Practicalmadness

The BBC reports that over 100 people are dead in Nigeria following riots over the Miss World beauty pageant, which is being held in the city of Kaduna, because you know, when I think of a country that likes a good beauty pageant, I just think...you know? Nigeria!

[The riots] began after a newspaper suggested that the Prophet Mohammed would have probably chosen to marry one of the Miss World contestants if he had witnessed the beauty pageant.

The report goes on to say that Kaduna is one of Nigeria's most volatile cities, which sounds something like saying any given building is one of the more dangerous parts of Cabrini-Green.

More than 2,000 people died there two years ago in clashes between Christians and Muslims; Thursday's riots involved thousands of Muslim youths who feel "the contest is immoral and degrading to women".

I guess the burqa modeling competition wasn't enough of an olive branch, guys.

Salon has a couple of gems this morning: first, Ashish Nanda, a mergers expert and professor at the Harvard Business School, is arguing that the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will, like most big corporate mergers, fail to be a panacea in solving the problem at hand, in this case fighting the War On Terrorism™.

Says Nanda:

When you talk about the challenge of merger integration, whether you look at it from the point of view of the possibility of success or of how long it takes, these are challenging, difficult things. It's going to be...even more challenging for the Department of Homeland Security [because] that in all the mergers I'm talking about there are only two organizations, and here there are 20-plus.

Homeland Security director Tom Ridge has reportedly spoken to executives at Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed Martin -- two firms that have recently been involved in huge mergers -- for advice on how to smooth the Homeland Security integration.

DHS will encompass 22 new and existing government agencies and will employ over 170,000 federal workers, ostensibly to improve interagency cooperation in order to do away with the hostile, competitive atmosphere which (it is believed) led to the intelligence failure on 9/11.

However, the two agencies (arguably) most responsible for gathering and acting on that intelligence, the FBI and CIA, will remain where they are.

The agencies to be folded into DHS include the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Coast Guard and the Secret Service, as well as the Transportation Security Authority (TSA), a new agency created to oversee (among other things, but mostly) airport security now that passenger screening is being conducted by federal employees.