Grenfell: who failed, really?
This evening there was a half-hour Channel 4 Dispatches programme about the role of the fire brigade in the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017, in which more than 70 people died when the tower...
Category: Disasters
Mary Beard and the defence of low expectations
Earlier today Mary Beard, the Cambridge historian well-known for championing the role of women in academia as well as for her TV series, posted tweet defending aid workers accused of sexual abuse in disaster...
Jail for poor taste, and May and ‘autism’
Somebody has already been imprisoned for offences relating to the Grenfell Tower fire in west London, and it's not someone who signed off on the dodgy cladding; no, it's a local who had been...
Tory press is Tory, and on packing bags
So, after the intial flurry of sympathy and devastation for the people affected by the Grenfell Tower fire last Wednesday, by Friday evening the Tory press had started to show their true colours: as...
Labour, Tories and fire regulations
Grenfell Tower: Tory minister declined to include sprinklers in fire safety rules as it could discourage house building | The Independent This pretty much sums up why I'll be supporting Labour in any repeat...
Grenfell Tower fire: not terrorism
This shouldn't need to be said, but … In the wake of the fire in the Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey public housing block in west London, in which at least six people have died...
What’s wrong with telling people you’re safe?
Last Saturday night there was a terrorist attack in London, and as often happens in these situations, Facebook activated its "safety check" or "I'm safe" feature, by which people identified as living in London...
Good story 1, Facts 0
The other day I came across a story which a lot of people were sharing on my social media feeds since the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester on Monday night. The story, published on...
No, we can’t hold all air shows by the sea
I heard the most extraordinary and ridiculous interview on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. John Humphrys was interviewing John Turner from the British Air Display Association about the accident outside Shoreham, West Sussex...
Stable-door logic
Last week a GermanWings airliner was crashed into a moutainside in south-western France, killing everyone on board. The evidence seems to suggest that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, crashed it deliberately, and investigations have turned...
Blacksburg: from one massacre to another
There were two articles that caught my eye today in the Guardian about the Blacksburg massacre, one by Simon Jenkins and the other, in the G2 supplement, by Lionel Shriver, the author of a...
Worker smelled petrol before explosion
The BBC are interviewing Raheel Ashraf, an eyewitness to this morning's explosions at the Hemel Hempstead oil plant, who stated quite clearly that he smelled fumes before the place went up. In other words,...
I see Biloxi, you say Biluxi …
Joni Mitchell famously sung that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and this is surely the case with quite a few places along the US Gulf Coast which are suddenly world...
Looting: it’s not a race issue
While in no position of great authority on US race relations, I find it sad, but by no means surprising, to hear people already rushing to make a race issue out of the looting...
Islamic articles on the Tsunami
Theological Lessons from the Sumatra Earthquake, by Abdul-Hakim Murad, at Mere Islam: Part of the brilliance of the Qur’an is that it makes no compromises over God’s transcendence, as it battles against pagan and...
Snouts in the trough in Aceh
It’s been reported that a Christian missionary organisation based in Virginia have relocated 300 Acehnese orphans to a Christian home in Jakarta: The appeal said WorldHelp was working with native-born Christians in Indonesia who...
Amazing pictures of Aceh mosques
There is a website of amazing pictures of mosques in Aceh which survived the recent tsunami disaster in Aceh. Aceh was the nearest land (except for the small islands off the west Sumatra coast)...
Indonesia: ruminations on ruminations
I’m not sure if the sort of ruminations which have appeared since the past weekend’s earthquake / tsunami disaster appear after every such disaster. But the whole idea of “how God can allow such...