Tag Archives | Bombing

Missing Man Wrongly Identified as Boston Bombing Suspect Found Dead

By on April 25, 2013 in News 0

SunilTripathi1Sunil Tripathi had been missing for over a month.

Via USA Today:

A body pulled from the water off Indian Point Park in Rhode Island has been identified as the Brown University student mistakenly linked by amateur sleuths on a social media site to the Boston bombings.

Health Department spokeswoman Dara Chadwick said Thursday that the body of Sunil Tripathi was identified through dental records.

It was not immediately clear when Tripathi, who was last seen March 15, died. The cause of death has also not been determined.

Tripathi’s body was found Tuesday by members of the Brown University crew team.

The Pennsylvania native was on leave from the Ivy League school but was living in an apartment near campus in Providence, R.I., with several other students.

After the April 15 bombings of the Boston Marathon, crowdsourcing groups drawing upon photos released by the FBI of a suspect erroneously reported via Reddit, a social news website, that the person in a baseball cap strongly resembled the missing student.

… Read the rest

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Bombs & Karma

By on April 19, 2013 in News 0

Picture: Richard Adams (CC)

Picture: Richard Adams (CC)

Ever since the tragedy at the Boston Marathon on Monday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of karma. Several posts have called out the irony (or Orwellian Doublethink) of the US licking its wounds, while it inflicts similar wounds on innocent bystanders worldwide. Clusterbombs, murdered Afghan and Pakistani wedding parties, “collateral damage” to the civilian population in Iraq, to name a few. I am trying to resist the reductionist conditioning of my western brain that wants to distill the vast cultural complexities of “karma” into a dualist cause & effect dynamic. However, there seems to be something darkly significant to the recent trend of our own innocents being killed by our own citizens. Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, possibly Boston, etc. Anyway, this train of thought led me back to an old classic essay on karma from Robert Anton Wilson. Deepleaf Productions hosts a nice collection of RAW audio & text, and here is an excerpt from Cosmic Trigger:

A Lesson in Karma

Robert Anton Wilson
from Cosmic Trigger – The Final Secret of the Illuminati

Lao-Tse says (at least in Leary’s translation) that the Great Tao is most often found with parents who are willing to learn from their children.

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Bombing London With Poetry

By on October 30, 2012 in News 0

This past June, the Chilean arts group Los Casagrande dropped more than 100,000 poems, printed on scraps of paper, from a helicopter above central London in a performance titled the Bombing of Poems. They have done the same in Warsaw, Berlin, and Santiago — all cities which have been bombed during wartime.

Local government approved of the Bombing of Poems as a jubilant spectacle anticipating the pomp of the Olympic festivities to come, but the stunt’s meaning may be more ambiguous. Was the poetry drop an emergency measure in an era in which funding the arts has been deemed no longer possible, and the metropolis is dominated by finance? Is it a commentary on the blanketing of the city with propaganda?

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The Time That UNICEF Bombed the Smurfs

By on October 17, 2012 in News 2

In the mid-nineties the Belgian arm of the United Nations Children’s Fund engaged in a publicity campaign to bring attention to the plight of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Burundi – both former Belgian colonies. Perhaps the most infamous part of that campaign was a PSA depicting the smurf village being bombed into smithereens, complete with dead and dying smurfs and even a howling, infant smurf deprived of its caregivers. The Smurfs was one of Belgium’s most beloved children’s cartoons, but the video was aimed at parents, not their kids. Thus, it was only shown after nine PM.The shock tactics worked: According to the United Nations, visits to the campaign website and calls to the organization increased when the video aired.

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Bombs Explode In IKEA Stores Across Europe

By on May 31, 2011 in News 8
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Photo: Sbotig (CC)

IKEA’s business has been booming. Although no one was significantly injured, this coordinated attack had alarm clocks exploding in three different European countries. Via Reuters:

French, Belgian and Dutch police have launched investigations after minor explosions struck IKEA [IKEA.UL] stores in each country late on Monday in what appears to have been a coordinated attack.

No one was seriously hurt in the blasts at the world’s biggest furniture retailer, although two workers in Belgium suffered minor injuries.

Rigged alarm clocks blew up in IKEA stores in Ghent in Belgium and Lille in France, and there was an explosion in a bin outside the IKEA store in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The alarm clocks were linked to small amounts of gunpowder, and prosecutors said they did not think that the bombers had intended to cause significant injury.

“Federal police with dogs did a sweep of other stores but there was nothing suspect that was found,” An Schoonjans, a Ghent prosecutor, told Reuters.

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Pakistani Teenager Tells Of Failed Suicide Bomb Mission

By on April 19, 2011 in News 14
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Coat of Arms of the Taliban regime (1996-2001). Photo: Falerístico (CC)

With the increasing number of suicide bombing, it is often asked, what were they thinking? Why did they do this? After 14-year-old Umar Fidai’s explosive vest failed to detonate, he discusses how the Taliban trained him and his regret towards his actions. BBC News reports:

In early April a suicide blast ripped though a Pakistani shrine packed with thousands of devotees, leaving scores dead. Both attackers were schoolboys in their early teens. But one survived and told the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool what made him want to take his life and the lives of others.

“All I was thinking was that I had to detonate myself near as many people as possible. When I decided it was the right time, it was a moment of happiness for me,” said 14-year-old Umar Fidai.

“I thought that there would be a little bit of pain, but then I would be in heaven.”

Umar did not make it to paradise.

… Read the rest

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