Considering the recent hideous Dehli blasts; They happened well after I returned home (landed in Stockholm last Friday roughly at 3 pm).
Something that surprised me was that there had been a recent blast in Hyderabad, preceding my arrival there (…Oh! No, I do not make a connection).
It seems that these bombings are a new threat. I heard that some announcement warnings had specifically mentioned Hyderabad as a potential target. Still, there is some confusion over who actually comitted these crimes. Kashmiri separatists, Islamic jihadists, or the Maoist guerrilla of Andrah Pradesh. Here is another article, giving some more detail.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Hyderabad bombing never entered, at least the Swedish, media.
It was noted in the papers the following week how the police cracked down on people wearing backpacks, since this was the suspected outfit of the suicide bomber at the police station in the Begumpet area in Hyderabad.
This bomb was not even noticed in the SvD, or any other Swedish media I could think of.
Kategori: Läst, Sett & Hört
From The Times of India:
Finnish tourist blames local priests for nude streak
The Times of India, Hyderabad, Tuesday, October 25, 2005
I really enjoyed all the morning papers at the hotel.
My paternal grandmother died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Therefore I pay attention whenever there are references made to the greatest pandemic since the Black Death in the 14th century.
Recently several newspapers and on-line publications announced the discovery that the Spanish flu was an avian flu, i.e. the same type of flu that is so much talked about today. There were articles e.g. in BBC News and in Svenska Dagbladet.
My memory is rich, but not always accurate, so it has taken some days to find the article where I first saw this.
In the article The Dead Zone by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker, Sept. 29, 1997, the following was said:
Taubenberger and Reid have so far decoded about fifteen per cent of the genes in the soldier’s virus, and their work has made possible a few preliminary conclusions about the Spanish flu. It had already been hypothesized, for example, that the Spanish flu originated—at least, in part—with a bird, probably a wild duck.
The Dead Zone by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Sept. 29, 1997
[…]
All animals that get the flu—horses, ferrets, seals, pigs, among others—and human beings probably get it originally from birds.
The real discovery, as related by e.g. The Guardian and Yahoo News, was that the virus had been recreated, and also what caused the virus to be so deadly had been established. Important knowledge when facing the potential threat of a new pandemic.
The desire in media to make the ’alarming’ coupling of one of the most devastating of the known pandemics to an existing, and so far limited, outbreak of avian flu, turns old knowledge into spectacular new discoveries. I guess scary news sell better than good news about the progress of our understanding.