Siege In Sydney
The lead story everywhere is the hostage situation at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe at Martin Place in Sydney, Australia. An unknown number of staff and customers have been taken hostage by a gunman. At one point a black flag with Arabic letters was held against the front window of the cafe by hostages.
The political leaders offer some advice:
“[New South Wales] Premier Mike Baird said the police and public were being “tested”, but people should go about their business as normal.”
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said “… I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual.”
Well, the problem is that this is in the middle of Sydney’s Central Business District and police have closed down several blocks surrounding the cafe, which means businesses in that area are closed and evacuated. Transportation routes that go through the area have been halted. It is difficult to go about your business as usual or normal if it involves anything in the cordoned off area. They have even closed and evacuated the Sydney Opera House that is a kilometer away.
The police have not been able to establish communications with the gunman in the cafe.
Update: This is the ABC live blog on the aftermath of the siege that ended in the death of two hostages and the gunman.
12 comments
So far, not much is known. The guy has contacted various media companies, but they have been gagged by Police (which the media here knows is SOP during this sort of situation). It’s being handled by the NSW Police Tactical Operations Unit (TOU), which is essentially a paramilitary unit since the mid-90’s when the DoD handed over certain responsibilities, such as bomb disposal and counter-terrorism and handles some of the training. It’s also part of the State Protection Group, which commands the Armoury, Negotiation Group (or Section), Bomb disposal and Dog Unit’s.
Unfortunately, they have had some recent history of playing hero (primarily young and inexperienced officers), and people have died. That said, the SPG Negotiation Group has some very well trained people. Hopefully, that will be enough, before someone get’s gungho or trigger happy.
If it isn’t resolved soon, or the perpetrator is found to be associated to an International terrorist group, it may be handed over to the AFP (Australian Federal Police) Specialist Response Group (SRG). Then things can get pretty nasty.
Politicians are morons who only understand sound bites, not reality. What’s new? *shrug*
Just updated. The man has been identified by police as Iranian cleric Man Haron Monis.
ABC Live Blog:
Sydney siege live
Your original link has updates also.
The Muslim community is generally pretty good here. They have gotten together and are strongly condemning this.
Muslim community ‘shocked’ by Sydney cafe siege, say ‘misguided’ individuals misrepresenting faith
I have been following the story on ABC. The police say they went in with flash-bang grenades and an all out assault after they heard shots fired inside the cafe. The manager apparently died struggling with the gunman over control of the weapon which would make me believe that the gunman had already decided kill people, so the manager had nothing to lose. It will take autopsies to figure out who killed the three people, but if shots were heard before the police went in, the hostages were probably killed by the gunman.
These situations are always a mess, no matter what the responders do. The gunman had to be getting tired and didn’t get the public media access to spread his excuses for being a murderous bastard. This wasn’t political, the guy was out on bail facing a number of violent charges, including involvement in the death of his ex-wife, so this behavior is consistent for him. Being a ‘cleric’ only means that he has the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree from a Shiia university. I doubt he had many followers or a regular mosque where he preached. He was facing prison and wanted to be considered oppressed by system or a martyr, rather than the dirtbag he was.
OT: I am beginning to believe that the spam software is reacting to your anonymizing rather than anything in your posts, because nothing in the your second comment met any of the spam criteria, so it must be checking back links to your computer which will fail.
Don’t sweat it, I catch them and approve them. 🙂
Sadly, Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Faux News then used this as an excuse for torture. Because of course a crazed loner storming into a business with a weapon can be headed off by torture if you torture his co-conspirators before the hostage situation begins. What? You say he had no co-conspirators? Heresy, heresy I say! Those people (you know, THOSE people) are all in it together to get us! Clearly the answer was to pick up a random brown-skinned person off the streets somewhere and torture him for the details of the next terrorist strike by THOSE people before it happened!
SIGH.
The guy was a garden variety violent misogynist who was facing serious prison time and wanted to politicize the prosecution to muddy the waters. Torture has never produced anything that was worthwhile up to now, so claiming it would help to fight terrorism is a claim supported by the misinformed, sadists, and racists, or a case of all three when it is Faux News.
