The Accusation

A PEN Translates Award-winning collection of short stories about life in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il, written in secret by a dissident author. The Accusation is a revelatory work of fiction that exposes the truth of the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Jong-Il’s leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation throw light on different aspects of life in this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. One story, “Life of a Swift Seed,” tells of a war hero and former ardent Communist who plants an elm tree in his back garden to commemorate one of his brothers-in-arms. When the tree is to be cut down to make way for a power line, the man is ready to defend it with his life, leaving a family friend to decide whether to intercede. In another story, “City of Specters,” a Pyongyang mother’s young son misbehaves during a party rally, crying out when he sees a portrait of Karl Marx, whom he thinks is a monster of Korean myth known as the Eobi. In one other story, a mother attempts to feed her husband during the worst years of North Korea’s famine, and in another, a woman in a perilous situation meets the Dear Leader himself. As a whole, The Accusation is a vivid and frightening portrait of what it means to live in a completely closed-off society, and a heartbreaking yet hopeful portrayal of the humanity that persists even in such dire circumstances. “Searing fiction by an anonymous dissident . . . A fierce indictment of life in the totalitarian North.”—New York Times

A chilling investigation of America’s only alleged case of blood libel, and what it reveals about antisemitism in the United States and Europe. On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, policemen and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. To believe in the accusation seems bizarre at first glance—blood libel was essentially unknown in the United States. But a great many of Massena’s inhabitants, both Christians and Jews, had emigrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe, where it was all too common. Historian Edward Berenson, himself a native of Massena, sheds light on the cross-cultural forces that ignited America’s only known instance of blood libel, and traces its roots in Old World prejudice, homegrown antisemitism, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Residues of all three have persisted until the present day. More than just the disturbing story of one town’s embrace of an insidious anti-Jewish myth, The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive exploration of American and European responses to antisemitism.

The mere accusation that Uncle Mike may have sexually touched his niece's daughter sets in motion an unstoppable chain of events. The mother wants revenge, and her own redemption. The police want a quick arrest. The District Attorney sees an easy win. Mike's family is forced to take sides as his lawyer tries to defend his innocence. Forgiveness and justice get lost in the mix. It is left to the jury. Payne Edwards settled in Virginia after a professional career that took him throughout the United States and around the world. He is active in an entirely different career field. The Accusation is his first novel.

This book addresses an old and basic question: what is the moral order of the market? 'Corporate Wrongdoing and the Art of the Accusation' is an exploration of accusations of wrongdoing, and the revelations these accusations expose about the dark side of capitalism and modern corporations, and their relationships with suppliers, buyers, peers, investment banks and state regulators. The study explores data gathered from the past twenty years, including over a thousand accusations of economic wrongdoing in corporate America. The research traces exchange paths or structural routes; cultural recipes or ideas about wrongdoing; and interactions between the culture and structure of transgression in economic in markets. Repertoires of accusation, and the three-way associations between accused, accuser and accusation, reveal the moral order of the market. The tools provided in this data collection and analysis provide a template for the study of the three-way relationship between the following: cultural items or types (i.e., accusation types), structural locations or paths (i.e., market interfaces) and time (i.e., temporal locations of types and paths, or recipes and routes). Repertoires unlock the moral order of the modern market and other institutions (family, politics, education, religion, science) as revealed in accusations of transgression.

This book examines how the functioning of the International Criminal Court has become a forum of convergence between the common law and civil law criminal justice systems. Four countries were selected as primary examples of these two legal traditions: the United States, England and Wales, Germany and Poland. The first layer of analysis focuses on selected elements of the model of accusation that are crucial to the model adopted by the ICC. These are: development of the notion of the prosecutor’s independence in view of their ties to the countries and the Security Council; the nature and limits of the prosecutor’s discretional powers to initiate proceedings before the ICC; the reasons behind the prosecutor’s choice of both defendants and charges; the role the prosecutor plays in the procedure of disclosure of evidence and consensual termination of proceedings; and the determinants of the model of accusation used during trial and appeal proceedings. The second layer of the book consists in an analysis of the motives behind applying particular solutions to create the model of accusation before the ICC. It also shows how the model of accusation gradually evolved in proceedings before the military and ad hoc tribunals: ICTY and ICTR. Moreover, the question of compatibility of procedural institutions is addressed: In what ways does adopting a certain element of criminal procedure, e.g. discretional powers of the prosecutor to initiate criminal proceedings, influence the remaining procedural elements, e.g. the existence of the dossier of a case or the powers of a judge to change the legal classification of the criminal behavior appearing in the indictment?