The members of the public attending the Braidwood Inquiry laughed as RCMP officer Kwesi Millington picked up the deadly stapler and showed the court the menace that such a weapon presented. I’m impressed with how straight-faced all of the YVR Four have been in insisting that this stapler was such a weapon of terror.
Also today I see that the BBC has picked up this story. I don’t expect that those Mountie figurines are selling very well at airport duty-free shops these days.
Posted in Canadian Law
Tagged BBC World Service, Braidwood Inquiry, Kwesi Millington, RCMP, Robert Dziekanski, YVR Four
I turned on the news in the background a while ago and CNN was breathlessly reporting on the imminent release of the name of McCain’s veep nominee. I flipped over to BBC and the announcer said not to expect it for another couple hours.
Ugh.
It seems to have been relatively harmless though undoubtedly frightening. What’s painful is watching CNN desperately try to cycle the same bits of info and yet make them sound fresh each time. (A truck crash! Men arrested! We have video of a fire!) BBC World had not, at last viewing, broken into its programming on the tenth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover.
Tagged BBC World Service, CNN, Glasgow, terrorism
The BBC World Service followed up a report on the Virginia Tech killer with a quick blurb on a car bombing in Baghdad. In a way we have a sort of perverse luxury here, don’t we? Mass killing is rare enough here that we can pour over all the morbid details whereas in Iraq it’s another day, another car bomb in a crowded street.
In both cases I think we can know profiles generally. Like most school shooters, the VT killer appears to have been a bit of loner who was into guns and left a body of disturbing writing and pictures. But we won’t stop there will we? In the coming days this shooter’s life will be picked apart. What music did he like? Video games? Movies?
We will know everything and yet it will tell us nothing we didn’t all assume the first minute we heard about this killing. Meanwhile the suicide bomber toils in anonymity – another easy profile, just not picked apart to the minutiae.
I flipped between CNN and BBC World this morning, here’s an example of what I found:
CNN: A fashion show for new Army uniforms followed by anxious anticipation of a press conference on Anna Nicole Smith’s autopsy.
BBC: An extended report on whether Rwandan President Paul Kagame was complicit in war crimes.
I know that the Beeb is far from perfect, but given the alternative…
Since my local cable provider has switched out CNN Headline News in favour of BBC World, I guess I won’t be subjected to any more of the rantings of Glenn Beck. It was nice to peer into the world of far-right talk radio for a bit and see how bizarre these demagogues really are. Now it’s nice that this idiot is gone. Good riddance.
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