A "holy shit" kind of week.
New Orleans under water, two more bear attacks out west, and this from Iraq:
BAGHDAD, Aug. 31 -- Rumors of a suicide bomber helped set off a stampede Wednesday among tens of thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims on a Tigris River bridge, killing at least 700 people as panicked worshipers hurled themselves off the bridge or trampled others underfoot, Iraqi authorities and survivors said.
That's what terrorism is all about. Osama can eat his heart out.
On the other hand, although there's plenty of evidence from the week's events that people stick suck, sometimes it takes the very worst kind of catastrophe to remind us that people will still do well by each other even at the worst of times:
The route took pilgrims from a Shiite neighborhood on the west side of the river to a Sunni neighborhood on the east with a heavy population of former Hussein Baath Party loyalists and fundamentalists.
Sunnis from the east side described rushing to save the Shiite pilgrims as they hurtled to the concrete, ferrying them to a Sunni mosque and Sunni university when hospitals on the west side filled with bodies.
Bystanders gathered with boats at a turn on the river where the current would carry the stricken ashore, pulling bodies from the river. Men stripped off their shirts and waded into the Tigris, searching first for the living to help, and then, the dead.
Small consolation, but what else can you say?
BAGHDAD, Aug. 31 -- Rumors of a suicide bomber helped set off a stampede Wednesday among tens of thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims on a Tigris River bridge, killing at least 700 people as panicked worshipers hurled themselves off the bridge or trampled others underfoot, Iraqi authorities and survivors said.
That's what terrorism is all about. Osama can eat his heart out.
On the other hand, although there's plenty of evidence from the week's events that people stick suck, sometimes it takes the very worst kind of catastrophe to remind us that people will still do well by each other even at the worst of times:
The route took pilgrims from a Shiite neighborhood on the west side of the river to a Sunni neighborhood on the east with a heavy population of former Hussein Baath Party loyalists and fundamentalists.
Sunnis from the east side described rushing to save the Shiite pilgrims as they hurtled to the concrete, ferrying them to a Sunni mosque and Sunni university when hospitals on the west side filled with bodies.
Bystanders gathered with boats at a turn on the river where the current would carry the stricken ashore, pulling bodies from the river. Men stripped off their shirts and waded into the Tigris, searching first for the living to help, and then, the dead.
Small consolation, but what else can you say?
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