In 2004, the United States waged one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. For many the city was a symbol of resistance to the US war and occupation; since the battle it has become a symbol of the worst of the US - Iraq war. Only one television station - Al Jazeera - stayed in Fallujah to report on the battle, and the horrifying and heartbreaking images seen worldwide came from reporter Ahmed Mansour and cameraman Laith Mushtaq. The images so outraged the world that the US military made Mansour's leaving Fallujah the first condition for a ceasefire. Donald Rumsfeld called his reporting 'vicious and inaccurate', and argued that they were propagandists: 'What they do is when a bomb goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and children'. Here, for the first time in English, is the renowned reporter's own view of what happened inside Fallujah. It is the untold story of a defining battle that determined the future of the US occupation of Iraq; the story of a city that shattered US designs not only for Iraq but the region as a whole.'Al-Jazeera has a track record of honest and accurate reporting, and has maintained a principled pluralism in the face of brutal and authoritarian regimes within the region, and increasingly from those without. This is why it has been vilified, criminalised and bombed. It is also why it should be defended...' Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
The fifth volume of Rudolf Ahlswede’s lectures on Information Theory focuses on several problems that were at the heart of a lot of his research. One of the highlights of the entire lecture note series is surely Part I of this volume on arbitrarily varying channels (AVC), a subject in which Ahlswede was probably the world's leading expert. Appended to Part I is a survey by Holger Boche and Ahmed Mansour on recent results concerning AVC and arbitrarily varying wiretap channels (AVWC). After a short Part II on continuous data compression, Part III, the longest part of the book, is devoted to distributed information. This Part includes discussions on a variety of related topics; among them let us emphasize two which are famously associated with Ahlswede: "multiple descriptions", on which he produced some of the best research worldwide, and "network coding", which had Ahlswede among the authors of its pioneering paper. The final Part IV on "Statistical Inference under Communication constraints" is mainly based on Ahlswede’s joint paper with Imre Csiszar, which received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society. The lectures presented in this work, which consists of 10 volumes, are suitable for graduate students in Mathematics, and also for those working in Theoretical Computer Science, Physics, and Electrical Engineering with a background in basic Mathematics. The lectures can be used either as the basis for courses or to supplement them in many ways. Ph.D. students will also find research problems, often with conjectures, that offer potential subjects for a thesis. More advanced researchers may find questions which form the basis of entire research programs.
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