‘I make no apologies for being a mercenary soldier. Quite the reverse. I am proud to have led 5 Commando. I am proud to have fought shoulder to shoulder with the toughest and bravest band of men it has ever been my honor to command. I am proud that they stood when all else failed.’ In July 1964, four years after gaining independence from Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo came under threat from an armed rebellion that spread rapidly through the country. To suppress the rebels and bring the unrest and bloodshed in the country under control, Congolese officials enlisted the help of mercenary leader Mike Hoare. Working alongside military officials, Hoare assembled a band of several hundred men that became known as ‘5 Commando’. In Congo Mercenary, Hoare tells the story of the role that these men played in the rebellion, describing in gripping detail how this band of mercenaries were recruited, trained, and how they swept through the country. His team undertook four campaigns in just 18 months during which they fought rebels, liberated Stanleyville, freed European hostages and brought order back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hoare’s experiences in the Congo and his involvement in suppressing the Simba rebellion were hugely significant from a political and a military standpoint. His influence, however, did not stop there. This account of his time in the Congo was first published in 1967 and had a huge cultural impact, as well, contributing to the glorification of the mercenary lifestyle in magazines and pulp novels, and even inspiring the 1978 war film The Wild Geese starring Richard Burton and Roger Moore.
In the 1730s two expeditions set out from Paris on extraordinary journeys; the first was destined for the equatorial region of Peru, the second headed north towards the Arctic Circle. Although the eighteenth century witnessed numerous such adventures, these expeditions were different. Rather than seeking new lands to conquer or mineral wealth to exploit, their primary objectives were scientific: to determine the Earth's precise shape by measuring the variation of a degree of latitude at points separated as nearly as possible by a whole quadrant of the globe between Equator and North Pole. Although such information had consequences for navigation and cartography, the motivation was not simply utilitarian. Rather it was one theme among many in an intellectual revolution in which advances in mathematics paralleled philosophical strife, and reputations of the living and the dead stood to be elevated or destroyed. In particular the two expeditions hoped to prove the correctness of Isaac Newton's prediction that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, but flattened at the poles. In this study, the 'Figure of the Earth' controversy is for the first time comprehensively explored in all its several dimensions. It shows how a largely neglected episode of European science, that produced no spectacular process or artefact - beyond a relatively minor improvement in maps - nevertheless represents an almost unique combination of theoretical prediction and empirical method. It also details the suffering of the two teams of scientists in very different extremes of climate, whose sacrifices for the sake of knowledge rather than colonial gain, caught the imagination of the literary world of the time.
This book examines the careers of the men who served as British Foreign Secretary between 1919 and 1939, focusing in particular on the ways in which they sought to mould foreign policy.
SOLDIERS OF $$ Privateers, contract killers, corporate warriors. Contract soldiers go by many names, but they all have one thing in common: They fight for money and plunder rather than liberty, God, or country. Now acclaimed author and war vet Michael Lee Lanning traces the compelling history of these fighting machines–from the “Sea Peoples” who fought for the pharaohs’ greater glory to today’s soldiers for hire from private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges is a fascinating account of the men who fight other people’s wars–the Greeks who built an empire for Alexander the Great, the Nubians who accompanied Hannibal across the Alps, the Irish who became the first to go global in their search for work. Soldiers of fortune have always had the power to change the course of war, and Lanning examines their pivotal roles in individual battles and in the rise and fall of empires. As the employment of contract soldiers spreads in Iraq and America’s War on Terrorism–the U.S. paid $30 billion to PMCs in 2003 alone–Mercenaries offers a valuable inside look at a system that appears embedded in our nation’s future. Includes eight pages of photographs
Programming Language Pragmatics, Fourth Edition, is the most comprehensive programming language textbook available today. It is distinguished and acclaimed for its integrated treatment of language design and implementation, with an emphasis on the fundamental tradeoffs that continue to drive software development.The book provides readers with a solid foundation in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the full range of programming languages, from traditional languages like C to the latest in functional, scripting, and object-oriented programming. This fourth edition has been heavily revised throughout, with expanded coverage of type systems and functional programming, a unified treatment of polymorphism, highlights of the newest language standards, and examples featuring the ARM and x86 64-bit architectures. Updated coverage of the latest developments in programming language design, including C & C++11, Java 8, C# 5, Scala, Go, Swift, Python 3, and HTML 5 Updated treatment of functional programming, with extensive coverage of OCaml New chapters devoted to type systems and composite types Unified and updated treatment of polymorphism in all its forms New examples featuring the ARM and x86 64-bit architectures
Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "advanced/optional content, hundreds of working examples, an active search facility, and live links to manuals, tutorials, compilers, and interpreters on the World Wide Web."--Page 4 of cover.
