Documents the primary mechanism abused by the government to destroy the constitutional rights and sovereignty of the people.

We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.

A collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field, In God's Empire examines the complex ways in which the spread of Christianity by French men and women shaped local communities, French national prowess, and global politics in the two centuries following the French Revolution. More than a story of religious proselytism, missionary activity was an essential feature of French contact and interaction with local populations. In many parts of the world, missionaries were the first French men and women to work and live among indigenous societies. For all the celebration of France's secular "civilizing mission," it was more often than not religious workers who actually fulfilled the daily tasks of running schools, hospitals, and orphanages. While their work was often tied to small villages, missionaries' interactions had geopolitical implications. Focusing on many regions--from the Ottoman Empire and the United States to Indochina and the Pacific Ocean--this book explores how France used missionaries' long connections with local communities as a means of political influence and justification for colonial expansion. In God's Empire offers readers both an overview of the major historical dimensions of the French evangelical enterprise, as well as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological challenges of placing French missionary work within the context of European, colonial, and religious history.

Progressive Education, derived mainly from Anglo-American culture, has been the primary frame of reference for student-centered classroom change in developing countries for over 50 years. Yet in many developing countries, strong evidence shows that progressivism has not replaced teacher-centered formalistic classroom practice. Classroom Change in Developing Countries: From Progressive Cage to Formalistic Frame presents a robust case for why formalism should be the primary frame of reference for upgrading classroom teaching in developing countries. Theoretically rich yet grounded in practice, the book draws on case studies from Africa, China and Papua New Guinea to show how culturally intuitive formalistic teaching styles can induce positive classroom change. Synthesising research and evaluation literature on classroom change in developing countries, Guthrie examines some of the methodological flaws in the literature. The book considers the progressive cage, and looks at Confucian influences on teaching in China, progressive reform failures in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, as well as offering a critical take on some failings in comparative education. It examines the formalistic frame, addresses methodological issues in culturally grounded research and offers a model of teaching styles for basic classroom research. The book concludes by returning the focus back to teachers and considers the so-called teacher resistance to change. The book will be an essential purchase for academics and research students engaged in the fields of classroom teaching, teacher education and curriculum and will also be of interest to academics, aid officials, and decision-makers in developing countries.

The OBR's forecast for GDP growth in 2012 is -0.1 percent and is projected to pick up in every year of the forecast. Public Sector Net Borrowing is forecast to fall by 1.0 percent of GDP in 2012-13 and in subsequent years of the forecast. Public Sector Net Debt is expected to be 79.9 per cent of GDP in 2015-16 before falling to 77.3 per cent by 2017-18. This Statement sets out a further £6.6 billion package of savings in the spending review period, made up from welfare, Official Development Assistance (ODA) and departmental current spending. A £5.5 billion of additional infrastructure will be funded, including in new roads, science and free schools and academies. There will be a further 1 per cent cut in the main rate of corporation tax from April 2014, to 21 per cent and a significant temporary increase in the Annual Investment Allowance from £25,000 to £250, 000 for two years. A greater proportion of growth-related spending will be devolved to local areas and a Business Bank will be created to deploy £1 billion of additional capital and enable UK Export Finance to provide up to £1.5 billion in loans with a package of reforms to promote export. The Government will: increase the basic State Pension by 2.5 percent; create an HM Revenue & Customs unit dedicated to tackling offshore tax evasion; introduce of the UK's first General Anti-abuse Rule; develop significant new information disclosure and penalty powers; and close off tax loopholes. Lifetime allowances for pension contributions will be reduced.

This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs’s Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as “a book of exploration, of searching regard.... a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs’s experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave’s four- thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.