted killng project that has led to the deaths of thousands.

A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today. Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain’s best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy. Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that’s the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there’s constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive. This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.

This book is based on the actual case of the East Area Rapist, later also known as the Original Night Stalker, a masked man who terrorized California communities for ten years; 1976 through 1986, and possibly to this day. Because I was not involved in the initial rape investigations, they are written from hundreds of reports, notes, memos, newspaper clippings, conversations and interviews with those who were involved. The crimes are factual. The crimes are real. While all characters and events have direct counterparts in the telling of the story, I have created some dialogue in the interest of readability. The cops in the initial rapes are not factual, their actions are. Their names and descriptions are completely fictitious. The names of the victims, witnesses and suspects are fictitious; the terror, the dialogue during the crimes, and the investigations are real. The cops involved in the cases after I was involved are real, their names and dialogue is factual, the investigations are real. The pain and terror may have diminished in the minds of the victims, I hope that the pain does not return. My intent is to tell the story without endangering the privacy or the dignity of the victims. They have suffered enough.

Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities—ranging from Arctic to equatorial regions, from tropical rainforests to desert interiors, and from deep prehistory to living memory—faced, and coped with, such dangers. Many disasters originate from a force of nature, such as an earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, volcanic eruption, drought, or flood. But that is only half of the story; decisions of people and their particular cultural lifeways are the rest. Sociocultural factors are essential in understanding risk, impact, resilience, reactions, and recoveries from massive sudden environmental changes. By using deep-time perspectives provided by interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides a rich temporal background to the human experience of environmental hazards and disasters. In addition, each chapter is followed by an abstract summarizing the important implications for today’s management practices and providing recommendations for policy makers. Publication supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Using literature as a source of challenges to questions in philosophy and law, this book exlores the inculcation of the legal subject and the relationship between "modernism" and "postmodernism", as well as how such concepts might evolve in the construction of community ethics.

The US Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of The National Academies to conduct a workshop that would examine the interface of the medicolegal death investigation system and the criminal justice system. NIJ was particularly interested in a workshop in which speakers would highlight not only the status and needs of the medicolegal death investigation system as currently administered by medical examiners and coroners but also its potential to meet emerging issues facing contemporary society in America. Additionally, the workshop was to highlight priority areas for a potential IOM study on this topic. To achieve those goals, IOM constituted the Committee for the Workshop on the Medicolegal Death Investigation System, which developed a workshop that focused on the role of the medical examiner and coroner death investigation system and its promise for improving both the criminal justice system and the public health and health care systems, and their ability to respond to terrorist threats and events. Six panels were formed to highlight different aspects of the medicolegal death investigation system, including ways to improve it and expand it beyond its traditional response and meet growing demands and challenges. This report summarizes the Workshop presentations and discussions that followed them.

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.