The story of Israel and Zionism has been hijacked, disfigured, and trampled upon. It has been deliberately replaced by a story about sinister ideologies and evil motivations. When this tale of evil becomes the reigning story, peace becomes ever less possible, since evil is not to be negotiated with, but defeated. If peace is ever to be made, the story of Israel and Zionism is to be told anew. In this book, Dr. Einat Wilf does just that, demonstrating in the process how the true telling of the story of Israel and Zionism opens the path to peace with the Palestinians and the entire Arab and Muslim world. In the book's opening chapter, "Telling Our Story," Wilf provides a context, telling the story of the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their homeland and how through deliberate Jewish action - not foreign hand-outs or Holocaust-motivated guilt - the State of Israel was born. This story of the Zionist movement remains among the most inspiring dramas in human history: although dealt some of the worst cards in history, through force of vision, desire and work, the Jewish people returned to history as active agents and shaped a future in which they are not the victims of others. This story is crucial to understanding the importance of the Jewish state to the Jewish people, as well as in its broader ability to inspire people throughout the world. In chapter two, "On Why There Is No Peace," Wilf examines why decades after the establishment of the State of Israel conflict continues to persist with no end in sight. The core of her argument is that the requisite condition for any solution - whether it be a one-state or two-state solution - is for both sides of the conflict to recognize the equal rights of the other as collectives and individuals to all of the land, and the acceptance that neither can have the land in its entirety. As this requisite is absent - specifically on the Arab side - compromise, and thereby peace, has not been viable. In chapter three, "On What Israel Should Do," Wilf explores the steps Israel should take towards peace. Wilf argues that although peace may not be viable now, Israel should prepare for the hopeful eventuality of the creation of two states for two peoples between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. Israel should do this by specifically delineating its eastern border - including the annexation of the large Jewish settlement blocks that are contiguous to the Green Line - and renouncing is territorial claims beyond that eastern border. Given the very real security issues that Israel faces, however, she should implement a policy of continued military occupation until she feels there is a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. This policy is one of "yes to the occupation, no to the settlements," east of that border. Regarding Jerusalem, Wilf clarifies that the only place where controversy persists is in regard to the Old City. The status of the Old City will be determined through a final peace agreement, but the status of the overwhelming majority of Jerusalem can already be specified; and that final peace agreement, Wilf explains, would be in a much better position if the ambiguity regarding the Old City did not spill over into the issue of Jerusalem as a whole. In the concluding chapter, "On What the International Community Should Do," Wilf explores what roles and policies might be pursued by the international community. Foremost, however, Wilf posits that it is critical for the international community to understand that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, rests on serious issues that go to the core of matters of each other's sense of justice, history, and identity. Additionally, it is most important to bear in mind that Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs are sovereign agents who need to determine their future for themselves and by themselves.

The Langlands Program was conceived initially as a bridge between Number Theory and Automorphic Representations, and has now expanded into such areas as Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, tying together seemingly unrelated disciplines into a web of tantalizing conjectures. A new chapter to this grand project is provided in this book. It develops the geometric Langlands Correspondence for Loop Groups, a new approach, from a unique perspective offered by affine Kac-Moody algebras. The theory offers fresh insights into the world of Langlands dualities, with many applications to Representation Theory of Infinite-dimensional Algebras, and Quantum Field Theory. This accessible text builds the theory from scratch, with all necessary concepts defined and the essential results proved along the way. Based on courses taught at Berkeley, the book provides many open problems which could form the basis for future research, and is accessible to advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students.

New York Times bestselling authors Neil Gaiman, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and 23 more masters of fantasy deliver spellbinding stories of Arthurian knights, innocent maidens, sorcerers, and sword masters who have been touched by the power of the Holy Grail...