OT: I’ve been busy elsewhere the past few days. 🙂 I suspected that was the case Bryan. No problem. 🙂
I saw we should try torture on Hasselbeck and the other co-morons and see if they can say anything intelligent! I’d humbly volunteer my well trained services! A worthy cause for me to temporarily come out of retirement! 😆 Of course, no useful intel would be gained, but for once, it would serve an educational purpose… and be fun (well, not for them)! 😛
Sadly Bryan, I think that deaths were unavoidable. I suspect that Monis had already decided to be a Martyr, as many misguided fools such as he believe. It could have been worse than two civilians, but it’s always tragic. I think you are correct about your assessment, and the manager Tori Johnson decided he had nothing to lose. A brave man. Perhaps he and Katrina Dawson decided together to stop him. Hopefully the remaining hostages can shed light on that.
Before Christians & Jews start yelling “exterminate all Muslims”! They should have a good hard look at their own houses and give them a good clean! But then, that would mean them being honest. Something I’ve not seen wither religion display, and history shows honesty isn’t really part of their respective codes. As Gandhi said “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”
There are of course exceptions to all that, but not many. In the case of crazy people who use the Muslim faith as an excuse to be evil, that’s a good thing.
I, going through 3 days of email’s and just saw a petition (which already has over 14,000 sig’s) for Abbott to award Tori Johnson the Cross of Valour. It’s disgusting that Abbott even needs a petition to consider it! But then, he has no honor, so i shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure he’s accept any award salivating and with both dirty, greedy hands out!
Tony Abbott: Award Tori Johnson the Cross of Valour for helping save lives from the Sydney siege gunman
Here’s another petition regarding this, and more info on the perpetrator. Seems this tragedy could have been prevented after all.
OT: we were discussing desalination a while back. I found an interesting portable desal project being crowdfunded. I’m considering supporting it, but need to look into it some more before I commit. I’ve emailed some questions about it (from an industrial Engineering standpoint). 🙂 See what reply I get. 😉 I mentioned I wasn’t impressed by getting a patent approved, since several people have had patents approved for inventing a wheel for example, and most issued these day’s aren’t worth the paper to print them on. 🙂
Desolenator: transforming sunshine into water
I noticed that one of your gun nut politicians said that this wouldn’t have happened if Australia had the ready availability of weapons they have in the US state, Texas. I think he might want to do a search on ‘Texas + mass shootings’ before he says something that stupid in public. If there had been someone with a gun among the hostages there would have certainly been more than three deaths, and since shots fired is a trip wire for the police to attack, whoever the ‘heroic armed civilian’ was, the responding police officers who have certainly killed him/her. It was crowded and there was no way of firing at the gunman without endangering innocent people. Gun nuts think that guns are a magical device that can solve all problems. Real life doesn’t work that way. Guns aren’t a feature – they’re a bug…
I looked at the criteria and Mr Johnson seems to meet the conditions, but the other hostages need to tell authorities what happened in the cafe, as Ms Dawson’s actions might merit the award as well.
As for the water distiller, there are a lot of devices that can be used that can be made locally – essentially black trays with glass tops that use gravity instead of motors to move the water. Other than the glass and the stainless steel collection pans, all you need is wood and black paint. There are hundreds of them in use in Peru. We had an inflatable device in our survival kits that would distill water, for use in water crashes.
The problem with boiler-type desalination schemes is that the boiler swiftly becomes salt-encrusted, eventually losing its ability to boil water. I don’t see anything in their 3d model that will deal with this. Are they applying the heat radiatively from the top? I can’t tell.
What this may be more useful for is dealing with the contaminated groundwater in much of India. Much of India’s groundwater is contaminated with levels of various industrial chemicals that are lethal over time. Much of India’s population has no choice but to drink that groundwater, since any surface waters are so contaminated with human wastes that drinking them is often much more immediately fatal.
Regarding the black trays with glass tops or the plastic inflatable things, the heat is being applied radiatively from the top, thus any salt encrustation on the bottom is irrelevant. The main problem is that the amount of heat that can be applied to the water is not sufficient to get more than a pint or two of water per day out of it in most climates. That may or may not be sufficient to sustain life, depending upon how many of these gizmos you have…
You get the same effect of boiler fouling in this area because the drinking water is mineral heavy in calcium and iron. Water heaters lose efficiency and pipes get clogged by the deposits. In a bit of irony, the soft water systems that combat that problem use salt tablets in the process.
The Peru installations are large and they are used with whatever water this available in the mountains for villages. They have barren land that doesn’t support any kind of vegetation, so they use that.