Author: Mick Hartley

Not much doubt about the way this column of Matthew Parris is going, with its headline ‘No surrender’ moves swiftly from heart to lip but it detours the brain:

The column that these bombings may seem to invite trips easily from the tongue. “No surrender,” it says. The enemy “can never be allowed to win”; no quarter must be given; barbarity must be met by resolve; we are not weakened but reinforced in our defiance of evil; we owe it to those who have died not to deviate from our chosen path.

From Shakespeare to Churchill to Kipling — from Rourke’s Drift to the Blitz to Port Stanley — politicians and poets have given us templates for this oratory, and every generation rewrites it. Winston Churchill mastered it when Hitler struck. Franklin D. Roosevelt rehearsed it after Pearl Harbor. John F. Kennedy hurled it at the enemies of liberty.

Margaret Thatcher repeated it from the rubble of the IRA bombing in Brighton. It formed the basis of the American and British response to the mailed fist of Soviet communism. In the face of provocation a ringing declaration never to falter proceeds direct from heart to lip.

But…

Yep…he thinks we should surrender. It’s hopeless, we can’t win. All those scary Muslim youths hanging around the East End….”The road back to their trust is the road back from Baghdad.”

Yeah right. Pull our troops out of Iraq, and suddenly all those sullen faces will light up with joy. They’ll abandon their Islamist teachers, and proclaim the glories of a tolerant liberal society.

Does he really think withdrawing from Iraq, then burying our heads in the sand and hoping all these nasty Islamists will go away and leave us alone, will do anything but make matters worse?

Up to 575 comments last time I checked – FUCK YEAH!

35-stone brown bear probably learned the trick while nudging a door to get it to open.

Experts speculate the nudging was mistaken by the owners for knocking and that the bear, pleased by the outcome, repeated the tactic.

The Loknar family from Gerovo in western Croatia said the bear had knocked at their door three times and they were now refusing to answer the door.

Mum Nevenka Loknar said: “We jumped out the window as he came in through the door and raided the kitchen the first time.

“I opened the door and saw him standing there and I didn’t believe my eyes at first, then I ran for it as he walked in as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

“Bears are a common thing in the woods around here, but no one has ever heard of a bear that knocks at the door.

“The bear is so intelligent it’s incredible. We’ve tried to put up lots of obstacles to stop him coming in, like a wire fence but he still gets through. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew how to use wire cutters.”

ng-class neighborhood in southern Chongjin, the 39-year-old coal miner lives in a squat, drab house. The homes in Ranam are organized in blocks, usually with five units on either side of an alley and an outhouse at one end shared by the 10 families.

His only piece of furniture is a wooden table with folding legs. He has one cooking pot. One knife. A couple of bowls. A cutting board that he made himself. A large urn to store water he brings from the well.

He has four pairs of chopsticks and four spoons — exactly enough for himself, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. He traded away his extra utensils for food years ago.

When there is electricity, he screws a bare lightbulb into a wall socket. His children have no toys or books. Each member of the family owns two sets of clothes — one for summer and one for winter — that they store on a homemade hanger suspended from a nail in the wall.

On the opposite wall hang the obligatory framed portraits of Kim Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il Sung, who seized power in the northern half of the Korean peninsula after World War II.

The government forbids people to put family photos or other decorations on the same wall. Party cadres used to drop by almost daily to make sure residents kept portraits free of dust, but that stopped two years ago.

“They don’t worry so much about ideology now,” he said. “All anybody cares about is finding enough food to get through the day.”

The miner is a pleasant man with a broad, welcoming smile, handsome despite a missing bottom tooth. He seems cheerful by disposition, but when he talks about the famine, a scowl spreads across his face.

The miner estimated that four or five of his housing block’s 30 residents, and half of his 3,500 co-workers at the Poam coal mine, had died of starvation and related illnesses since the mid-1990s.

ent and individual religious freedom.

