Скачать книгу - ArmA: Armed Assault

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken ? at both local and international level – to end what has been called the “greatest silence in history”.

In 1989 the first edition of this book set out Gittins' pioneering index solution to the multi-armed bandit problem and his subsequent investigation of a wide of sequential resource allocation and stochastic scheduling problems. Since then there has been a remarkable flowering of new insights, generalizations and applications, to which Glazebrook and Weber have made major contributions. This second edition brings the story up to date. There are new chapters on the achievable region approach to stochastic optimization problems, the construction of performance bounds for suboptimal policies, Whittle's restless bandits, and the use of Lagrangian relaxation in the construction and evaluation of index policies. Some of the many varied proofs of the index theorem are discussed along with the insights that they provide. Many contemporary applications are surveyed, and over 150 new references are included. Over the past 40 years the Gittins index has helped theoreticians and practitioners to address a huge variety of problems within chemometrics, economics, engineering, numerical analysis, operational research, probability, statistics and website design. This new edition will be an important resource for others wishing to use this approach.

The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence.A famed aesthete, politician and patron of the arts, Philip Sassoon lived in a world of English elegance and oriental flair. Gathering a social set that would provide inspiration for Brideshead Revisited, Sassoon gave parties at which Winston Churchill argued with George Bernard Shaw, while Noel Coward and Lawrence of Arabia mingled with flamingos and Rex Whistler painted murals as the party carried on around them.Not merely a wealthy socialite, he worked at the right hand of Douglas Haig during the First World War and then for Prime Minister Lloyd George for the settlement of the peace. He was close to King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, and Minister for the Air Force in the 1930s. And yet as the heir of wealthy Jewish traders from the souks of Baghdad, Philip craved acceptance from the English establishment. In Charmed Life, Damian Collins explores an extraordinary connected life at the heart of society during the height of British global power and influence.

Since 1997 the government has launched an unprecedented assault on our most basic rights.Liberty protected?Under the false pretext of protecting the public, New Labour has pawned off our fundamental freedoms, turning Britain into a surveillance state which now boasts the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world. Extensions to pre-charge detention mean that suspects can be locked up for longer in Britain than Zimbabwe.In the name of security?Yet in the past eleven years, the terrorist threat has risen, police-recorded violent crime has increased by 80 per cent and Britain today has the worst anti-social behaviour record in Europe. This is now a country set for the largest and most expensive ID database in the world looked after by people incapable of keeping records safe.Democracy defended?At the same time, a myriad of novel human rights have been conjured up in court rooms, far from the control of elected law-makers, fuelling a growing compensation culture and undermining social responsibility. The state now persecutes shop keepers who sell in pounds and ounces, but the Human Rights Act lets dangerous criminals negotiate their release from prison to go on to kill.In a country where common sense has been turned on its head, The Assault on Liberty is an exceptional and necessary polemic that asks one of the most urgent questions of our time:What Went Wrong With Rights?