On October 23, 1990 an armed militant group fighting for the rights of minority Tamils expelled the entirety of the Muslim population of the north [of Sri Lanka] from the province at gunpoint. They were given only a 48-hour ultimatum to leave the Northern Province or to face death at the hands of the militants. [...]
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initiation of full-scale armed conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.
National Peace Council of Sri Lanka:
Commemorating July 1983: Bridges that Continue to Hold
On July 23, 1983 law and order in Sri Lanka virtually collapsed as mobs went on a rampage, inciting anarchy and fear, uprooting Tamil [...]
Via RISKS, B. Elijah Griffin (a/k/a eli@panix) points out that the LA Times staff writer (Matt Moore?) is hinting at a next step in the Zimbabwean crisis:
Apart from the paper crisis, the real fear inside Fidelity is that its software license for the European banknote design technology that it uses could be withdrawn because of [...]
(Note the expiration date.)
[Begin update: And that date was optimistic. What a difference a few short months makes. From thisiszimbabwe.com:
End update.]
At the request of the German government, Giesecke and Devrient GmbH (motto: “Creating confidence”) has been supplying currency-quality paper to Zimbabwe. According to the AP’s (so sue me!) Matt Moore, G and D
said it [...]
Michael McClintock’s book Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Countrinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940–1990 (NYC: Pantheon, 1992)—available in full on the web—provides the background for understanding the recently leaked Army field manual Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (FM 31-20-3; 1994, 2004).
OLPC mesh networking + Windows XP? Oh dear.
Groklaw asks: “What are you doing to those children?” C|net’s Matt Asay expands:
OLPC is rather about liberating developing nations from their vassal status that continually keeps them at the mercy of the pricing and licensing of Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. By building on Windows, Negroponte cuts his [...]