Hostage Three Quotes

I'm here to tell you that if you get broken, it's possible to put yourself back together. I'm here to tell you that if you get lost, it's possible that a light will come, dancing, on the horizon, to lead you home.

Why would I want to share anything with a man who yells at me twenty-three hours of every day, then kisses me?

The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.

This is the thing: people think that magic doesn't exist, but it does, all the time. We use spells every day: the spell of forgiveness, the spell of thanks.

I know for an absolute honest-to-goodness fact that life can kick you to pieces, break you into a thousand little shards, and that you can get up again and mend yourself. I promise.

Because things might be meant to happen. Because an order might exits, under the chaos. Because the universe might be playing a tune.

Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will of others.

She curled her fingers into his chest instead of complying. “You’re an incredibly handsome male,” she said. “Perfect bone structure, pure blond hair, eyes so blue they should be impossible. Your only ‘flaw’ is this tattoo.” She traced the three jagged lines on his right biceps. “It’s an echo of the markings on your alpha’s face.” He gave a short nod. “A symbol of absolute loyalty.” Her lips parted. “Knowing that just makes you even more dangerously beautiful.

We are all, even the best of us, egoists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds.

She pulled her arm free from his grasp and stood back, her arms crossed. "So, what then? You're holding me hostage? Are you even really a sheriff?" "I am," he said, highly amused at her attempt at bravado. "You wanna see my badge?

However, Dorian's acceptance of Andrew only went so far. And it was nowhere near enough to allow him this close to Ashaya. "What are you doing here?" Though SnowDancer and DarkRiver had free range over each other's territory, the wolves preferred to stick to the higher elevations. Andrew's eyes shifted over Dorian's shoulder. "I can smell her." "Don't." The younger male grinned. "She's all over you, too. Is she as sexy as she smells?" Dorian knew Andrew was deliberately jerking his chain. "Why don't you come closer and find out?" "Do I look stupid?" "You look like a wolf." Andrew bared his teeth. "I thought we were friends." "And I thought you got posted back to San Diego." The other man shrugged. "I came back to visit my baby sister, check up on that mate of hers." "She's fine," Dorian said, relaxing a little at Andrew's deliberately nonaggressive stance. "I've been keeping an eye on her." "Yeah, I know. She's always muttering about how she has three over protective morons for brothers now. Andrew snorted. "Wait till she has a baby girl. I can't exactly see Judd being any less feral.

In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were attached to snare traps around their necks, likely to kill them in the event that the police attempted to storm the bank. The hostages grew increasingly afraid and hostile toward the authorities trying to win their release and even actively resisted various rescue attempts. Afterward they refused to testify against their captors, and several continued to stay in contact with the hostage takers, who were sent to prison. Their resistance to outside help and their loyalty toward their captors was puzzling, and psychologists began to study the phenomenon in this and other hostage situations. The expression of positive feelings toward the captor and negative feelings toward those on the outside trying to win their release became known as Stockholm syndrome.

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.

This is the FBI Hostage Negotiations Service. Press one if you wish to surrender. Press two for a getaway car. Press three for a helicopter. Press four for a pizza

He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence... He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion.

The geneticist Daniel Bradley and his colleagues identified a Y-chromosome type that is present in two to three million people today and derives from an ancestor who lived around fifteen hundred years ago.16 It is especially common in people with the last name O’Donnell, who descend from one of the most powerful royal families of medieval Ireland, the “Descendants of Niall”—referring to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a legendary warlord from the earliest period of medieval Irish history.

Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston.

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!

As (the Soviet newspaper) Pravda said in 1951,"If ever the spy Allen Dulles should arrive in Heaven through somebody's absent-mindedness, he would begin to blow up the clouds, mine the stars, and slaughter the angels." Allen Dulles cared little for the methods that were used to accomplish the secret projects he funded. Proof of this is clear when you look at his attempts in 1950 to convince John McCloy to intervene in General Alexander von Falkenhausen's trial. Von Falkenhausen had executed hostages in Belgium throughout the war and ordered the deportation of 25,000 Jews to death camps. Von Falkenhausen drew a twelve-year sentence but was freed after three weeks.

Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, willful, terrible, crazed, and adoring. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. Other times they'll reach out and touch you like adoring grandparents on their deathbeds trying to memorize your face with their fingers...Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

■​Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■​Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■​Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■​Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■​Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■​When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■​Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

the greatest inspiration for institutional change in American law enforcement came on an airport tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 4, 1971. The United States was experiencing an epidemic of airline hijackings at the time; there were five in one three-day period in 1970. It was in that charged atmosphere that an unhinged man named George Giffe Jr. hijacked a chartered plane out of Nashville, Tennessee, planning to head to the Bahamas. By the time the incident was over, Giffe had murdered two hostages—his estranged wife and the pilot—and killed himself to boot. But this time the blame didn’t fall on the hijacker; instead, it fell squarely on the FBI. Two hostages had managed to convince Giffe to let them go on the tarmac in Jacksonville, where they’d stopped to refuel. But the agents had gotten impatient and shot out the engine. And that had pushed Giffe to the nuclear option. In fact, the blame placed on the FBI was so strong that when the pilot’s wife and Giffe’s daughter filed a wrongful death suit alleging FBI negligence, the courts agreed. In the landmark Downs v. United States decision of 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote that “there was a better suited alternative to protecting the hostages’ well-being,” and said that the FBI had turned “what had been a successful ‘waiting game,’ during which two persons safely left the plane, into a ‘shooting match’ that left three persons dead.” The court concluded that “a reasonable attempt at negotiations must be made prior to a tactical intervention.” The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations. Soon after the Giffe tragedy, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) became the first police force in the country to put together a dedicated team of specialists to design a process and handle crisis negotiations. The FBI and others followed. A new era of negotiation had begun. HEART

We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.

And the ladies dressed in red for my pain and with my pain latched onto my breath, clinging like the fetuses of scorpions in the deepest crook of my neck, the mothers in red who sucked out the last bit of heat that my barely beating heart could give me — I always had to learn on my own the steps you take to drink and eat and breathe, I was never taught to cry and now will never learn to do this, least of all from the great ladies latched onto the lining of my breath with reddish spit and floating veils of blood, my blood, mine alone, which I drew myself and which they drink from now after murdering the king whose body is listing in the river and who moves his eyes and smiles, though he’s dead and when you’re dead, you’re dead, for all the smiling you do, and the great ladies, the tragic ladies in red have murdered the one who is floating down the river and I stay behind like a hostage in their eternal custody. I want to die to the letter of the law of the commonplace, where we are assured that dying is the same as dreaming. The light, the forbidden wine, the vertigo. Who is it you write for? The ruins of an abandoned temple. If only celebration were possible. A mournful vision, splintered, of a garden of broken statues. Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum. The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we neither are nor is. My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays I see with them; I’ve seen and approved of nothing. Seated at the bottom of a lake. She has lost her shadow, but not the desire to be, to lose. She is alone with her images. Dressed in red, and unseeing. Who has reached this place that no one ever reaches? The lord of those dead who are dressed in red. The man who is masked in a faceless face. The one who came for her takes her without him. Dressed in black, and seeing. The one who didn’t know how to die of love and so couldn’t learn a thing. She is sad because she is not there. There are words with hands; barely written, they search my heart. There are words condemned like the lilac in a tempest. There are words resembling some among the dead, and from these I prefer the ones that evoke the doll of some unhappy girl. Ward 18 when I think of occupational therapy I think of poking out my eyes in a house in ruin then eating them while thinking of all my years of continuous writing, 15 or 20 hours writing without a break, whetted by the demon of analogies, trying to configure my terrible wandering verbal matter, because — oh dear old Sigmund Freud — psychoanalytic science forgot its key somewhere: to open it opens but how to close the wound? for other imponderables lovelier than the smile of the Virgin of the Rocks the shadows strike blows the black shadows of the dead nothing but blows and there were cries nothing but blows

In the past, the Israelis complained that the Palestinians were so fragmented that no faction could deliver on any peace deal. Now Abbas had a controlling position. Washington and Brussels backed him. Everything was in place for a package to bring Gaza back under the control of Abbas, to disarm Hamas, to reopen crossing points to Egypt and Israel, monitored by EU observers, and to pour millions of dollars into Gaza's reconstruction as a precursor to a viable Palestinian state. But instead of welcoming this sign of growing moderation, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resorted to his old tactic of divide and rule. In June, three Israeli teenagers vanished in the West Bank. Netanyahu ordered a "hostage rescue operation", despite intelligence that the youths were already dead, which escalated into the onslaught against Hamas.

