The attacks in London today are already the deadliest one-day attack in British history, and the death toll is almost certain to rise. Steve let us know early this morning that he’s OK (he’s in Europe traveling with his family, was in London until yesterday) but may have some trouble getting home. I have IM’d some friends in London to make sure they’re OK, which is a reassuring process.
I’ve also found Wikipedia (collaborative group effort to document what’s known about the attack), Flickr (photos from people watching the TV coverage, some on-the-scene pictures) and Technorati (real-time index of blog postings mentioning London) to be tremendously valuable in supplementing the “traditional” coverage from sites like CNN.com.
To our brothers and sisters in London affected by this tragedy, our thoughts and prayers are with you. I won’t waste any breath on the bastards who persist in this barbaric practice of slaughtering innocents.
Those of us using LiveJournal in the UK found it was a brilliant medium for (a) tracing people (b) checking in to let others know we were safe (c) keeping up with news as it happened and (d) finding out if there was any way we could help. This was within 1.5 hours of the first bomb going off. There's a mention of another LJ community (London_Hurts) in the Grauniad.
ReplyDeleteHuman beings are barbaric to one another all the time; which is why it is so important to continue to love our neighbours as we do ourselves, whoever our neighbours are. The people who did this have only the dead for neighbours.