He’s gone beyond that today, calling for the abolition of the visa lottery and threatening to send the suspect to Guantanamo
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A 16-year-old friend of mine went out to NYC (her first long-haul flight) for a week-long school trip only a couple of days ago. She was scheduled to be at the World Trade Center site yesterday to see the 9/11 memorial, then off to Times Square in the evening around about the time the attack took place. Haven't heard anything from her yet, it's silly to worry but you can't help but wonder how shaken up she and all her friends are, if nothing else. She's not a confident kid at the best of times, and this was basically her first ever day abroad on her own too. And now she'll be there with a group of mixed-ethnicity schoolmates for the next few days, all of them hearing the President announcing his latest measures to make life worse for anyone not white Anglo-Saxon Christian daring to try to enter the country.
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Cheers both. Have heard from her now via her mum, who's spoken to her – apparently they passed by the street where the attack took place about 15 minutes before it happened. Obviously a bit shaken but not too much the worse for it – I gather one of the other girls could be heard in the background describing the museum at Ground Zero as "[bleep] boring", which suggests she at least was none too traumatised, though I suspect they'll be on edge for the rest of the trip to some extent. They'd been buying costumes earlier in the day to wear at the Halloween Parade, and I think they did make it as planned – like you say ursus, it's quite plausible none of them were any the wiser about what had happened until some time after the fact.
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VA - Glad that your friend is safe and not too traumatized. I had a similar experience in London once, when I decided to go back to my hotel rather than continue walking around in the Covent Garden area. When I got to the hotel room, I switched on the TV to see news reports about a nail bomb that had gone off in that same area that I had just left. It does make you think things like, what if my feet had not started hurting when they did?
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Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
I'm entirely sure that no traffic planner anywhere outside the Netherlands has ever ridden a bicycle in a big city on a regular basis.
Those giant orange bollards (or pylons, as they seem to be called here) are a menace. They're filled with water or sand and are completely immovable, as a friend discovered a few months back thanks to one jumping out at him while he was on a downhill stretch at about 30mph, resulting in a couple of fractured vertebrae and a trashed bike. The bollard was unharmed.
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Haha. I love the cyclists' responses after that article. The city has tried to cobble together some kind of meaningful protective barrier* in three days - and surprisingly it's not perfect, so cyclists are incensed.
*which will, in the end, do absolutely nothing to prevent this sort of thing happening again.
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