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective. By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting.

Daleric rushed in and braced Arram's free side. "Arram, what's this?" He asked with concern. "You were fine when we left. " "Apparently Kottrun and his pack took Arram and the wounded as hostages," the captain explained. "They must have run mad to think Master Ramasu could walk them out of here. Our mages put sleep on them, but before it took, the boy made a fountain that smacked Kottrun silly and then dropped him." "Kottrun hit me in the head, too," Arram said cheerfully. His knees turned to water, and he sagged in the mages' grips. "But I'm fine. " Daleric raised his eyebrows. "No wonder you're wrung out, then," he told Arram. "Three days of serious healing, a clout on the head, and whatever you just did on top of it. Don't tell me you're fine." "I am," Arram protested. "Mm-hmm," Daleric said dubiously.

What is that?” the woman asked. “One of your little vampires,” I said. “You send more body parts our way, we send you more heads.” “We could send you a head, too,” she yelled. “You have only two hostages; we have a dozen, and three of them are your masters, which means if they die, you die.” “Thaddeus,” Marius yelled, “you wouldn’t dare.” “Thaddeus isn’t in charge of these negotiations; I am, and I so fucking would.

The metaclimate in America during gen X’s youth was marked by declining national self-esteem. We grew up in the shadow of Watergate and the Vietnam War (the first war America ever lost), we watched the Iran hostage crisis stretch on through 1979 and 1980, and we feared the potential nuclear apocalypse of the long Cold War with the Soviet Union, which seemed as powerful as America, or perhaps more so, making it difficult for us to cling to the image our parents had taken for granted. Even Henry Kissinger said that we had passed our historic high point. It appeared as though we were in the twilight of America as a dominant nation; you didn’t have to be paying close attention to geopolitics to see that. At home, in the 1970s, we had three

The rescue of the hostages, so far away from home, is about to become legend. But it has exacted a price: three of the hostages have died in the firefight. As has one soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

He also explained Operation Trojan, where Mossad relayed disinformation to be received by the US and Britain. They planted the Trojan, a communication device, deep inside the enemy territory. The device would rebroadcast prerecorded digital transmissions, which would be able to be picked up by Americans and the British. On the night of February 17th, two Israeli missile boats headed through the Mediterranean, letting four submarines and two speedboats disembark just outside the territorial waters of Libya. The submarines headed for shore and the agents headed inland with the Trojan device. They were picked up by a Mossad combatant who was already there, then they headed to the city, where they went to an apartment building less than three blocks away from the Bab al Azizia barracks known to house Qadhafi’s headquarters. They brought the device to the top floor of the building, activated it, then headed back to the beach. The combatant monitored the unit in the apartment for the next few weeks. The Trojan broadcasted messages during heavy communication traffic hours. They appeared as long series of terrorist orders to Libyan embassies around the world. The Americans began to perceive the Libyans as active sponsors of terrorism, while the French and Spanish were suspicious. The Mossad used America’s promise to retaliate against support for terrorism, to manipulate them into the ploy. Their intention was to get a country with better weapons to attack Libya. They succeeded. On April 14th, 1986, one hundred and sixty American aircrafts dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya. A deal for the release of American hostages in Lebanon was cut, forty Libyan civilians died, and an American pilot and his weapons officer died. For the Mossad, this mission was incredibly successful. However, it doesn’t highlight the intelligence agency in the same ways as other stories of operations. It showed deceit toward the Americans, who they would normally try to cooperate with. It “by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right.” It showed the world what side the US was on in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation’s infrastructure is different from another’s, and so on. Yet whether we are considering any family, any institution, or any nation, for terrorism to hold sway the same three emotional prerequisites must always persist in that relationship system.    There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”    The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the terrorist—whether a bomber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.    There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.” From an emotional process view of leadership, whether we are talking about families or the family of nations, these three emotional characteristics of a system are the differences that count.

though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid. I

Dreams die in every life. Everyone gets old. There is promise in the beginning when life seems so bright. The promise fades when the years get short. But not Pham’s dream. He had pursued it across five hundred light-years and three thousand years of objective time. It was a dream of a single Humankind, where justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned, and where two-bit kings didn’t give children away as hostages. When Sammy had dug him out of the cemeterium at Lowcinder, Pham was dying, but not the dream. The dream had been bright as ever in his mind, consuming him.

