Wired gives some insight to global terror in their look at Thermobaric Slaughter in Sri Lanka.

How realistic are the allegations that the LTTE have employed thermobarics? The FBI calls the LTTE “among the most dangerous and deadly extremist outfit in the world,” and they have been accused of many attacks on civilians. They invented the suicide belt, and their Black Tiger suicide units have carried out more suicide bombings than Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda put together. (Incidentally, the LTTE are largely Hindu and have been accused of carrying out anti-Muslim campaigns.)

They don’t give numbers, but the more important question is whether this group is an indicator of where tactics will be going or a training ground with predictable release cycles.

The NYT reports that the new US administration will let stand a recent decision against Guns in Parks

Last month, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court here struck down the policy allowing guns in parks. She called the rule, issued in the last days of the Bush administration, severely flawed and said officials had failed to evaluate its possible environmental impact, as required. She set a deadline of Monday for the Interior Department to indicate its likely response.

The NRA apparently used a “cut down on crime” argument to support the call for arms in parks. However, there is no evidence of a serious crime problem in parks, unless you factor in drug cartels.

National park rangers in camouflage gear and bulletproof vests, toting M-16 assault rifles, comb the Sequoia hillsides in search of marijuana. Cannabis growers, fearful of rivals and protective of their valuable crops, are often heavily armed, according to park officials.

I am not sure allowing concealed guns to park visitors is the right approach given this scenario, as it could make the job of being a park ranger even more dangerous and prone to firefights.

The data I found on State Park and National Parks Violence shows less than 5,000 serious offenses with over 270 million visitors in 2006. The numbers seem somewhat stable over a four-year period. Ranger Assaults only has two years of data listed, unfortunately, so it is hard to know whether incidents like the recent one in Tucson are a common threat.

The United States Park Rangers made it clear in a statement that they oppose the Guns in Parks law, not least of all because guns are already allowed in parks as long as they are kept stored and unloaded instead of set for ready use.

An article on South Sudan’s bike ambulances paints a very different picture of motorcycles than usually found in hospitals.

There are certainly more comfortable ways to go to hospital than a motorbike with a sidecar bed attached to its side.

But the launch of these ambulance motorbikes in South Sudan is a serious attempt to tackle some of the world’s highest rates of women dying in pregnancy.

[…]

“The advantage of the motor bikes is that they can easily be managed at a lower level health facility,” said Joyce Mphaya, a safe motherhood specialist with the UN children’s fund (Unicef), which donated the bikes.

“It is cost-effective in terms of fuel, and you can easily move with the motorbikes to remote places, where there are no roads and where cars cannot go.”

[…]

Sudan is not the first to use motorbike ambulances.

In Malawi, similar bikes helped more than halve maternal mortality rates over a period of four years.

They also helped halve the numbers of emergency caesarean sections, because they got the women to hospital before an operation was needed.

That is a hugely successful program to manage risk. No mention of fatalities or even accidents from use of the motorbikes?

ZDNet.com gives a scathing review of the RIAA settlement with the Santangelo family.

After four years of battling Patti Santangelo and her children over alleged P2P downloading, the RIAA has settled with the family for a paltry $7,000 – to be made in payments, AP reports.

They also give a curse assessment of the RIAA enforcement business, written by the outspoken Paul Sanders

Under normal rules, managing your resources irresponsibly and doing things that are not worth the time money and effort, let alone the loss of goodwill and the distraction from normal business, are surely grounds for instant dismissal. I certainly couldn’t run my businesses if I took a similar approach to my major cost centres.