Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Freedom & Security

This book says outright what many have merely hinted at: that President George W. Bush knowingly misused the findings of the erroneous and incompetent U.S. intelligence community to provide a pretext for war with Iraq. The author hones in on the systematic weaknesses of the intelligence agencies that caused them to ignore the crucial signs leading up to the attacks of 9/11.

Voting is our most important right as Americans—“the right that protects all the others,” as Lyndon Johnson famously said when he signed the Voting Rights Act—but it’s also the one most violently contested throughout US history. Since the gutting of the act in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, many states have passed laws restricting the vote. After the 2020 election, President Trump’s effort to overturn the vote has evolved into a slow-motion coup, with many Republicans launching an all-out assault on our democracy.

Joel Simon, who in nearly two decades at the Committee to Protect Journalists has worked on dozens of hostages cases, delves into the heated hostage policy debate. We Want to Negotiate is an exploration of the ethical, legal, and strategic considerations of a bedeviling question: Should governments pay ransom to terrorists?

In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends - fellow working-class college students Nael and Tareq - joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm in arm they marched, poured Coca-Cola into one another’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent.

"There is an epidemic sweeping the world", the Nigerian Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, said. "It is the epidemic of fake news. Mixed with hate speech, it is a disaster waiting to happen." Some argue that the disaster has already happened. But is the solution as simple as ridding social media of disinformation and hate speech? Who should decide whether content should be removed from platforms, or which users should be kicked off? Should governments set the rules and force the American behemoths - Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - to follow?

A decade ago, millions of Egyptians took to the streets in a people-led revolution that captivated the world’s attention and sent ripples across the Middle East. But the so-called “Arab Spring” quickly faded, and a return to the status quo—of authoritarian rule—was cemented. What happened to the energy and desire for change? In Egypt, the answer lies in its youth, who comprise the bulk of the country’s fast-growing 106 million citizens.

Whenever decorated officer Vishwas Nangre Patil recalls the memories of Diwali from his childhood days, the sounds of firecrackers often transform into the deafening grenade blasts from the night of 26/11. It was his grit, cultivated over the years from the neck-breaking labour of studying for the UPSC exams, that had enabled him to power on and gun down the terrorists inside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel during the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a bright new age for children appeared on the horizon, with progress on ending child labor, providing public education, combating indigence, promoting wellness, and creating a juvenile justice system. But a hundred years on, the promised light has not arrived. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty and more than four million lack health insurance.

Why are some of the most interesting artists of our time committed to engaging with conflict and exploitation around the world? Beautiful, Gruesome, and True tells the stories of three of them: Amar Kanwar makes riveting films about the destruction of rural India in the drive to extract natural resources. Teresa Margolles creates haunting installations from the traces of crime scenes and drug-related violence in Mexico. The anonymous collective Abounaddara has produced more than four hundred short films chronicling the uprising and civil war in Syria.

The Infodemic lays bare the mechanisms of modern censorship and shows how they were used to undermine the response to the greatest global pandemic in a century. Beginning in China, the book charts the onslaught of COVID censorship through Iran, Russia, India, Egypt, Brazil, India, and inside the Trump White House. Modern censors not only restrict the flow of information but also open the floodgates to overwhelm the public with lies and half truths.

A community of rock quarry miners in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, gave their tiny cluster of thatched roofed houses the name Azad Nagar. Freedomville. But it hasn't always been identified by that auspicious moniker. The miners renamed their village in 2000, after they staged a revolt that overthrew the profit-driven landowners who held their families in debt bondage for generations. But the complex story of Freedomville, the murder that these revolutionaries nearly got away with, and the short-lived freedom its inhabitants created has never before been told until now.

Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what's gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the founders and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability.

A personal look at a crime of passion describes an FBI agent's successful career, family life, and extramarital affair that ended in murder, and the guilt that drove him to confess in spite of his impenetrable government shield. In a true story of crime, guilt, and conscience, a model agent's illicit involvement with an informant leads him to commit a crime that reveals all the workings of the human heart - and the dark side of the FBI.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

Since 9/11, more than 300 Americans - born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere - have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Some have taken the fight abroad: An American was among those who planned the attacks in Mumbai, and more than 80 US citizens have been charged with ISIS-related crimes. Others have acted on American soil, as with the attacks at Fort Hood, at the Boston Marathon, and in San Bernardino. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our efforts to track them?

Am 13. November 2015 sah Antoine Leiris seine Frau Hélène zum letzten Mal - sie wurde an diesem Tag mit neunzig weiteren Personen im Konzertsaal Le Bataclan Opfer der Terroranschläge in Paris. Während die Welt geschockt und in tiefer Trauer versuchte, eine Erklärung für das Unfassbare zu finden, postete der vierunddreißigjährige Journalist auf Facebook einen offenen Brief.

Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in American history - an enemy who brought the United States what President George W. Bush called “a day of fire”, and ushered in a new era of terrorism. It took a decade of blood and sacrifice, of determination and frustration, but finally, in a nighttime raid at the end of a dirt road in Pakistan, the hunt for Bin Laden ended with a gunshot. It was a dramatic climax to a long and painful chapter. But now what?

Was den "Islamischen Staat" so gefährlich macht. Nach seinem brutalen Eroberungszug im Jahr 2014 herrscht der "Islamische Staat" heute über mehr als fünf Millionen Menschen und eine Fläche von der Größe Großbritanniens. SPIEGEL-Korrespondent Christoph Reuter zeichnet den präzise geplanten Aufstieg der Dschihadisten nach und stößt zu den Wurzeln des Terrors vor - im zerfallenden Irak, im syrischen Bürgerkrieg und in den vielfältigen Konflikten der Region, die die Strategen des Terrors geschickt für ihre Zwecke zu nutzen wissen.

Tania Kambouri hatte genug. Wieder einer dieser Einsätze, bei denen ihr kein Respekt entgegengebracht, sondern sie stattdessen wüst beschimpft und beleidigt wurde. Der türkischstämmige Mann, der die Polizei um Hilfe gerufen hatte, war empört: Was wollte diese "Bullenschlampe" von ihm? Warum kam eine Frau - und kein Mann - zum Einsatzort? Vorkommnisse dieser Art erleben Polizisten im Einsatz immer öfter. Als Polizistin und Frau griechischer Abstammung ist Tania Kambouri den Angriffen auf der Straße besonders häufig ausgesetzt. Jetzt setzt sie sich zur Wehr: "Ich will den Finger in die Wunde legen, auch wenn mir bewusst ist, wie explosiv das Thema ist".

Throughout her long career of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” the cause closest to Molly Ivins’s heart was working to protect the freedoms we all value. Sadly, today we’re living in a time when dissent is equated with giving aid to terrorists, when any of us can be held in prison without even knowing the charges against us, and when our constitutional rights are being interpreted by a president who calls himself “The Decider.”