I don’t normally subscribe to a lot of weird and wonderful conspiracy theories, but this one is class.
It revolves around the fact that BBC World news, when reporting on ‘9/11′ announced at 4:57 (local time) that WTC 7 (known as Salomon Brothers Building) had collapsed. It then went on to talk about it, including a live interview with someone in New York while you can see it still in the background!!! That’s cos the building collapsed at 5:20 local time.
You can see this for yourself at this site.

The BBC have now responded to this, over here.

Me, what do I think? Well, I’m of the opinion that basically the BBC screwed up. They misreported, and screwed up. Though, there is an interesting question. If they just blindly feed out what they were receiving via news feeds without actually verifying things… who feed them that news in the first place?
Real ‘tin-foil’ hat questions ehh?

Meanwhile, there was quite an interesting little weekly poll on the Japan Today site. Basically, it was about the cancelled publication of the book about Princess Masako in Japan. You can see it here.
A comment by a chap called Ryohei caught my attention.

“I am not interested in reading the book because I am not sure how well the author understands Japan. But no matter how much he understands, I don’t think the cultural difference can be eliminated when talking on the subject. But the fact that the publisher decided to cancel the release is probably due to political pressure from the outside. Neither side would ever admit it, but I am certain that is the case. It would mean that freedom of expression and freedom of the press are at stake. It is a hard call whether it was the right or wrong decision by the government since I never read the book, but I guess the government made the right choice in the end.”

“….but I guess the government made the right choice in the end”. This is a typical Japanese reaction unfortunately. There are those who govern, and those who are governed. It got me thinking though. Sometimes I get annoyed by the attitude of some people in this country, who ALWAYS complain about what the government is doing. The issue is sometimes, the government has to do something which is inherently unpopular, and the population does need to accept that the government has made the right choice.
There’s the rub… true democracy cannot work because the general population collectively cannot make hard decisions for the good of the whole. But, a system where nobody questions the ruling class does not work either.