Gini's mean difference (GMD) was first introduced by Corrado Gini in 1912 as an alternative measure of variability. GMD and the parameters which are derived from it (such as the Gini coefficient or the concentration ratio) have been in use in the area of income distribution for almost a century. In practice, the use of GMD as a measure of variability is justified whenever the investigator is not ready to impose, without questioning, the convenient world of normality. This makes the GMD of critical importance in the complex research of statisticians, economists, econometricians, and policy makers. This book focuses on imitating analyses that are based on variance by replacing variance with the GMD and its variants. In this way, the text showcases how almost everything that can be done with the variance as a measure of variability, can be replicated by using Gini. Beyond this, there are marked benefits to utilizing Gini as opposed to other methods. One of the advantages of using Gini methodology is that it provides a unified system that enables the user to learn about various aspects of the underlying distribution. It also provides a systematic method and a unified terminology. Using Gini methodology can reduce the risk of imposing assumptions that are not supported by the data on the model. With these benefits in mind the text uses the covariance-based approach, though applications to other approaches are mentioned as well.

A firsthand account of how the Bush administration mismanaged its Afghan campaign, A Vulcan's Tale shines new and important light on the events and people behind the headlines in the immediate years following the September 11 attacks. The "Vulcans," so named by Condoleezza Rice, were eight foreign policy experts who advised George W. Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign. After Bush assumed the presidency, the Vulcans helped shape the administration’s foreign policy following 9/11, including the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. All were veterans of past administrations, having served under either Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, and they included among their ranks Dov Zakheim. Made comptroller and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense in 2001, Zakheim was also named the DoD’s coordinator for Afghan civilian reconstruction in 2002. In A Vulcan's Tale , Zakheim draws on his own participation and intimate knowledge to analyze how the United States missed critical opportunities while it struggled to manage two wars, particularly the seemingly endless endeavor in Afghanistan. In his view, the Bush administration's disappointing results in Afghanistan were partly attributable to the enormity of the challenges, certainly. But flawed leadership and deficiencies of management, understanding, and forethought all played their parts as well. The power of the purse proved to be especially damaging. The Office of Management and Budget was slow to fund Defense's efforts at the outset of the Afghan conflict and then inadequately funded the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, casting the die for several additional years of conflict. The invasion of Iraq siphoned off critical resources for Afghanistan, thereby further complicating that country's reconstruction. Even with public policy of the highest order, the devil still lurked in the details, as the DoD's "money man" was soon to discover while he struggled to fund and manage the reconstruction of civilian Afghanistan. A Vulcan's Tale is an authoritative, candid but fair account of how a wise and admirable goal can be waylaid by insufficient funding and ineffective coordination, with the result of faulty—or, at best, incomplete—implementation.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens o...

"In a groundbreaking book based on six years of reporting, leading expert on humanitarian aid and development David Rieff offers a review of whether the end of extreme poverty and widespread hunger are within our reach. Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and development experts agree that the eradication of hunger is an essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade, the prices of wheat, soy and rice have soared. This has condemned the hundreds of millions of the world's population who live on less than one dollar per day to a state of hunger and insecurity. Rieff searches for the causes of this food security crisis, as well as what lies behind the failures to respond to disaster: failures to address climate change, poor governance, and misguided optimism. Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, as well as the interventions of celebrity campaigners, whose business-led solutions rob development of political urgency. He dismisses the idle hope of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that food scarcity can be solved by technological innovation alone. The path ahead, Rieff reminds us, demands we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and understand that what is at stake is a political challenge we are failing to confront".

Treason of the Heart is an account of British people who took up foreign causes. Not mercenaries, then, but ideologues. Almost all were what today we would call radicals or activists, who thought they knew better than whichever bunch of backward or oppressed people it was that they had come to save. Usually they were applying to others what they saw as the benefits of their culture, and so obviously meritorious was their culture that they were prepared to be violent in imposing it. Some genuinely hated their own country, however, and saw themselves promoting abroad the values their own retrograde government was blocking. The book deals with those like Thomas Paine who saw American independence as the surest means to hurt England; the many who hoped to spread the French revolution and then have Napoleon conquer England; historic characters like Lord Byron and Lawrence of Arabia who fought for the causes that brought them glory; finally those who took up Communism or Nazism. Treason of the Heart is nothing less than the tale of intellectuals deluded about the effect of what they are doing and therefore with immediate reference to today's world.

In this important new book a remarkable group of authors - academics, journalists and politicians - offer a radical reappraisal of the future of Left political theory and policy in the context of recent changes in society. Compiled by the Institute for Public Policy Research, the volume includes contributons by Anthony Giddens, Perry Anderson, Gordon Brown, Anne Phillips, Michel Rocart, David Marquand and Will Hutton among others and sets out many new ideas and concepts.