His insistence that his government deal only with the Right had made it a hostage to nationalist interest groups and alienated the rest of the country. His embracing and encouragement of a public rhetoric which bristled with violence, racial stereotyping and threats had helped to bolster an image abroad of a nation hungering for conflict.

Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.

And the PRCS [Palestinian Red Crescent Society] had not lost just one hospital: thirteen clinics and nine hospitals all over Lebanon had been destroyed in this way. Only Gaza Hospital, for a reason I was to discover three years later, was still standing. At the height of the air raids, when the Palestinians found out that every single PRCS hospital and clinic was a bomb target, they put three Israeli soldiers captured in south Lebanon on the upper floors of Gaza Hospital, and radioed a message to the Israeli Army saying that any further military action on Gaza Hospital would result in Israeli lives being lost. That saved Gaza Hospital from further destruction.

Lossberg's coat-tails.

I will tell you on the way. Take off this outer dress. We must leave now. No questions asked.” She obeyed and pulled it off. Her tunic underneath was better suited for running. His eyes found it quite agreeable. She did trust him, with all her heart and soul. She let him lead her out of the building toward the courtyard. He told her about the riots and the giants and the hostages as they ran. It was all horrific, but she was a tough girl. Methuselah realized she was the kind of person you wanted on your side when all Sheol broke loose. She would not scream in fear and shake like a brittle titmouse. She would want to join the fray. “You need to tell me where your parents live. My mother went to get them, to bring them with us. But now they are all three caught up in the middle of it.

It’s almost laughably simple: for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective. By

The year I turned thirty a relationship ended. I was very sad but my sadness bored everyone, including me. Having been through such dejection before, I thought I might get out of it quickly. I went on Internet dates but found it difficult to generate sexual desire for strangers. Instead I would run into friends at a party, or in a subway station, men I had thought about before. That fall and winter I had sex with three people, and kissed one or two more. The numbers seemed measured and reasonable to me. All of them were people I had known for some time. I felt happier in the presence of unmediated humans, but sometimes a nonboyfriend brought with him a dark echo, which lived in my phone. It was a longing with no hope of satisfaction, without a clear object. I stared at rippling ellipses on screens. I forensically analyzed social media photographs. I expressed levity with exclamation points, spelled-out laughs, and emoticons. I artificially delayed my responses. There was a great posturing of busyness, of not having noticed your text until just now. It annoyed me that my phone could hold me hostage to its clichés. My goals were serenity and good humor. I went to all the Christmas parties.

TIBBOT NE LONG BURKE, hard-pressed to choose sides in the Irish rebellion, finally made his decision at the battle of Kinsale. On his own volition he mustered a force of three hundred men and marched south. Under Lord Mountjoy, Tibbot led his men so single-mindedly and courageously that he was lauded by the Crown. Having proven his loyalty beyond any doubt, he returned home to a life of leisure with Maeve and his six children. Miles—for many years a hostage—was released by his English captors and went to live with his family. Like Conyers Clifford before him, Mountjoy befriended Tibbot, took sides with him against a new and unpopular governor of Connaught, and made sure his salary was regularly paid. Tibbot was knighted in the early days of James’s reign and elected to the Irish Parliament as a representative of Mayo in 1613. In 1626, by virtue of his valor and faithful service to King Charles I, he was created Viscount Burke of Mayo. He died, age sixty-two, murdered by an O’Connor brother-in-law while the two were on their way to church.   R

She was only a couple years older than him, maybe thirty-three or thirty-four, but she had this way of making him feel dumb and confused all at the same time, and without any effort on her part. Maybe because she had a law

Celida stood on the top step next to the door with Evers and his girlfriend Rachel. Bauer, three days post-op after his spinal surgery, was there too, talking to Zoe. The rest of his teammates were inside already, along with DeLuca and Travers. It meant the world to him that the guys had come out to pay their respects today.

