explosions

BBC is reporting that Gibran Tueni--a Lebanese MP and newspaper editor and a prominent opponent of Syrian interference in Lebanese politics--has been killed in a car bombing in Beirut. The explosion today occurs just as Detlev Mehlis's new report on the Hariri assassination is being released, and I am increasingly afraid that the shit is about to hit the fan. Tueni's death is terrible news--he and his father Ghassan Tueni (who's spoken at Oxford a few times) have been important figures in Lebanese journalism for decades as the editors of the paper An-Nahar, founded by Gibran's grandfather, and these further attacks on outspoken political figures are chilling.

And then this enormous fire after explosions at an oil depot in Hertfordshire--The Guardian says there's no sign of an attack, but the potentially toxic blaze is immense and is likely to keep burning for days. The blasts were apparently audible in Oxford, and the cloud may cause toxic rain across a large swathe of southeastern England. The pictures remind me of my mother's photos of the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption: the sky filled with massive black clouds.