"When seventh grader Nicholas V. Landrew, his beloved pet gerbil Henrietta, and a package of ground beef are beamed aboard an alien space ship, they soon find themselves on the run in a madcap chase across the universe. Now all Nicholas wants to do is get back home before his parents find out and ground him forever, but with the Universal Police hot on his trail, that won't be easy. Before it's all over, Henrietta will find herself safely ensconced back in her cage, Nicholas will be crowned Emperor of the Universe, and something even more surprising will happen to the package of ground beef."--Amazon.

There were two battles against apartheid - a political campaign and a media war. The political story has been told, and now you can read about the media effort. As South Africa marks in 2014 its 20th anniversary as a democracy, its transformation is still hailed as a "miracle." Most of the credit for the region's massive changes is awarded to towering leaders like the late Nelson Mandela. But the freedom fighters didn't achieve it alone--they had active solidarity from a global anti-apartheid movement, with a media component that showcased the struggle and kept it visible worldwide. "News Dissector" Danny Schechter reveals the inside story of what he calls a "Media War" in When South Africa Called, We Answered. He presents journalism as activism and displays the determination and dedication of journalists worldwide in exposing and eradicating apartheid. DANNY SCHECHTER is a writer, television producer, and independent filmmaker who also speaks about media and financial issues. He is the editor of Mediachannel1.org and blogs daily as the News Dissector at NewsDissector.net. Schechter is the author of sixteen books and has produced and directed more than thirty documentaries and television specials. His blog was named the 2009 "Blog of the Year" by the Hunter College Media Department of the City University of New York.

DANNY SCHECHTER, "The News Dissector" has spent decades as a truth teller in the media, with leading media companies and as an independent filmmaker with the award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News, where he was among the first to cover the S&L crisis. In 2007, his film IN DEBT WE TRUST was the first to expose Wall Street's connection to subprime loans, predicting the economic crisis that this book investigates. Schechter is a blogger, editor of Mediachannel.org, and author of nine books. He has reported from 53 countries, and lives in Gotham. He owns no derivatives or tranches.

Three highly illustrated, hilarious stories about a group of kids and their adventures during the fifteen minutes of Little Lunch. At Little Lunch we squeezed between the portable classroom and the fence, Battie fell off the old climbing tree and Melanie counted EVERYTHING. What else can happen in fifteen minutes?

What do the South Vietnamese government, the Shah and Ferdinand Marcos have in common? All were allied to the United States; all defied democratic and liberal norms; and all three fell in a blaze, creating problems for the United States. These three cases - and another eighteen more - are the subject of Friendly Tyrants, the first study ever to survey the contentious, persistent problem of U.S. government relations with pro-American authoritarian rulers.

In this lively book, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Boorstin, author of the widely acclaimed trilogy The Americans, illuminates our everyday concerns with his reflections on the new meaning of technology for America and of America for technology. He gives us a bold new view of the two kinds of revolution - the political and technological - and shows us how and why they are different, and why technological revolutions are irreversible. We are a center from which radiate forces that converge human experience everywhere. Though people around the world may not love one another any more than they did, yet their ways of life tend to become more and more alike. These same overwhelming forces of technology that homogenize the culture of the human race have disrupted the international community of nations; large and small nations become "equal," but each day the word "nation" grows more meaningless. Ideology, tribalism, nationalism, the crusading spirit in religion, bigotry, censorship, racism, persecution, immigration and emigration restriction, tariffs, and chauvinism do interpose barriers. For reasons which we are only beginning to discover, and which Boorstin explores in this controversial book, these barriers will only be temporary. The converging powers of technology will eventually triumph.

In this fascinating exploration of justice, eminent philosopher D. D. Raphael presents the culmination of a lifetime's study of its evolution, from ancient times to the late twentieth century. His aim is not just historical but philosophical: to illuminate our true understanding of justice. His unique approach examines not only classic texts by such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Mill, and Rawls but also the Bible and Greek tragedy, as well as some neglected but important thought from the modern era. Lucid and stimulating, this work can be enjoyed by anyone interested in moral and political thought, even by those with little to no knowledge of political theory or philosophy.