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July 07, 2005
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And so it goes. And so it goes. |
Special Report: Terror Blasts in London
LONDON, England -- This morning, terrorists detonated a series of bombs on the London transportation system, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds more. These bombings coincide with the opening of a G8 Summit hosted by the U.K. for the purpose of providing aid to impoverished African nations and tackling the problems of global warming. The bombings also take place one day after London was chosen to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, an event which promises to be a celebration of peace and world unity.
The attack was not aimed at the government, its military, or policy makers. The attack was aimed at working-class people riding on buses and trains during their morning commute.
The staff of Last Week's News stand with the people of England and offer sincere condolences to the victims and their families. Any act of terrorism, anywhere it takes place, for whatever "cause" its perpetrators purport to serve, is an attack on all civilized people of the world.
We will return our format to satire tomorrow morning.
The Real StoryI was working on this website as the terror story broke. I was making formatting changes in advance of moving to a new domain, tidying things up, and completely missing the most important story of the day. I wonder if that ever happens to CNN.
At one point I checked a British news aggregation service that syndicates my content, and found that it was down. The server was probably overwhelmed by requests, but I thought nothing of it. Still blissfully ignorant of the unfolding horror, I shut down my computer and went to work.
I probably wouldn't have found out about the bombings if not for Nelly Furtado singing on the radio about how much she resembles a bird in that she also has the desire to fly away. In my haste to change the station, I accidentally pushed the preset for NPR instead of a different music station. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in the middle of a speech about someone or something that had disrupted the G8 meeting.
After the audio excerpt of Blair's speech, the BBC World Service anchor tried to throw to a reporter at a hospital in London--Aha, I thought. Whatever's happening isn't in Scotland after all--but there were technical problems so she instead went into an interview with a terrorism expert.
I still had no details on what had happened or how many people were affected, even from the one station most likely to deliver that news. And if you can't get London news from people who talk with a BBC accent, where else on the dial can you turn?
I was thinking the worst, but finally one of the reporters mentioned that the death toll was "only" in the dozens and not in the hundreds or thousands as I'd feared.
I've been in a major city during a terror attack on the subway--Tokyo in 1995. People were afraid to take public transportation for months afterward. Even when the leader of the Aum Shinrikyu terror group was in custody, he could still cause a panic from his prison cell by announcing that "something bad would happen" on a particular day.
I have an idea of what ordinary Londoners must feel today, at least those who are somewhat removed from the event and don't have family or friends who were directly involved. But those who were actually at the scene of the carnage, those who were injured and rushed to hospitals on a double-decker bus filled with fellow victims, those with family members who are never coming home again, I can only imagine what they're going through.
Disclaimer: This story probably isn't true, names have been changed, and any quotes are most likely made up.
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