This book analyses British official reactions to the apparent decline of France, politically, socially and economically, in the three years before the outbreak of war in Europe. The book is based on public and private archival sources and on the memoirs and biographies of leading British figures and describes the British Government's efforts to cope with the desperate strategic situation created by its own military weakness and the malaise of the Third Republic, its own potential great power ally in a war with the Axis powers.
The interaction of database and AI technologies is crucial to such applications as data mining, active databases, and knowledge-based expert systems. This volume collects the primary readings on the interactions, actual and potential, between these two fields. The editors have chosen articles to balance significant early research and the best and most comprehensive articles from the 1980s. An in-depth introduction discusses basic research motivations, giving a survey of the history, concepts, and terminology of the interaction. Major themes, approaches and results, open issues and future directions are all discussed, including the results of a major survey conducted by the editors of current work in industry and research labs. Thirteen sections follow, each with a short introduction. Topics examined include semantic data models with emphasis on conceptual modeling techniques for databases and information systems and the integration of data model concepts in high-level data languages, definition and maintenance of integrity constraints in databases and knowledge bases, natural language front ends, object-oriented database management systems, implementation issues such as concurrency control and error recovery, and representation of time and knowledge incompleteness from the viewpoints of databases, logic programming, and AI.
Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was the most gifted and successful British portrait painter in the generation following Gainsborough and Reynolds, and his pre-eminence was publicly confirmed when he was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1820 ... This book is the first sustained study of the work of Lawrence to be published for many years ..."--Inside front cover jacket.
In this book, Michael F. Palo explains how a historical and theoretical examination of Belgian neutrality, 1839-1940, can help readers understand the behaviour of small/weak democracies in the international system.
Kettle argues that the White Russians became expendable British pawns in a temporary forward holding position, designed to contain the Bolshevik inferno within Russia. British medium intervention thus prolonged the Civil War.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is one of the most prominent and controversial figures in contemporary British politics. He is a man who divides opinion in his own party, in Parliament and across the country. An arch-Brexiteer with significant business interests and a large personal fortune, he has long been a vocal critic of the European Union and of Prime Minister Theresa May's attempts to negotiate a Brexit deal. As chairman of the powerful anti-EU organisation the European Research Group, he has also been a thorn in the side of those seeking to dilute Brexit. While many people mock him for his impeccable manners and traditional attitudes – he has been dubbed 'the Honourable Member for the eighteenth century' – an equally great number applaud him for his apparent conviction politics. Undoubtedly, Rees-Mogg stands out among the current crop of MPs and his growing influence cannot be ignored. In this wide-ranging unauthorised biography of the Conservative Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, Michael Ashcroft, bestselling author of Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron, turns his attention to one of the most intriguing politicians of our time.
Drawing on unique sources, Michael Bloch describes the career of the Duke of Windsor during the Second World War.As a military liaison officer in France during 1939-40, he issued warnings which, had they been heeded, might have avoided the defeat of France;as Governor of the Bahamas 1940-45, he succeeded in what was regarded as one of the most difficult posts in the British Empire.But at the same time he and his wife (to marry whom he had given up a throne) had a second war to contend with - against King George VI and Queen Elizabeth who were determined to treat them as outcasts.This book caused a furore on publication, being the first work to give a detailed account of the bitter relations between the ex-King and his family.
