Elizabeth Lydia "Eliza" Manningham-Buller, Baroness Manningham-Buller, DCB (born 14 July 1948) was Director General (DG) of MI5, the British internal national security agency, from October 2002 until her retirement on 20 April 2007, aged 58.

More than 2 million troops have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands have returned with a bedeviling mix of psychological and cognitive problems. For decades, doctors have recognized that soldiers can suffer lasting wounds from the sheer terror of combat, a condition referred to today as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Even so, there's no movie in the Disney vault quite like Victory Through Air Power. Inspired by the 1942 book of that name by Alexander P. de Seversky, the film is sheer propaganda. It is an advocacy piece for a very specific military plan, marshaling any evidence which would support that plan and denigrating or ignoring anything else. It is a movie wholly dedicated to advancing an argument. A damn far cry from watching woodland animals frolic around a princess in the woods, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody - I suspect, not even to the eternally optimistic Walt himself - Victory Through Air Power lost money. It is easily the driest, least-entertaining, and grimmest feature ever made by the Disney animators, and the fact it was released theatrically at all - by United Artists, not Disney's customary distributors at RKO, who felt that the project was a surefire money-loser - is testament to how much weight the name "Walt Disney" yet carried in July, 1943.

Simply put, Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace.

I've read many books about war, but aside from those that deal with strategy and tactics, these are two of the best. Loyd's book looks at war through the eyes of an addict and Hedges' from the perspective of a disillusioned journalist. Both, I think, make compelling cases against the narrative fallacy (and what I call the soundtrack delusion)--or how we imbue glory and significance to fragmented and undeserving events. A word of warning: while both these books are well-written--poetic even--no writer could ever live up to the expectations set by that pair of titles. If you go in thinking they could, you won't be able to appreciate how important and insightful they truly are. After reading these, you might try Lt Dave Grossman's On Killing.

I've read many books about war, but aside from those that deal with strategy and tactics, these are two of the best. Loyd's book looks at war through the eyes of an addict and Hedges' from the perspective of a disillusioned journalist. Both, I think, make compelling cases against the narrative fallacy (and what I call the soundtrack delusion)--or how we imbue glory and significance to fragmented and undeserving events. A word of warning: while both these books are well-written--poetic even--no writer could ever live up to the expectations set by that pair of titles. If you go in thinking they could, you won't be able to appreciate how important and insightful they truly are. After reading these, you might try Lt Dave Grossman's On Killing.

He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him.

"On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism."

"At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from violence both military and economic, were far too busy staying alive to mount a political response to Bremer's campaign. Worrying about the privatization of the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half the population lacking access to clean drinking water; the debate over the flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in the international press, Bremer's new laws, though radical, were easily upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime."