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

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

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.

From New York Times best-selling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail tells eye-opening, behind-the-scenes stories from Secret Service agents about presidents and their families.

In this essential new book, Vali Nasr argues that the Obama administration had a chance to improve its relations with the Middle East, but instead chose to pursue its predecessor's questionable strategies there. Nasr takes listeners behind the scenes at the State Department and reveals how the new government's fear of political backlash and the specter of terrorism crippled the efforts of diplomatic giants, like Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton, to boost America's foundering credibility with world leaders.

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?

"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?

Matthew Friedman provides an up-to-date overview of human trafficking, a largely ignored present-day evil, and recounts true stories of enslavement in Asia today. Former United Nations and USAID expert Matthew Friedman obtained in-depth first-hand knowledge with boots-on-the-ground work over 30 years throughout Asia. Human trafficking exists in nearly every nation on earth and Friedman has personally interviewed hundreds of freed slaves and imprisoned traffickers throughout South and Southeast Asia.

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.

A history of the landmark case of Clarence Earl Gideon's fight for the right to legal counsel.

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.”

Die Welt kennt nur die Bilder aus dem Lagezentrum des Weißen Hauses: Präsident Barack Obama und sein Stab beobachten am Monitor den Zugriff...