Most people have seen the pictures of the ‘vest’ that bombers wear, but how are these bombs made and why are they so devastating. The bombs that these terrorists use are one of the most evil weapons ever invented. The explosives are bad enough, but palestinians have chosen to add metal pieces to the bombs to increase their deadliness, and to deliberately wound as many Israelis as possible. These extras are manufactured in “metal shops” throughout Gaza and the West Bank, which is why you hear about the IDF firing missiles into “metal shops,” and see the owners moaning about the loss of their factories and insisting they were not involved in the manufacture of bombs.

The explosive belt usually consists of several cylinders filled with explosive (de facto pipe bombs), or in more sophisticated versions with plates of explosive. The explosive is surrounded by a fragmentation jacket that produces the shrapnel responsible for most of the bomb’s lethality, effectively making the jacket a crude body-worn claymore mine. Once the vest is detonated, the explosion resembles an omnidirectional shotgun blast. The most dangerous and the most widely used shrapnel are steel ball bearings 3-7 mm in diameter. Other shrapnel material can be anything of suitable size and hardness, most often nails, screws, nuts, and thick wire. Shrapnel is responsible for about 90% of all casualties caused by this kind of device.

The most widely used and the most dangerous shrapnel consists of ball bearings 3-7 millimeters in diameter. In the most severe terrorist acts – in the Delfinarium, Sbarro, in the banquet hall in Netania – the bombs of the suicide-bombers were filled with steel balls.

In an explosion, the balls are launched with such speed, that their power is close to a bullet’s. You could say that in an explosion the suicide-bomber shoots several hundred bullets in a single moment.

Aside from steel balls, nails, screws and so on, nuts and washers are also used. Nuts are easily glued together to form tiny plates that can be pressed in, or even tied by a tape to the plates of the explosive to hide it better. Likewise, nuts are also stringed on a thread or on a piece of wire.

An interesting (I say interesting, but I mean to get my point across) artice quotes Dr. Michael Messing. Messing said one of the victims he saw while in Jerusalem had around 300 individual metallic fragments within his body. The metal fragments, measuring from millimeters to centimeters, were imbedded in the young man literally from head to toe. “Several of the fragments penetrated into his vital organs. He sustained a punctured colon, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated liver and kidney. I could actually feel the nails under his skin where they had burrowed and lodged,” Messing recalls.

Shrapnel is what killed Phillip Balhasan, who stayed alive long enough to realise his children had survived, to hug them tightly and tell them to call their mum, before he collapsed. But even this is not enough for the terrorists. They also soak the shrapnel in rat poison, because it causes hemorrhaging — victims may bleed to death before they can get to the hospital.

Remember all of this, when you hear the world tell Israel to “use restraint” in responding to this attack. Remember all of this, when you read about the innocent metal shop owners who insist their shops were only making nails and screws for construction purposes.

Remember all of this, when Israel is the nation that is demonized by the blind, hateful people who wear checked kaffiyehs at anti-war protests, and call Israel an “apartheid state” for building a separation barrier — to keep out the monsters who would use bombs like I have just described.

Okay, okay, I know it’s a strange heading, but let me explain. It’s relating to two news stories that I have read over the past 24 hours that I felt were important enough to write about and share my feelings on them.

The first news item was relating to two year honours degrees that will be offered at five universities in England. Students at Staffordshire University, Derby University, Leeds Metropolitan University, University College Northampton and The Medway Partnership in Kent will pilot the fast-track courses from September with the aim to save time and money so that students can begin work sooner and with less debt. What really confuses me about this is that if these degrees are basically three year degrees ‘compressed’ into two years, then that would surely mean less holiday time, which would mean less time to be able to work to make money to be able to pay for their living costs whilst at university.

The second is about the imminent flooding that is occuring in Serbia. I have to admit that the headline for that article was my favourite headline of the day, it definately made me giggle:

Danube reaches peak in Balkans, dykes in danger

I know, it’s silly, but I actually saw the headline on my google homepage and only noticed the last two words out of the corner of my eye and thought it would be an article addressing lgbt issues. When I did read the article though, it got me pondering. I was in London for three days last week and was speaking with some family about the hosepipe ban. What made me think was that, for me up in Manchester, it’s been bloody soaking since I can remember, we cannot have a day of sunshine without there being two days of rain to follow. I cannot see how the south-east of the country can be suffering from a drought, when there are some people in the north starting to evolve webbed feet. What should be put in place around Europe is a system where, if a river is going to burst its banks and flood the surrounding area, then the excess water is pumped and piped to wherever in Europe it is needed. Whether that be to combat forest fires in Spain or France or to reduce a drought in England.