Tragedy

The horrific events in Norway last Friday have been difficult to process, and killer Anders Breivik's 1,500 page manifesto is a lot to digest. Fortunately, there have been some exceptionally good pieces written about the tragedy that help provide some context and understanding for what happened and why.

Bruce Bawer, who lives in Oslo, writes about the tense state of Muslim relations in Norway.

The Norwegian terrorist seems to have penned a long Unabomber-style manifesto, "2083: A European Declaration of Indpendence," which can be downloaded, for now at least, at this link.

This past weekend’s fatal crash of Poland’s presidential aircraft, a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154M, has had cataclysmic affects on the country’s national leadership. Among the 97 victims were the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and virtually the entire Polish armed forces’ leadership – the senior commanders of each branch of the service.  Ironically, they were all on their way to a ceremony to commemorate the 1940 execution of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in the Katyń forest by the USSR secret police.