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According to this story from Reuters some people in Kuwait were arrested for celebrating the attack on the WTC. The nationalities of those arrested were not released. And how were the perps celebrating? They were passing candy out on the streets.
The following is courtesy of slashduh. By Bart Salmons September 11 came like any other day, I was wrapping up a 24-hour shift looking forward to going home, and not really doing anything in particular, little expecting the emotional roller coaster that was to come. Morning coffee was made, my partner and I cleaned a little so we wouldn?t leave a mess for the crew. It was 8:48. As I sat in the dayroom and surfed the channels, one image caught my eye. A huge high rise engulfed in smoke. ?Wonder what movie this is?, I thought to myself. Then I realized I was watching CNN. Professional interest took over, a plane they say. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. I recalled back 8 years ago when a terrorist bomb detonated in the parking garage, I had the privilege of listening to the 911 tapes of that incident, and I had a pretty good idea what FDNY units would be rolling in downtown Manhattan that morning. Firefighters are strange people, we tend to watch something like this and get analytical. I actually began figuring the fire flow that would be necessary to extinguish the top third of a 110-story office building. Then the 2nd airliner swooped in, and in a display of pyrotechnics that would outdo anything I?ve seen on the big screen disappeared. I knew something was terribly wrong. The rest of the morning, reports came in. The new shift came on, but we were glued to the screen no one saying a word. The fires burned, the anchormen speculated, the politicians stated. My thoughts were with the guys and girls I knew who were going in harms way, to help their fellow men, and in a way I was a little jealous. Then the walls came tumbling down. Somewhere along the line I had picked up the figure that 10 alarms from the FDNY were on the scene in and around the world trade center. Firefighters, medics, police officers all were there. A tear rolled down my cheek as they showed them running for their lives, some getting overcome by the thick gray cloud of crumbling concrete, their buddies actually taking the time to stop, and pick them up and flee with them. They ran singly, in pairs, groups of 5 or 6. A building collapse is a firefighters worst nightmare, and this was the granddaddy of ?em all. Slowly the realization came over me; there were still people in those buildings. People just like me. They weren?t expecting to die today. They showed up at shift change, washed the rig, checked off their equipment, and sat around the table drinking coffee just an hour or two before. They responded without a thought to what might happen, there was a job to do. The most painful images to me were the abandoned emergency vehicles. No beacon lights showed, no headlights burned. Their shiny paint buried in the dust and soot, their engines had been choked out and slowly their batteries failed. These machines died, just like the brave men and women who had been vibrant and full of life just a short time before. I got to come home today, to see my wife and kids. I said a prayer for all the families who weren?t going to see their loved ones again. Yes, I?ll remember that at ten minutes til 9 on September 11, 2001 I was in a small town fire station in West Virginia. But I hope my guardian angel was in New York.
Unanswered questions abound as New York City and Washington DC clean up after the worst terrorist attack in American history. Confirmation is hard to come by, but we know for certain that each of the World Trade Center towers was struck by a commercial jet between 9:30 and 10:00am Eastern, resulting in the subsequent collapse of each of the towers. Within another hour the Pentagon was hit by another commercial airliner, severly damaging, but not crippling operations. I was doing my usual evening surfing, when I found a pointer to our favorite gaming company. Seems that the makers of Warcraft, Star Craft and Diablo were developing a game "in secret". World of Warcraft is an online, interactive epic adventure. It seems like it may be a sort of 3-D MUD with an ever evolving adventure, based on the Warcraft mythology. Cool enough, but they will be charging per month to pay, sort of like Everquest. Oh, by the way, WoW is set four years after Warcraft III.
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