Now comes word that the terrorists are targeting bridges in California. I never did like bridges — vertigo, you know — and now I really fear them. Never did like tall buildings and now I really fear them. I now fear tunnels, too. I was thinking of moving to nice, flat Kansas but that reminded me of “North by Nothwest” and the crop duster. Where to go? I’m thinking Yellowknife, Northwest Territories — and I won’t give my forwarding address. I now fear mail, too.
Not a religious war? Not according to Bin Laden, who’s targeting Christians.
Nick Denton is finally back blogging at Blogorama with a report from North Africa.
Alert Doonsbury! Geraldo Rivera is moving from CNBC to Fox to be a war correspondent. Perfect! Via Romenesko.
– Frightening stuff deep in a Washington Post anthrax story, making it clearer to me that this is a well-funded, well-researched (read: foreign) attack and that the danger is bigger than we yet know:
“Indeed, the closer scientists look at the spores that have traveled through the mail, the more impressed and concerned they have become…. ‘We didn’t think that anybody could come up with the appropriate coatings for anthrax spores to make them float through the air with the greatest of ease,’ [senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control Alan] Zelicoff said, adding that exposing 28 people with a single opened envelope ‘is no mean trick.’ And C.J. Peters, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas at Galveston, said that someone who has learned to produce two grams of anthrax spores milled to one to five microns — as was true of the spores mailed to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) — could just as easily produce two kilograms of the stuff. He sees the potential for a grander terror. ‘With two grams of finely milled anthrax,’ Peters said, ‘if you can disseminate it in a closed system like a subway or building, you could infect hundreds of thousands of people.’ ”
– And doctors are scared. Also from the Post: ” ‘Once you suspect anthrax, you have no time to think,’ said Carlos Omenaca, a Miami specialist who treated Ernesto Blanco in Florida, the second case. ‘You first treat and then think.’ ”
– NY tests air in subways.