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This chapter describes some of the kinds of cheating committed by flower visitors and what plants can do to avoid the costs of being cheated. While both plants and visitors have many ways of cheating, the diversity and deviousness of cheating by the plants seem to be substantially greater than the surreptitious stealing and ambushing that goes on in the animals. This is not surprising when considered in terms of the so-called life-dinner principle, and what each participant has at stake. The chapter begins with a discussion of how animals cheat by means of floral theft and thus get rewards without effecting pollination, including nectar theft, pollen theft, and florivory. It then examines three main options for defending plants against theft: physical barriers, chemical deterrents, and bribes. It also explains the overall effects of theft on flowers and concludes with an analysis of floral exploitation by hitchhikers and ambush predators.

Counsel is one of the most important, least understood, and most elusive elements of politics in early modern France. Table talk in all households revolved around plots and schemes designed to further the lineage at the expense of one's neighbour. Plots were disguised as fair duels or chance encounters. Behind much of the surviving evidence of face-to-face killing in this period lies the hidden history of calculation and conspiracy. One of the best documented vengeance killings of the 17th century involving two feuding families provides a good opportunity to explore the dynamics of family decision making and group solidarity. This chapter also discusses ambush and surprise attacks, use of disguise and concealment to commit crime, and escape of those who committed the crime.

In the early days of the intifada, there were lots of curfews. The plug would be pulled, and everything would suddenly and without warning be immersed in complete darkness. People had heard the pops and whizzes of IDF bullets so often they could frequently distinguish the kind of gun that had fired them. Like his grandmother, Sitti, Yusuf was also blind. Sometimes, they worked on improving their Arabic. Sometimes, Yusuf would give a lesson on Braille. Long expanses of time could go by like this, and then something would happen. They seemed like midnight ambushes.

A reflection on the personal experience of writing the war-of a sense of grief and emotional ambush from encountering so many personal stories of anguish, suffering, death, and loss. Also admiration for wanton courage, often spent in an abominable cause. And a sense of great unfinished business, after a war that should have settled certain matters for good.

This chapter describes what it was like for police to fight in the Irish War of Independence, using their own testimony, obtained from the records of military courts of inquiry. It analyses the various types of engagements in which police fought — assassinations, ambushes, barracks battles, and encounter battles — and shows how, from the police perspective, the War of Independence was often frustratingly one-sided. Battles between guerrillas and police often ended in defeat for the police, who then were faced with a choice of fighting to the death, running away, or surrendering. Those who surrendered to the guerrillas were sometimes treated well, but sometimes killed. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the Kilmichael ambush controversy: although nationalist historians have largely succeeded in discrediting Peter Hart's revisionist account, they have not succeeded in confirming the traditional version of events.

This chapter follows the operations of Battery B, 999th Armored Field Artillery Battalion, in its efforts to support the Republic of Korea 1st Division during the opening days of the Spring Offensive. A Communist attack hit the ROK 1st division of the US 1 Corps hard and the Armored Field Artillery Battalion, an African American organization, reinforced the unit. The extensive accounts of the ambush and response, coupled with maps and illustrations, provide a complete picture of the Battery B unit, which continued to be an effective fighting organization even after the attack.

This chapter describes the process of instigating a murder; choosing a victim; beer-drinks and ambushes; mutilating and killing; disposing of the body; and the making the medicine, all in relation to medicine murder. Information about the instigation and planning of medicine murders comes almost entirely from accomplice witnesses. Many were simply told, either by the chief or by one of his councillors, that the chief had decided to kill a certain person for medicine and that he wanted them to take part. If the intended victim was an adult, the most common plan was to invite them to a feast of some kind, a mokete, to let them get drunk, and then to attack them after they had left. Before the murderers got down to work, there were other precautions to be taken. Blood-stains had to be avoided, and paths that were less likely to be seen are chosen.

This chapter focuses on how digital culture is re-making our understanding of citizenship by creating alternative channels of communication, activity, connection, and expression. In particular, it discusses instances of digital resistance around the Olympic Games, arguing that these antagonistic reactions are crucial components that justify the Olympic mission and a crucial means through which the Olympic idea can assert itself as a movement, rather than just a sports event. In this respect, it argues that the Olympic industries must seek to enable such expression, while also ensuring that it does not jeopardize the need for the Olympic Games to remain politically neutral.

This chapter describes the deaths of the people who died in Ireland in 1919. For a while, postman Daniel Joseph McGandy had been helping Michael Sheerin, who had been pilfering a stock of grenade casings in Craig's engineering works, by carrying these off in his postman's bag. On January 19, 1919, McGandy failed to attend a rendezvous with Sheerin. Next day his coat, revolver, and post bag were found on the quay outside Craig's; a week later his body was recovered from the River Foyle. It was believed 'that he had lost his life on account of unofficial hostile action'. Meanwhile, farmer James McDonnel joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) on October 18, 1882, serving in Wexford, the RIC Reserve, and Wexford again before transfer to Tipperary town in 1891. He died during the Soloheadbeg ambush by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) party in 1919.