who you want to meet and we’ll bring him to you.’ ‘Abraham is a hostage,’ Satyrus said. ‘You can’t bring him out of Athens, and I need to see him.’ His captains looked at him with something like suspicion. ‘I’m going to Athens,’ he insisted. ‘Without your fleet?’ Sandokes asked. ‘Haven’t you got this backward, lord? If you must go, why not lead with a show of force?’ ‘Can you go three days armed and ready to fight?’ Satyrus asked. ‘In the midst of the Athenian fleet? No. Trust me on this, friends. And obey – I pay your wages. Go to Aegina and wait.’ Sandokes was dissatisfied and he wasn’t interested in hiding it. ‘Lord, we do obey. We’re good captains and good fighters, and most of us have been with you a few years. Long enough to earn the right to tell you when you are just plain wrong.’ He took a breath. ‘Lord, you’re wrong. Take us into Athens – ten ships full of fighting men, and no man will dare raise a finger to you. Or better yet, stay here, or you go to Aegina and we’ll sail into Athens.’ Satyrus shrugged, angered. ‘You all feel this way?’ he asked. Sarpax shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Aekes and Sandokes have a point, but I’ll obey you. I don’t know exactly what your relationship with Demetrios is, and you do.’ He looked at the other captains. ‘We don’t know.’ Sandokes shook his head. ‘I’ll obey, lord – surely I’m allowed to disagree?’ Satyrus bit his lip. After a flash of anger passed, he chose his words carefully. ‘I appreciate that you are all trying to help. I hope that you’ll trust that I’ve thought this through as carefully as I can, and I have a more complete appreciation of the forces at work than any of you can have.’ Sandokes didn’t back down. ‘I hope that you appreciate that we have only your best interests at heart, lord. And that we don’t want to look elsewhere for employment while your corpse cools.’ He shrugged. ‘Our oarsmen are hardening up, we have good helmsmen and good clean ships. I wager we can take any twenty ships in these waters. No one – no one with any sense – will mess with you while we’re in the harbour.’ Satyrus managed a smile. ‘If you are right, I’ll happily allow you to tell me that you told me so,’ he said. Sandokes turned away. Aekes caught his shoulder. ‘There’s no changing my mind on this,’ Satyrus said. Sandokes shrugged. ‘We’ll sail for Aegina when you tell us,’ Aekes said. Satyrus had never felt such a premonition of disaster in all his life. He was ignoring the advice of a god, and all of his best fighting captains, and sailing into Athens, unprotected. But his sense – the same sense that helped him block a thrust in a fight – told him that the last thing he wanted was to provoke Demetrios. He explained as much to Anaxagoras as the oarsmen ran the ships into the water. Anaxagoras just shook his head. ‘I feel like a fool,’ Satyrus said. ‘But I won’t change my mind.’ Anaxagoras sighed. ‘When we’re off Piraeus, I’ll go off in Miranda or one of the other grain ships. I want you to stay with the fleet,’ Satyrus said. ‘Just in case.’ Anaxagoras picked up the leather bag with his armour and the heavy wool bag with his sea clothes and his lyre. ‘Very well,’ he said crisply. ‘You think I’m a fool,’ Satyrus said. ‘I think you are risking your life and your kingdom to see Miriam, and you know perfectly well you don’t have to. She loves you. She’ll wait. So yes, I think you are being a fool.’ Satyrus narrowed his eyes. ‘You asked,’ Anaxagoras said sweetly, and walked away.         3           Attika appeared first out of the sea haze; a haze so fine and so thin that a landsman would not even have noticed how restricted was his visibility.

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties, such as years in solitary confinement and deprivation of virtually all privileges, including visitation and telephone access. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation. The sentences are so long because SCDC issues a separate Level 1 violation for each day that an inmate accesses a social network. An inmate who posts five status updates over five days, would receive five separate Level 1 violations, while an inmate who posted 100 updates in one day would receive only one. In other words, if a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks.

London, where in the hell are you?” Jerry Allemand’s voice was laced with excitement—unusual for him—and I heard sirens screaming in the background. “We’ve got a hostage situation with shots fired at the First Gold Bank off of Highway Three in Gracetown!” “Anyone

It starts with that damn bird in the backyard. Actually, no. I guess it starts with the dog, right? Turbo's barking from the living room is what makes me look outside at the bird. I mean, if you want to get particular, it starts last year, during the bank robbery/hostage situation that added a special layer to the bedrock of PTSD all three of us already had. You could get really particular and say it starts in Florida on a tennis court that day Raymond Keane approached me and my mom; or that night, a few years later, when I chopped dear old stepdad's fingers off to break into his safe and guarantee my FBI-bartered freedom. Or, more particular: it really starts the day I was born to a con-artist mom who taught me everything she knew, made me a partner in her schemes as I grew up, only to dump it all to marry a criminal much worse than her and force me to turn snitch to escape before I hit my teens.