Assuming the al-Qaeda’ group’s claim is genuine, the greatest challenge to their aims would be the spread in the Muslim world of democracy, and this would most immediately originate from the few democracies in their midst, ie, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. The fundamentalists’ aim is to stop the democratic ideal spreading, first by mounting continuous terrorist campaigns in these countries to destroy the democratic institutions and the will of the people, and secondly by eroding the resolve of the Western democracies without whose support they are unlikely to survive.

This latest attack, coupled with the Madrid bombing, demonstrates how strong their determination is to succeed. Any weakness now in our will to support these vulnerable countries will grant the fundamentalists the victory they crave.

And the inevitable smug bastard:

Sir, It seems that Tony Blair’s illegal Iraqi chickens have come home to roost — with predictably appalling consequences.

The media love stories about mass panic, but it’s a lot less common than people suppose (via Metafilter). In times of extreme danger, many report feeling a strange calm….

An enormous amount of research on how people respond to extreme events has been done by the Disaster Research Center, now at the University of Delaware. After five decades studying scores of disasters such as floods, earthquakes and tornadoes, one of the strongest findings is that people rarely lose control. When the ground shakes, sometimes dwellings crumble, fires rage, and people are crushed. Yet people do not run screaming through the streets in a wild attempt to escape the terror, even though they are undoubtedly feeling terror. Earthquakes and tornadoes wreak havoc on entire communities. Yet people do not usually turn against their neighbors or suddenly forget personal ties and moral commitments. Instead the more consistent pattern is that people bind together in the aftermath of disasters, working together to restore their physical environment and their culture to recognizable shapes.

I’m hearing stories of people stuck in the tube at Aldgate believing that it was a power surge / collision / some other piece of typical stupidity on the part of London Underground, who were as a result more annoyed than frightened. Was the talk of a power surge, I wonder, a deliberate ploy to stop people panicking? The way the whole operation was run by the emergency services had the effect of playing down the scale of the disaster. No wild estimates of the number of casualties: till mid-afternoon only two fatalities were confirmed. Now we’re hearing about some of the horrors – limbs blown off and all the rest of it – but at the time the feeling was that this was nothing like as bad as, say, the Madrid bombing. That’s still the case, but, really, it’s not far off – and could have been much worse.

Andrew Sullivan is getting overcome with patriotism at us plucky stoical Brits – an easy emotion when you’re away from home. Well fair enough: at this stage you have to say that the performance of the emergency services has been superb. Meanwhile, out on the streets, London life goes on.

) was at the back of the top deck. Police are refusing to confirm that this was a suicide bomb, but that would seem to be the most likely scenario.

Update 11 (2:50pm): it now seems there were only four explosions: Liverpool St and Aldgate were the same blast (and Moorgate?), as were Kings Cross and Russell Square. That leaves one at Edgware Rd, and the bus blast.

Update 12 (3:25pm): Fatalities confirmed as as least 33: 21 from the Kings Cross blast, 7 from Aldgate, and 5 from Edgware Road – plus an unconfirmed number from the bus blast at Woburn Place.

enders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.

“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”

That line about Iraq now being worse than under Saddam: I always used to think, people saying that really don’t have a clue what it was like to live under a regime like Saddam’s. I still think that, but it’s a case that will get harder to argue as long as this continues. Let’s hope the benefits of openness in the new Iraq – that this sort of thing gets reported and gets condemned – will have some effect.

At this moment of triumph, it’s important not to forget those who were less fortunate…

“I was standing with around 5,000 people, all ready for a party. We were watching the session on two large screens with a French police band dressed in white and standing by, ready to play.

“And then as the moment approached, the sky darkened and a light rain started to fall around a minute before the announcement.

“The news was greeted by silence and disbelief. There was a smattering of booing and some weeping, but most people just started to shuffle away.

“But then the screens cut to London and showed pictures of the celebrations in Trafalgar Square and there was an eruption of booing. At which point the deputy mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, started to speak to the crowd.

“She told the crowd to treat the news in the spirit of fair play and that the process had been fair. And then there was some clapping and the rain started to fall harder and the band started to play a medley of James Bond tunes. It was quite funereal.

A medley of James Bond tunes?