Brain Contour

My little brother, Jeffrey, who works in Manila, was among the thousands of people affected by the tropical storm “Ondoy” (international codename: Ketsana) that hit the Philippines this weekend. After my sister (in Illinois) and I heard about the worsening situation in Manila due to flooding caused by the torrential rains, we immediately contacted our brother, but to no avail. His phone, and all his friends’ phones, were unreachable. We posted messages on Facebook hoping other friends and relatives could somehow trace our brother’s whereabouts.

Last night, we finally got a note that my brother and some others were trapped in the second floor of a two-story house. Water on the first floor was about chest-high.

Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, has obtained a copy of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing video tapes through the federal Freedom of Information Act. The video is now posted online.

If you watch the video, something is actually lacking. The video shows events minutes long before the blast and then goes blank before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the Oklahoma City federal building. Where are the rest of the video? Why are they missing? There were four cameras monitoring the place at different locations and all of them coincidentally went blank at the same time! Coincidence. Really? Maybe not.