This chapter looks at the deaths of the people who died in Ireland in 1921. Ex-serviceman Martin Heavy was abducted along with his mother, sister, young niece, and nephew on the night of December 30, 1920, by masked members of the Curraghboy Company, 4th Battalion, South Roscommon Brigade. Held overnight in a cattle shed, the family were taken next evening by 'mule and trap' through Knockcroghery to 'a big house'. His family were expelled, while Heavy 'was left behind with his hands tied'. Thrown into the Shannon River, his body was never recovered. Ten Curraghboy Company Volunteers were arrested in January of 1921, each suffering 'a severe beating'. Meanwhile, Michael McGrath was one of about fifty of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who mounted an ambush at Pickardstown. McGrath was killed on the Ballinattin road; he was the first Waterford city volunteer killed during the War of Independence.

This chapter begins the discussion of the professional soldier, assessing the definitions of professionalism propounded by Huntington, Janowitz, and Moskos. It argues that in the professional force not only has infantry doctrine been refined so that specific actions at each point of an infantry assault are specified comprehensively but the professional soldier is also sufficiently well trained to execute these drills in practice. The chapter draws on interviews, observation of training, and recent published accounts of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the famous Gatigal ambush, to illustrate the inculcation and implementation of battle drills. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ‘close-quarters battle’, the most advanced urban combat techniques initially developed by Special Forces in the 1970s, to highlight contemporary developments in infantry drills.

The talks resolve most issues after the talks move to the shore of Lake Ohrid. But the execution of NLA fighters and the ambush of a Macedonian Army convoy threaten to destroy the negotiations. President Trajkovski steps in to complete the agreement and prevent a destructive civil war. NATO then moves to disarm the NLA.

Many clerics who sympathised with Sinn Féin and who wished to see Ireland become an independent republic were nonetheless vociferous in condemning IRA violence. The discouragement of violence was thus an important aspect of the clergy’s traditional political alignment. This goal was pursued principally by exerting moral pressure on Irish Catholics through denunciation. This chapter examines public clerical condemnation of the IRA campaign. It looks first at its incidence, showing that priests condemned IRA violence more often as it became more frequent up to the last quarter of 1920, when denunciations dropped as British violence became harsher. The chapter also analyses the means by which clerics communicated their message and examines its contents. It shows that specific tropes of condemnation were established in the aftermath of the Soloheadbeg ambush.

An idealized principal narrative course is reconstructed for the medieval Germanic dragon fight. The motifs reviewed include: the transformation of a man into a dragon whilst lying on treasure; the generation of a dragon from a corpse; the development of a tiny worm into a vast dragon; the offering of a princess’s hand to a champion; the champion’s protective clothing; his ambushing of the dragon between its cave-lair and a water-source; the dragon’s uniquely vulnerable spot; the champion’s named sword; the special properties of the dragon’s blood. A pair of recurring narrative subroutines are also investigated: in one the champion intervenes on a lion’s behalf upon coming across it engaged in a fight with a dragon, and after killing the dragon has lifelong loyal pet in the lion; in the other the champion is cast into a snake pit, with varying outcomes.

Telemachus is encouraged to follow the example of Orestes’ return from abroad to take revenge on his mother’s suitors. (Orestes’ matricide is downplayed, so that he offers a pattern which does not compromise Telemachus’ moral standing.) Agamemnon is trapped in an ambush and murdered at a feast by a trick of his wife’s to achieve a cross-over parallel with the suitors, who are tricked (by Penelope), ambushed, and murdered at a feast. The fish-and-net simile used of the suitors’ bodies lying in the hall parodies Agamemnon’s traditional murder in the bath tangled up in a cloth. Penelope’s instructions for the care of her guest, the disguised Odysseus, parody the bath, textiles, and bed/bier which later appear in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

This chapter looks at the Tooth Hill campsites, which were a grail of modern conflict archaeology, as they preserved the faintest traces of military activity in a vast and hostile desert, and others probably lay undiscovered in-between Tel Shahm and Mudawwara. They are the rare imprint of the origins of modern mobile guerrilla warfare which shaped so many military actions across the twentieth century, and into the present. However, guerrilla warfare against the Hejaz Railway achieved arguably its most spectacular success not against a station but in what would later be regarded as a classic ambush. The Hallat Ammar ambush was about metal—trains, track, mines, and munitions—and so metal-detector survey was invaluable. No identifiable trace of the looting of the train was found, though the large quantity of railway debris had doubtless been sifted, robbed, and moved around in the intervening years. Indeed, despite its isolation, the archaeology of the ambush site could not be the pristine remains of the Arab Revolt, but rather, as elsewhere, a layering of the intervening century’s activities, disturbing, overlaying, and obscuring some of the events of the attack.