For more than a decade, an intense gang war has been raging between British and foreign criminals in Spain's sunny coastal regions. The warring factions have left more than a hundred people dead and scores injured, making headlines around the world. These vicious conflicts for control of drugs turf, protection rackets, people smuggling and sex slavery have blighted the reputation of what was once Europe's number one holiday destination and given it a sinister epithet: Costa del Crime.Gang Wars on the Costa reveals the inside story of the crime mobs, their deadly feuds and how this chilling criminal gang culture has evolved at a rate and intensity unlike anything seen before in Europe. With unprecedented access to senior gang members and police officers, Wensley Clarkson traces the roots of these criminals - from Britain, southern Europe, South America and the former Soviet block - and focuses on the emergence of the main gangs, whose rise to power has sparked gun battles and even professional hits.

For more than a decade, an intense gang war has been raging between British and foreign criminals in Spain's sunny costal regions. The warring factions have left more than a hundred people dead and scores injured, making headlines around the world. These vicious conflicts for control of drugs turf, protection rackets, people smuggling and sex slavery have blighted the reputation of what was once Europe's number one holiday destination and given it a sinister epithet: Costa del Crime. Gang Wars on the Costa reveals the inside story of the crime mobs, their deadly feuds and how this chilling criminal gang culture has evolved at a rate and intensity unlike anything seen before in Europe. With unprecedented access to senior gang members and police officers, Wensley Clarkson traces the roots of these criminals - from Britain, southern Europe, South America and the former Soviet block - and focuses on the emergence of the main gangs, whose rise to power has sparked gun battles and even professional hits.

This comprehensive work provides a sourcebook of information about the substantive, methodological, and policy-oriented aspects of homicide research in Europe. Part one of this work covers the most recent substantive and methodological information about European homicide research. The second part will contains detailed case studies on homicide research in 15-20 individual European nations. This work will be both conceptual and practical. conceptual and practical. Conceptual aspects will focus on theoretical frameworks and patterns and trends of violence in Europe. Practical aspects will examine the results of empirical research, topics relating to different data sources and the variation of legal definitions of violence throughout Europe, and policy issues relating to variation in homicide prevention and punishment of homicide offenders throughout Europe. This handbook will not only provide an up-to-date reference that brings together known information, but will also offer previously unpublished comprehensive literature reviews and original research findings. The editors’ distinctive approach is to provide readers with an English-language central source of information about the voluminous literature on European homicide research that is currently spread widely in dozens of different European and American journals.

As in the cascading of water, violence and nonviolence can cascade down from commanding heights of power (as in waterfalls), up from powerless peripheries, and can undulate to spread horizontally (flowing from one space to another). As with containing water, conflict cannot be contained without asking crucial questions about which variables might cause it to cascade from the top-down, bottom up and from the middle-out. The book shows how violence cascades from state to state. Empirical research has shown that nations with a neighbor at war are more likely to have a civil war themselves (Sambanis 2001). More importantly in the analysis of this book, war cascades from hot spot to hot spot within and between states (Autesserre 2010, 2014). The key to understanding cascades of hot spots is in the interaction between local and macro cleavages and alliances (Kalyvas 2006). The analysis exposes the folly of asking single-level policy questions like do the benefits and costs of a regime change in Iraq justify an invasion? We must also ask what other violence might cascade from an invasion of Iraq? The cascades concept is widespread in the physical and biological sciences with cascades in geology, particle physics and the globalization of contagion. The past two decades has seen prominent and powerful applications of the cascades idea to the social sciences (Sunstein 1997; Gladwell 2000; Sikkink 2011). In his discussion of ethnic violence, James Rosenau (1990) stressed that the image of turbulence developed by mathematicians and physicists could provide an important basis for understanding the idea of bifurcation and related ideas of complexity, chaos, and turbulence in complex systems. He classified the bifurcated systems in contemporary world politics as the multicentric system and the statecentric system. Each of these affects the others in multiple ways, at multiple levels, and in ways that make events enormously hard to predict (Rosenau 1990, 2006). He replaced the idea of events with cascades to describe the event structures that 'gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems' (1990: 299). Through a detailed analysis of case studies in South Asia, that built on John Braithwaite's twenty-five year project Peacebuilding Compared, and coding of conflicts in different parts of the globe, we expand Rosenau's concept of global turbulence and images of cascades. In the cascades of violence in South Asia, we demonstrate how micro-events such as localized riots, land-grabbing, pervasive militarization and attempts to assassinate political leaders are linked to large scale macro-events of global politics. We argue in order to prevent future conflicts there is a need to understand the relationships between history, structures and agency; interest, values and politics; global and local factors and alliances.

On the night of April 7, 2006, eight members of the motorcycle gang the Bandidos were killed execution style and left in a farmer's field near London, Ontario. The brutal slaying, the largest mass killing in Canada's history, was reported as the work of a rival motorcycle gang. The Shedden Massacre instantly made international headlines, as did the sensational murder trial that followed. In Bloody Justice, readers are taken to the very night of the crime itself, to the key players and perpetrators, to the events leading to the slayings—and inside a trial that let a killer go free. Reflecting the author's painstaking research, attendance at the trials, and jailhouse interviews with one of the convicted, Bloody Justice outlines a fascinating case that is very much at odds with the prosecution's.

What would you do if you woke up and found yourself in a parallel universe under an alien sky? This is the question Zax Delatree must answer every time he closes his eyes. Every time Zax Delatree falls asleep, he travels to a new reality. He has no control over his destination and never knows what he will see when he opens his eyes. Sometimes he wakes up in technological utopias, and other times in the bombed-out ruins of collapsed civilizations. All he has to live by are his wits and the small aides he has picked up along the way - technological advantages from techno-utopias, sedatives to escape dangerous worlds, and stimulants to extend his stay in pleasant ones. Thankfully, Zax isn't always alone. He can take people with him, if they're unconscious in his arms when he falls asleep. But someone unwelcome is on his tail, and they are after something that Zax cannot spare - the blood running through his veins, the power to travel through worlds... File Under: Science Fiction [ Green Power | Sweat Dreams | Waking Nightmare | Zax of all Trades ]

Half-a-million Brits reside full-time in the Costa Del Sol, drawn by the good weather and easy lifestyle. Among them are the drug barons, hookers, gigolos, pimps, con-men, fraudsters, killers, gangsters, drag queens and swingers who underpin the economy of the continent's most outrageous hotspot.'You get out there and lose all sense of proportion. It must be the sun, the booze and the women; so many blokes come a cropper and get hooked on all three' - Max, Costa entrepreneur'Many of the customers who walk into the club looking for sex are British holidaymakers. Some sneak out of hotels, leaving their wives and kids unaware they've gone off to a brothel. Takes all sorts, I guess' - Jenny and Madonna, Costa Club Girls''I got everything from colonic irrigation devices to rubber catsuits. Most of its worth trying at least once, just to see if ya enjoy it' - Ramona, Costa dungeon queen'Things got a bit heavy for a while. A few Molotov cocktails were chucked through me front window, if you know what I mean' - Lenny, Costa drug baron'I knew it was the place for me the moment the place touched down at Malaga. Lots of pretty birds and plenty of geezers prepared to get at it in front of the camera. That was where it was at' - 'Grubby' Vic, Costa pornographer