Zarqawi

About an hour ago I was working and happened to check Google News. There it was; the Zarqawi had been killed.

My immediate thougth was whether to wake up the family, friends; everyone. Back in December 0f '03, Bear was up here visiting me. We were watching late night TV, just about to go to bed when the news came on that Saddam Hussein had been captured. After a brief consultation we immediately woke up my parents so they could watch. Flush with that, I started waking up the universe.

So often in life one only gets woken for bad news. How sweet is was to wake people up for something positive. (I know it's hard to remember that now, amidst setbacks in Iraq and systematic propaganda to make it seem like a total disaster, but at the time capturing Saddam was simply huge.)

In many ways capturing Zarqawi is even bigger. Saddam came after the major hostilities were long over, and was seen more as a nail in the coffin kind of thing. Zarqawi is by all accounts still actively involved in the insurgency, planning and setting ito motion the suicide attacks and other bombings.

I was tempted--I still am--to wake everyone up, but I will forego that. Maybe it's because he's dead, and it feels a little ghoulish. Or maybe it's because there is a misunderstanding with how big this story really is.

One other note: As is my pratice, as soon as I saw the story I checked several news websites to see what they had. Never take just one source for something. It always cracks me up how CNN and FOXNEWS can have totally different covereage of an event. I know most of you are trained to think FOXNEWS is biased, and they sure are, but how does CNN escape the same condemnation? Their news is always equally bad. (Although I will say, their website is much better.)

Anyway, after Google News I checked CNN, FOXNEWS, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The LA Times, the Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune and two or three others at random. This early virtually all of them just had the AP story, mostly bare-bones since this just happened. The only real difference was the pictures. Half of them an the same exact AP picture; so I must have just caught the beginning of the story. FOXNEWS actually had the best picture, a huge blow up of Zarqawi with a great headline: "DEAD."

Out of curiosity I began checking Canadian sites. Nothing. Zilch, nada. My local paper had nothing. The national papers had nothing. Toronto and Ottawa had nothing. Canada.com had nothing. I guess they're still all full of their own terrorist story, and of course the Stanley Cup.

I checked the London Times, which didn't have much, and Dawn, the English-Language Pakistani newspaper. They just had a blurb, no story, which is surprising, because 80% of the time Dawn has better coverage, and sooner than anything over here. (It was posted an hour sooner, if that means anything.)

I just thought of something: who are the top ten people whose deaths would cause me to wake up the world? I'll think about that and get back to you.