Friday, March 04, 2005

World gone mad?



Is it me or has the world gone mad? The top three stories on the BBC News website this afternoon were all entirely unbelievable.

Firstly, we have the crazy story about the Italian hostage who was released by her captors in Iraq, only to be shot and wounded (and have one of the Italian 'agents' accompanying her killed) as she was being driven to the airport. And, just to give the story that little extra oomph, the people who did the shooting were apparently US troops. Words fail me.

That story makes a nice contrast with story two, in which President Bush demands a full Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. I think there is some pot/kettle phrase that fits the situation quite well.

Finally, to round of the craziness, the third most important thing in the world (according to the BBC, as of March 4th at 20:49 GMT) is about that <insert appropriately nasty phrase here> Jackson. Why is everybody in the media, including myself I guess, wasting so much time and energy over this scary little man and his twisted ways?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, if I read the article, it claims that the car she was in drove towards a US checkpoint, and didn't stop when instructed.

Now, I may be particularly dense, but it sems to me that when you are in what is more or less a war zone, and you are ordered to stop at a checkpoint by a US soldier with a big gun, in an environment where suicide car bombs are a weapon of choice against such checkpoints, you really need to stop the car.

There are occasional stories about friendly fire fuckups that often involve the US doing the firing, but this doesn't look like one of those. This one looks like it's down to stupidity on the part of the Italians.

Unknown said...

I wasn't really trying to apportion blame for the incident, I was just amazed by the unpleasant irony of being held hostage for three weeks only to be shot at, by the people who were supposed to be on your side, once you were finally free.