How much did I expect her to endure? She wasn’t even old enough to drink and she’d already lived through more tragedy than most people three times her age. Her own mother had abandoned her. Then Mel died, and I left her alone with her grief and traveled the world while Dad descended further into his mental illness. She got pregnant by accident, her body taken hostage by a baby she didn’t plan and didn’t want and wasn’t emotionally capable of caring for. She was an addict. She had her own demons to deal with—and at least she was self-aware enough to recognize it. Was I doing to her what Adrian had done to me? Insisting I knew what was best for Annabel when she was the one who had to live with her choices?

Henry first released the twenty-three Scots hostages from the Tower,

It was pretty clear that he was mad, for madness means just this dislocation of the modes of thought which mortals have agreed upon as necessary to keep the world together.

I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn’t mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.

As with all fairy tales, a crime was committed. In "Snow White," there was a poisoning. A hostage situation was at the heart of "Beauty and the Beast." "Hansel and Gretel" featured attempted cannibalism. "Cinderella" involved the lesser offense of party crashing. North Carolina began with a trespassing. Not a "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" domestic breaking and entering but an act of large-scale land grabbing.

These consequences are imbalanced and inhumane. They are also ridiculous, as investigative journalist Dave Maass points out. “If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped,” Maass writes, “he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks.

Gates recommended against a raid, although he was open to considering the strike option. He raised the precedent of the April 1980 attempt to rescue the fifty-three American hostages held in Iran, known as Desert One, which had turned catastrophic after a U.S. military helicopter crashed in the desert, killing eight servicemembers. It was a reminder, he said, that no matter how thorough the planning, operations like this could go badly wrong.

for the FBI, a “mirror” is when you repeat the last three words (or the critical one to three words) of what someone has just said. Of the entirety of the FBI’s hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, and yet uncannily effective.

The British burnt down villages and took chiefs as hostages, but it wasn’t until 5 August that the Oba gave himself in.50 He walked into Benin City with hundreds of followers, some twenty elegant wives, many chiefs, and musicians. Messengers walked in front, carrying a white flag. He spent two nights at Obaseki’s house, deliberating on his future. On 7 August the Oba walked to the new court building, which stood in front of his palace from which he had fled six months earlier. He was dressed in full red coral regalia, including a headdress, collar, bangles up to his elbows and ankle bracelets. A huge crowd assembled. The Oba hesitated, and then kneeled in front of Roupell. Three times the Oba lowered his forehead to the dirt ground. He had performed the traditional act of obeisance, in full view of his own people. It was a very public surrender, and exactly the humiliation the British sought. Roupell told the Oba that he’d been deposed, and that he and his chiefs would stand trial for the killing of Phillips and the six other white men.

But there is another variety of the older child that gets ugly. This is the child who is being resistant in an “eff you” kind of way. This child will look right at you while he’s peeing on the floor. You will know if you have this variety. It will feel aggressive, and you will feel hostage to your child. This behavior needs to be addressed head on. This is not funny and can lead to serious issues later on. You must deal with this as behavior and behavior only. Do whatever you would do as if he looked you right in the eyes and said, “Eff you.” ’Cause that’s kind of what he’s doing. I highly suggest contacting a family therapist if this is happening. This actually is not at all about potty training. I do think it’s serious, and I do think you should seek help and not take it lightly. Bottom line: when you have a child over three, potty training needs to be addressed in a very straightforward manner. It needs to be done, and done now, at almost any cost. The child over three is much more likely to have bigger problems. I know so many parents are fearful of seeming “hard-core”—they don’t want to traumatize their kid. I get that, totally. I never want to see a kid traumatized, either. But in my humble opinion, getting kicked out of kindergarten for potty training issues is a lot more traumatizing than having parents who are super strict now.

I took your shirt hostage. The ransom is three kisses. Pay up or the whole wardrobe gets it. ♥ J