Bad news from Fallujah

This study uses the thematic analysis developed by the Glasgow University Media Group to explore how the US, UK and German national press covered the US/Coalition assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative full text content analyses to assess 428 news, editorial and commentary items. The article suggests that, while government and military officials of the US/Coalition had argued the military ‘operation’ was necessary to secure Iraq and defeat an ‘insurgency’, organisations and actors from Iraqi society refer to the ‘operation’ as ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘massacre’ that targeted the Iraqi population. The article investigates how the press represented each of these perspectives. The findings suggest that the press overemphasised the US/Coalition perspective despite striking counter evidence. Critical aspects of coverage largely focused on tactical elements of the military dimension of the event. The article concludes that such findings are in accord with hegemonic models of media performance

A short review of phase transition in a chaotic system

The subject approached here is a dynamical phase transition observed in Hamiltonian systems, which is a transition from integrability to non-integrability. Using the dynamics defined by a discrete mapping on the variables action I and angle $$\theta$$, we perform a description of the behaviour of the chaotic diffusion to particles in the chaotic sea using two methods. One is a phenomenological description obtaining the critical exponents via numerical simulation, and the other is an analytical result obtained by the solution of the diffusion equation. The scaling invariance is observed in the chaotic sea leading to an universal chaotic diffusion. This is a clear signature that the system is passing through a phase transition. We investigate a set of four questions that characterize a phase transition: (1) identify the broken symmetry; (2) define the order parameter; (3) identify what are the elementary excitations and; (4) detect the topological defects which impact on the transport of the particles