Government Mysteries

Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump's victory and the rise of alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography - everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling best-selling cultural critic, Peter Biskind, dives headlong into two decades of popular culture - from superhero franchises such as the X-Men and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24 - and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics.

On the surface, Anna Witherall has the perfect life. Married to her university boyfriend David, she has an enviable job, beautiful home, and gorgeous three-year-old twin daughters, Stella and Rose. Their competent and capable nanny, Maria, is practically part of the family. But beneath the veneer of success and happiness, Anna is hiding a dark secret, one that threatens to unravel everything she has worked so hard to create. Only one thing is certain: to protect her children, she must betray them.

Want to crack the code of commodity futures markets? Back to the Futures provides a unique and educational perspective on the world of commodity futures markets, shaped by the personal experiences and professional insights of Dr. Scott Irwin, a leading expert in the field.

Sam Dryden lives quietly in a small coastal town in Southern California, buying and fixing up old houses. It's good physical work that he's come to love. But his peaceful life is shattered when he gets a phone call from an old friend in trouble. A phone call that pulls Dryden into the middle of a situation that's as violent as it is baffling.

When long-time White Rock resident Mike Donnelly is found dead at his hunting camp, it appears as if the tragic death was by his own hand. But a gut feeling tells Chief of Police Sam Mason otherwise. Is it any coincidence that Mike's family farm sits smack in the middle of a parcel of land that greedy Lucas Thorne desperately needs to complete the development of his resort? Sam and Sergeant Jody Harris's line of questioning stirs up a hornet's nest.

Flat Earth isn't merely a matter of topography and the conspicuous lack of curvature or detectable movement. Flat Earth is the absence of delusion. It is a cleansing of the doors of perception, allowing us to see reality as it is, infinite. The Flat Earth Reformation has already begun in the minds of those who unplugged from that blind faith in the official interpretations of reality and recognized how the Globe-Paradigm is a mental and religious construct which binds humanity in a toxic and codependent relationship with power.

In Paris, a bomb blast triggers a chain of events that contaminates every aspect of Stephanie's life. It's clear she's been betrayed. But by whom? She must identify the threat before she can run from it! Stephanie saves herself by taking a hostage, but soon, the tension between captive and captor accelerates dangerously beyond her control.

Scientific and weapons secrets and personnel are being sent via the people-smuggling routes from China, through Albania and the former Yugoslavia to Europe and Britain. Stephanie's personal feelings for one of the victims of this trade causes her to make a rare professional mistake, and the consequences are far-reaching, vicious, and challenging, even for her skills and expertise.

With more than a dozen kills under her belt, ex-Marine Mara Roberts is one of the Agency's most reliable assassins. But her latest target - a convicted traitor about to be released from prison - is different than her other marks. He's a former agent who betrayed his country. He's responsible for the death of Mara's mother. And he happens to be Mara's father. Scott Roberts knows that his daughter was sent to kill him. He realizes he has only one chance to convince her that he's been framed for treason - and that every member of their family are pawns to be sacrificed, one by one.

In The Crash of Flight 3804, Investigative Journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies - the British, the French, and the Russians - in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through vivid storytelling, extensive research, and deep analysis of region-defining maps, she reveals how feverish competition among intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day.

More and more people are beginning to realize that we are being manipulated and lied to. We are denied access to secrets that shouldn’t be secrets. Our politicians obfuscate, deny, and outright lie. No one knows whom to trust. The nightly news is being replaced by carefully orchestrated propaganda. Our iPhones are monitored, as are our laptops and our landlines. As for social media, that too is ripe for spying by men in black suits. No wonder, then, that the last few years have seen an incredible rise in conspiracy theories about deceptions and cover-ups.

Michael Tanner is on his way home from a business trip when he accidentally picks up the wrong MacBook in an airport security line. He doesn't notice the mix-up until he arrives home in Boston, but by then it's too late. Tanner's curiosity gets the better of him when he discovers that the owner is a US senator and that the laptop contains top secret files. When Senator Susan Robbins realizes she's come back with the wrong laptop, she calls her young chief of staff, Will Abbott, in a panic.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a profound impact on individuals, businesses, and governments, but what is required to get ahead and stay ahead of the AI curve is not well-understood. AI Supremacy is a comprehensive guide to AI’s impact on a societal and global level and provides a vision for how AI and machine learning will likely influence the way business is done, societies function, and governments interact in the future.

After taking out a sleeper network, Devin Gray and Marnie Young are picking up the pieces of their disrupted lives. But the gravity of the conspiracy they helped to cripple is sucking them right back into the black hole of violence and subterfuge that nearly consumed them. Another sleeper network is awake. A progressive congresswoman dies in a car explosion, vaporized by an American kamikaze drone—the beginning of the mayhem to come. What Devin dismantled is being rebuilt. The plan: ignite a civil war in the United States and burn America to the ground.

On August 1, 1990, Flight 149 was scheduled for its routine London-to-Kuala Lumpur run. But when the plane, carrying 385 passengers and crew, landed at a Kuwait airport to refuel that day, it was surrounded by Iraqi tanks and about to be bombed by fighter jets. The passengers and crew were kept as hostages and suffered brutal treatment including violent attacks, sexual assaults, and mock executions.

Digby and Zoe have been skirting around each other for so long that you might think they'd lose their magic if they ever actually hooked up. But never fear--there's all the acerbic wit, steamy chemistry, and sarcastic banter you could possibly hope for.Now that Digby's back in town with a new lead, he's plunged Zoe (and their Scooby Gang of wealthy frenemy Sloane, nerd-tastic genius Felix, and aw-shucks-handsome Henry) into the deep end on the hunt for his kidnapped sister.

In Burning the Reichstag, Benjamin Hett offers a gripping account of Hitler's rise to dictatorship - one that challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played. At the scene the police arrested 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason. Though he was initially dismissed abroad as a Nazi tool, post-war historians since the 1950s have largely judged him solely guilty - a lone arsonist exploited by Hitler.

Logan is an undercover operative for Blindeye: a clandestine team of ex-intelligence operatives secretly tasked with the jobs that are beyond the legal remit of the official security services. When the group picks up on a trail of corruption which reaches to the top of the UK’s National Crime Agency, their mission begins. DCI John Tenniel is a ruthless individual unafraid to break the rules in order to elevate himself to more power and bodies have been piling up in his mission to the top.

With help from her friends - the irascible gray cat Pewter, the wise corgi Tee Tucker, and Tally, the exuberant Jack Russell - Sneaky crisscrosses her home state of Virginia hoping to go where no cat since Socks Clinton has gone: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In the tradition of her heroine, Sojourner Truth, she takes her case to the masses. Journeying from the lair of the red-shouldered hawk to the nest of the tufted titmouse, from a pasture full of curmudgeonly cows to the stately halls of Monticello, the tenacious tiger cat even secures the chattering support of Thomas Jefferson’s mice.

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.