The use of armed drones by the United States against Al-Qaeda and its ‘associates’: a study of law and policy arising from a ‘State of exception’

The use of armed drones in undeclared warzones pose various challenges to well established rules of international law. The US drone policies rest on shaky legal grounds, are ambiguous in nature and have been justified by reinterpretation of international law. The UK government’s use of drone strike in Syria shows a new problematic trend. The frequency of armed drones by few states outside area of active hostilities has normalised the use of force and generated a permanent state of exception. Mainstream research on targeted killings has focused on legality of US strikes in Pakistan but largely ignored the problematic role of Pakistan, in particular, the military violence of the Pakistani military in the tribal areas. The case study of Pakistan highlights that the drone strikes are directed against a population that is marginalised within the targeted state. The study argues that the special status of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has allowed the US to conduct drone strikes without any accountability. The US has been targeting groups with varying degree of closeness to Al-Qaeda in multiple territories based in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria. The study established with the help of control test devised by the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua case that the associations between Al-Qaeda and these groups or organisations is very loose. Targeting groups who pose no threat to the US is both illegal and counterproductive. Therefore the extraterritorial targeting of terrorists who pose no threat to the US is a flawed strategy and must be reviewed

People with learning disabilities and mental health problems: the impact of ethnicity

There is increasing awareness of the needs of people with learning disabilities from different ethnic communities. This paper focuses on the impact of ethnicity on the presentation of mental health problems. The main aim of the paper is to inform those planning and delivering mental health services for people with learning disabilities of the current evidence, in order to enable their practice to improve health outcomes for people from minority ethnic communitie

Charged Dilatonic Black Holes in Gravity's Rainbow

In this paper, we present charged dilatonic black holes in gravity's rainbow. We study geometric and thermodynamic properties of black hole solutions. We also investigate the effects of rainbow functions on different thermodynamic quantities for these charged black holes in dilatonic gravity's rainbow. Then, we demonstrate that first law of thermodynamics is valid for these solutions. After that, we investigate thermal stability of the solutions using canonical ensemble and analyze the effects of different rainbow functions on thermal stability. In addition, we present some arguments regarding the bound and phase transition points in context of geometrical thermodynamics. We also study the phase transition in extended phase space in which cosmological constant is treated as the thermodynamic pressure. Finally, we use another approach to calculate and demonstrate that obtained critical points in extended phase space are representing a second order phase transition for these black holes.Comment: 17 pages with 9 captioned figures: Accepted in EPJ

Supporting the complexity of managing information technology projects : application of living systems theory

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The main objective of this research is motivated by the challenge of IT project failure in terms of cost overrun and time delays which is a common practice and is being investigated for years now. Increasing complexity of projects or an underestimation of the project complexity is one of the reasons for project failure, which is the main focus of this study. For this reason, the present work seeks to understand how to apply living systems theory as new lens to investigate and support the complexity of managing IT projects; where management is about “preparation and facilitation” of the project tasks. To achieve research objectives, this study defined management framework based on interpretation of the literature and elicitation of expert opinions through online questionnaire. This framework provide guidelines for project managers to map and study project management processes to identify important issues that leads project to complexity and failure. It also provides suggestion on how to deal with these issues. Through presentation of the framework and supporting guidelines during semi-structured interview with experts, this research investigates the applicability and appropriateness of the proposed approach. The outcomes of this research help project managers to identify important issues that might arise in the project and assist them on how to facilitate and prepare management processes. Academia’s can use the result of the project to develop tools to measure complexity in projects. With this measurement, they will be able to estimate project timelines and costs more precisely

The characterisation of armed conflict and targeted killing of suspected terrorists under international humanitarian law: reflections on the future of Jus in Bello

The use of drones for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists has raised a number of complex legal issues for scholars and practitioners in field of international law. This paper will focus on the applicability of international humanitarian law in such situations and the characterisation of drone warfare as armed conflict. In this context, the scope of armed conflict as a concept of international humanitarian law will be explored. In doing so, emphasis will be placed on the need for accountability to ensure greater compliance with international law

Holographic Complexity and Fidelity Susceptibility as Holographic Information Dual to Different Volumes in AdS

The holographic complexity and fidelity susceptibility have been defined as new quantities dual to different volumes in AdS. In this paper, we will use these new proposals to calculate both of these quantities for a variety of interesting deformations of AdS. We obtain the holographic complexity and fidelity susceptibility for an AdS black hole, Janus solution and a solution with cylindrically symmetry, an inhomogeneous background and a hyperscaling violating background. It is observed that the holographic complexity depends on the size of the subsystem for all these solutions and the fidelity susceptibility does not have any such dependence.Comment: Slighly updated version. Accepted for publication in Phys. Letters