Arris Books

A definitive concise history of Portugal, from its earliest beginnings right up to the politics and life of the present day. It was not until the twelfth century that Portugal became a country in its own right, having been a Roman colony and then having suffered both Barbarian and Islamic invasions. The golden age of discoveries, the reign and foresight of Henry the Navigator, and great seamen such as Vasco da Gama led to the founding of Portugal's empire and wealth. Troubled times followed: in 1755 Lisbon was virtually leveled by the Great Earthquake, and the country had hardly recovered its former prosperity when it was overrun by Napoleon's troops at the start of the Peninsular War, to be followed not long after by the Miguelite civil war. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the Port Wine trade flourishing, and further expansion into Africa. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, ever since the bloodless revolution of 1974 overthrew the right-wing dictatorship of Salazar, the country has regained its stability, and now takes its rightful place in the European Community.

In 2004, the United States waged one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. For many the city was a symbol of resistance to the US war and occupation; since the battle it has become a symbol of the worst of the US – Iraq war. Only one television station – Al Jazeera – stayed in Fallujah to report on the battle, and the horrifying and heartbreaking images seen worldwide came from reporter Ahmed Mansour and cameraman Laith Mushtaq. The images so outraged the world that the US military made Mansour’s leaving Fallujah the first condition for a ceasefire. Donald Rumsfeld called his reporting ‘vicious and inaccurate’, and argued that they were propagandists: ‘What they do is when a bomb goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and children’. Here, for the first time in English, is the renowned reporter’s own view of what happened inside Fallujah. It is the untold story of a defining battle that determined the future of the US occupation of Iraq; the story of a city that shattered US designs not only for Iraq but the region as a whole. ‘Al-Jazeera has a track record of honest and accurate reporting, and has maintained a principled pluralism in the face of brutal and authoritarian regimes within the region, and increasingly from those without. This is why it has been vilified, criminalised and bombed. It is also why it should be defended...’ Arthur Neslen, The Guardian

At 5:21 in the afternoon on 9/11 — almost seven hours after both the Twin Towers had collapsed — Building 7 of the World Trade Center also came down, even though it had not been struck by an airplane and had fires on only a few floors. The reason for its collapse was considered a mystery. In August 2008, the official report on WTC 7 was finally released by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), which declared: ‘the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery’. The principal author of this report assured the press that ‘science is really behind what we have said’. Noting that President Obama has declared that his administration ‘will restore science to its rightful place’, David Ray Griffin shows that science emphatically does not support the conclusions of NIST’s WTC 7 report. He demonstrates that NIST is guilty of the most serious types of scientific fraud: fabricating, falsifying, and ignoring evidence. His study concludes by pointing out that even after all its distortions of fact, the NIST report has still left the world wondering: How could a building brought down by fire — not explosives — have come down in free fall?