As of 1975, the decades long insurgency in Angola appeared to be short of its conclusion. However, with no less than three major insurgent movements fighting for supremacy, the war went on and then South Africa, USA, the Soviet Union, Zaire and Cuba became involved.Affairs like the CIA’s efforts to destabilize Angola for little else but to recoup its prestige after the catastrophic defeat in South Vietnam, or the South African military intervention in Angola – Operation Savannah – ...

The Syrian Civil War, (the colloquial name of the ongoing conflict in Syria), has experienced an entirely unexpected transformation during its first two years. It started as unrest within the Syrian population and a series of mass demonstrations within the context of wider protest movements in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, known as the Arab Spring. Contrary to events in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, where oppressive governments were toppled by the end of that year, the gover...

"A little Elmore Leonard, a little Charles Portis, and very much its own uniquely American self. . .Tom Cooper has written one hell of a novel." –Stephen KingWhen the BP oil spill devastates the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the citizens of the bayou town of Jeanette scramble to replace their lost livelihoods. Among them is one-armed, pill-popping shrimper Gus Lindquist, who has nothing left but the dying glimmer of a boyhood dream: finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean...

Drive down almost any street in Webster Groves and one is filled with a sense of timelessness. Entire neighborhoods are in the National Register of Historic Places, and there are lovingly preserved century homes, beautiful old churches, avenues lined with gardens, and shopping districts more reminiscent of small-town America than a thriving suburb next door to the city of St. Louis. History runs deep here, as it is home to the first chapter of the Red Cross and the first Boy Scout Troop we...

Open almost any textbook and count the faces. You will find 737 named figures and only 178 women, and 98 of those appear once and vanish. Girls get a map with no roads to themselves, boys get a story that the work was theirs, and both learn a history that is half true.This book is not a complaint and it is not a collection of trivia. It is 16 chapters of fully checked lives that span science, invention, civil rights, labor, medicine, war, suffrage, and literature, each 1 showing a ...

You picked up this book because you are busy and you care about your health, and you know that too much sodium is a problem, but the idea of cooking elaborate low sodium meals after a long day feels impossible. You want to protect your heart, support your kidneys, manage your weight, and still get dinner on the table without turning the kitchen into a second job. Or maybe you have been told to cut salt and you have no idea where to start. Whatever brought you here, you share the belief thi...

You picked up this book because you have heard you should learn Git and GitHub, and you may have also heard that an AI coding assistant can help you write software faster, but you have not found a calm daily path that teaches all three together without assuming you speak the language of developers. You may have tried Git before and been handed a wall of commands, told to memorize them, and left alone to connect the dots. Whatever brought you here, you share a conviction that this book was ...

On 24 February 2022, the Russian Federation launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine. Coming after years of tensions following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and thinly veiled direct armed support for separatists fighting in Donbass and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, observers gave Ukraine’s military little chance of surviving the initial Russian onslaught. Yet the Russian forces failed to deliver a decisive blow in the opening air or ground campaign. Volume 6 of War in Ukraine ex...

When released into independence from Great Britain in 1948, the stunningly beautiful island of Ceylon, renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, was expected to become a sort of ‘South Asian Singapore.' However, stable political order and bright economic prospects proved insufficient to maintain peace. A host of unsolved ethnic conflicts and social inequalities conspired to erupt into an armed conflict in 1971.When this broke out the entire Sri Lankan society was shocked to its core by a large-sc...

Through late 1987 and early 1988, the battlefields of southern Angola moved ever further away from the border with South West Africa/Namibia, until the showdown between the Soviet and Cuban-supported government in Luanda and South African-supported insurgency of UNITA culminated in the controversial and still much disputed Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.During this period, Angolan and Cuban airpower slowly grew to a point where it outmatched the SAAF, in turn limiting the freedom of mov...

Following the Civil War of 1994, Yemen experienced few years of relative peace. This was rudely interrupted in 2004, when the government opened the first of six campaigns against the movement colloquially known as ‘Houthis’. The Yemeni Air Force – partially re-equipped over the previous years – saw intensive involvement in this conflict, but proved insufficient. In late 2009 and through 2010, the war spread into Saudi Arabia, which reacted with its first military intervention in the countr...

In 1971, Idi Amin Dada, a former officer of the King’s African Rifles and commander of the Ugandan Army, seized power in a military coup in Uganda. Characterized by human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extra judicial killings, nepotism, corruption and gross economic mismanagement, Amin’s rule drove thousands into exile. Amin shifted the country’s orientation in international relations from alliances with the West and Israel, to cooperation with the Soviet Union.