The years from 1934 to 1937 were a time during which the British Empire was confronted with the emergence of the triple threat of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. The goal of British policy was easily defined: the protection and promotion of Britain's vast interests. While Neville Chamberlain and Sir Robert Vansittart agreed on the goal, they disagreed on the means to achieve it. Their disagreement stemmed partly from their different understandings of the nature of the Third Reich; Vansittart understood better than Chamberlain the implications of Hitler's Weltanschauung. But their different strategies also reflected the fact that Chamberlain did not share Vansittart's belief in the necessity of pursuing alliance diplomacy to protect the world-wide security and interests of the British Empire. While the prime minister realized that Britain's problems were global in scope, he thought Britain could solve each problem on a bilateral basis. In other words, Britain should approach Germany, Japan, and Italy directly to settle outstanding disputes. Vansittart did not believe, however, that Britain's problems could be solved on a bilateral basis, for the interdependence of events in every region of the globe militated against bilateral solutions.
In this brilliant and authoritative work, based on their private correspondence and papers, Michael Bloch describes the feud which developed between the Duke of Windsor and the British royal establishment after the Abdication, the humiliations which were suffered by the ex-King and his wife, and the plots to ensure that they remained in exile.
Errata, detected in Taylor's Logarithms. London: 4to, 1792. [sic] 14.18.3 6 Kk Co-sine of 3398 3298 - Nautical Almanac (1832) In the list of ERRATA detected in Taylor's Logarithms, for cos. 4° 18'3", read cos. 14° 18'2". - Nautical Almanac (1833) ERRATUM ofthe ERRATUM ofthe ERRATA of TAYLOR'S Logarithms. For cos. 4° 18'3", read cos. 14° 18' 3". - Nautical Almanac (1836) In the 1820s, an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed and partly built a calculating machine originally intended for use in deriving and printing logarithmic and other tables used in the shipping industry. At that time, such tables were often inaccurate, copied carelessly, and had been instrumental in causing a number of maritime disasters. Babbage's machine, called a 'Difference Engine' because it performed its cal culations using the principle of partial differences, was intended to substantially reduce the number of errors made by humans calculating the tables. Babbage had also designed (but never built) a forerunner of the modern printer, which would also reduce the number of errors admitted during the transcription of the results. Nowadays, a system implemented to perform the function of Babbage's engine would be classed as safety-critical. That is, the failure of the system to produce correct results could result in the loss of human life, mass destruction of property (in the form of ships and cargo) as well as financial losses and loss of competitive advantage for the shipping firm.
The major goal of this book is to present the techniques of top-down program design and verification of program correctness hand-in-hand. It thus aims to give readers a new way of looking at algorithms and their design, synthesizing ten years of research in the process. It provides many examples of program and proof development with the aid of a formal and informal treatment of Hoare's method of invariants. Modem widely accepted control structures and data structures are explained in detail, together with their formal definitions, as a basis for their use in the design of correct algorithms. We provide and apply proof rules for a wide range of program structures, including conditionals, loops, procedures and recur sion. We analyze situations in which the restricted use of gotos can be justified, providing a new approach to proof rules for such situations. We study several important techniques of data structuring, including arrays, files, records and linked structures. The secondary goal of this book is to teach the reader how to use the programming language Pascal. This is the first text to teach Pascal pro gramming in a fashion which not only includes advanced algorithms which operate on advanced data structures, but also provides the full axiomatic definition of Pascal due to Wirth and Hoare. Our approach to the language is very different from that of a conventional programming text.
The books in this trilogy capture the foundational core of advanced informatics. The authors make the foundations accessible, enabling students to become effective problem solvers. This first volume establishes the inductive approach as a fundamental principle for system and domain analysis. After a brief introduction to the elementary mathematical structures, such as sets, propositional logic, relations, and functions, the authors focus on the separation between syntax (representation) and semantics (meaning), and on the advantages of the consistent and persistent use of inductive definitions. They identify compositionality as a feature that not only acts as a foundation for algebraic proofs but also as a key for more general scalability of modeling and analysis. A core principle throughout is invariance, which the authors consider a key for the mastery of change, whether in the form of extensions, transformations, or abstractions. This textbook is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science and for self-study. Most chapters contain exercises and the content has been class-tested over many years in various universities.
Shedding light on the origins of the Second World War in Europe, Stalin’s Gamble aims to create a historical narrative of the relations of the USSR with Britain, France, the United States, Poland, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the 1930s. The book explores the Soviet Union’s efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War. Drawing on extensive research in Soviet as well as Western archives, Michael Jabara Carley offers an in-depth account of the diplomatic manoeuvrings which surrounded the rise of Hitler and Soviet efforts to construct an alliance against future German aggression. Paying close attention to the beliefs and interactions of senior politicians and diplomats, the book seeks to replace one-sided Western histories with records from both sides. The book also offers an inside look at Soviet foreign policy making, with a focus on Stalin as a foreign policy maker as well as nd his interactions with his colleagues. Told in a fascinating narrative style, Stalin’s Gamble attempts to see the European crisis of the 1930s through Soviet eyes.
Mathematicians have long recognized the distinction between an argument showing that an interesting object exists and a procedure for actually constructing the object. Computer science adds a new dimension of interest in constructivity, since a computer program is a formal description of a constructive procedure that can be executed automatically. It has beenover a decade since a conference was devoted to constructivity, and never before has one been held specifically relating computer science to constructivity. Thus, this proceedings volume is the most concentrated offering ever produced of the diverse ways in which constructivity and computer science are related. The papers cover semantics and type theory, logic and theorem proving, real and complex analysis, topology and combinatorics, nonconstructive graph-theoretical techniques, and curriculum and pedagogic issues. The book offers a concentrated view of the many ways in which constructivity has assumed importance in computer science, and contains results available nowhere else.
This book examines the political history of the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I and argues that Haile Selassie was the founder of centralized Ethiopia with access to the sea as well as the founder of modern Ethiopian diplomacy.
Beaucourt is one of the last parts of the Battle of the Somme still to be covered, until now, by the splendid Battleground Europe Series. It was also one of the last actions of the Battle of the Somme, 1916. The eventual capture of Beaucourt along with Beaumont Hamel forced the Germans to retreat to their new defensive position known as the Hindenburg Line. The Battle of Beaucourt was also known as the Gough Offensive, led by General Gough, with a large proportion of the troops involved being from the Royal Naval Division. Indeed, Beaucourt is where Bernard Freyberg of that division won his Victoria Cross. Following the usual Battleground style, readers are taken on a voyage of discovery through the village of Beaucourt and along the banks of the Ancre in the direction of Cambrai.
Concerned primarily with statistical data, this text aims to provide a guide to the nature, uses, availability and limitations of the main data sources for interpreting and undertaking regional studies of economic activity. It also considers the methods used for the collection of this data.
The second volume explains how the League of Nations mandates system fused two of the predominant and compelling global forces of the twentieth century: imperialism and Wilsonian internationalism. After the First World War, Britain and France administered most of Germany's former tropical African colonies as "mandates" under the supervision of the League as "a sacred trust of civilization." This system of international trusteeship changed British and French rule in Africa. In short, "mandates" were not "colonies." Mandates meant less militarism, more commercial equality, a greater emphasis on the interests of Africans, and an end to the extension of European national sovereignty over colonized peoples. Accountability to the League also required the British and French to reconsider traditional economic, strategic, and ideological assumptions about their empires. In the process, the "sacred trust" sowed the seeds of self-doubt about the very purpose and future of European imperialism. The mandates system continued to represent a genuine internationalisation and reformation of colonialism and had long-term economic, political, and cultural consequences for Africans and Europeans within the mandated territories. Despite the Depression, repeated Anglo-French foreign policy failures, growing humiliations for Geneva, and war in Africa and Europe, the principles and practices of international trusteeship proved persistent. Mandates demonstrated the relevance of international law, the importance of the League of Nations, and the impact of Wilsonian principles on international relations and European imperialism.
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