It's interesting how the public and the media hone in on such incidents, the same way attacks on tourists in Indonesia or Egypt in the 90s were one-offs but somebody gets their pocket picked today and it's yet another sign of growing resentment against the West (or the US or the "Coalition of the Willing").

For instance, I can think of at least two cases from college where suspicious packages were detonated by police, and as Ithaca was not big enough for its own bomb squad, this meant calling in the cavalry all the way from Endicott. One was an empty rollaboard which had been left in the Campus Store (presumably as it would not fit in the garbage bin, or maybe the owner thought some student might make use of it). The other was an attache which turned out to contain a visiting botany professor's banana seedlings. In both cases they took the bag out to a parking lot in the Vet School and blew it up, which probably didn't do much for the banana experiment presentation. The point is, a lot of cops have always liked to blow sh|t up. But nobody noticed till a couple weeks ago.