TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED IN NORWAY
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On Friday, a man named Anders Behring Breivik went mad with bombs and guns, killing at least 93 people and injuring a hundred or so more in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.
Videos by VICE
The bomb went off in Regjeringskvartalet, outside the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in the heart of Oslo’s government quarter. The gun attack took place an hour and a half later on the island of Utøya, where the Norwegian Labour Party were holding their annual youth summer camp.
Breivik dressed as a policeman so that it was easier to lure victims towards him. He wandered around the island firing indiscriminately, before taking aim at those trying to escape back to the mainland across the lake. Most of his victims were 15 or 16 years old.
At the time of writing, these are the facts. But as the Western world tried to decipher what the deaths meant over the course of the weekend, it found itself getting mixed up. These days, the word ‘terrorism’ is as commonplace and everyday as toast or utility bills; this casual acquaintance lends itself to generalisations and assumptions.
In the initial confusion, we had 24-hour rolling news stations attributing the Oslo attacks to al-Qaeda. On Saturday, we had the first edition of the most widely-read newspaper in the UK going to press with a front page declaring the same.
It was ‘terrorism’, the media said, and ‘terrorism’ on the 22nd of July, 2011, meant Muslims. But when ambulances full of wide-eyed medics and unexpectedly busy police are still rushing around trying to stop the bad things happening, they don’t have time to talk to journalists.
So when it emerges, as it soon did, that your man isn’t al-Qaeda, but hates al-Qaeda and has killed all those innocent people and tried to blow up the president of his own country because of his hatred for al-Qaeda – those members of the media too fact-thirsty to wait for the blood to dry should perhaps hang their heads.
If you’re gonna accommodate vagaries in your argot, at least have the balls to cope with the ambiguity, lay off for a while and accept the chaos of a situation like this.
Instead, the media seemed intoxicated with Breivik’s callous and deranged spectacle. That’s dangerous when your cameras are rolling 24 hours a day and you don’t get a chance to sleep the intoxication off.
Here’s not the place to go in-depth on this – it’s supposed to be a concise and direct catch-up for people too fuzzy-brained to bother with news at weekends – so to be honest, I’d be happier just dropping the facts and taking my leave.
Anders Behring Breivik is expected to plead not guilty.
AMY WINEHOUSE DIED
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Amy Winehouse, a widely-loved female pop singer, was found dead at her home in North London on Saturday afternoon.
Police have not told the world what they think happened yet, but a couple of sources – one anonymous, the other an MTV director named Danny Panthaki – have claimed it was caused by a dodgy pill.
Other people are saying that on the night before her death, she’d met a drug dealer in London to pick up “ecstasy, ketamine, cocaine and possibly heroin.”
She was 27.
WE’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO GO BACK IN TIME OR JUMP FORWARD IN IT TOO MUCH
Hot Tub Time Machine: a flawed premise
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Scientists reckon human beings will never be able to control their own passage through the dimension known as time.
Apparently there was a slim chance this could happen if we found something that moved faster than the speed of light.
But the one thing that scientists thought might be able to move faster than light – the little things that make up light, or “photons” – can’t.
Gawker writer Lauri Apple made a sort-of-funny joke about the particular photon the scientists had chosen to monitor being lazy or slow.
The scientists have yet to respond to the joke, but I don’t think they’d like it too much because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from nerds it’s that they aren’t very funny people.
MAC HACKETT TRIED TO CHEER YOU UP
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It’s the Eternal Truth dogs again.
MAC HACKETT
