The Manchester bombing is just the latest example of man’s inhumanity to man. But it’s hardly the only one.
There’s the caning of two men in Indonesia for no other reason than they engaged in gay sex.
Then there’s the Trump budget, the anti-Robin Hood, taking from the poor to give to the rich. ...
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It was a beautiful day: That’s what I remember thinking. And it’s probably the first thing anyone who is old enough to remember it will tell you about it.
Seamless sky, what pilots call severe clear. Had to be. The men who brought those buildings down didn’t know how to pilot a plane beyond flying straight, so conditions had to be optimal. The day before, Sept. 10, it had rained. The next was a different story.
It had started promisingly enough. I was working on a piece about the 75th anniversary of the Chrysler Building – the favorite landmark of New Yorkers – and had a 7:30 a.m. interview with William Ivey Long, costume designer for the Broadway hit “The Producers,” whose designs for the show included a gown inspired by the building’s diadem top. Long was a terrific interview but soon excused himself for what he said was a busy day. Delighted with his remarks, I wished him joy of it. ...
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One of the themes to emerge from the Nov. 13 Paris bombings has been why the world – and particularly journalists – has paid more attention to the terrorist acts in Paris than it has to the double suicide bombing in Beirut a day earlier.
There are any number of reasons for this: Bombings in the Middle East, sadly, seem commonplace; the Paris attack is more of an anomaly; more people were killed in Paris (129 to Beirut’s 43), although you can’t really quantify death, of course, each death being a tragedy to someone; the West and particularly the United States have close ties to France, etc. ...
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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has apologized for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.
“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering I’ve caused you, for the damage I’ve done – irreparable damage,” he said in court Wednesday. “I’m guilty of it. If there is any lingering doubt of that, let it be no more.”
Is he truly sorry, and does it make a difference? Should we expect the same from Dylann Storm Roof, charged with the murder of nine in the Charleston church? Fat chance. That one will probably go to his grave Timothy McVeigh-like.
“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. told the Boston court, quoting Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzokhar Tsarnaev.” ...
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