Sept. 11 vs. the IRA

Sept. 11 vs. the IRA

MADRID, Spain — Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were “not that terrible” when compared to attacks by the IRA in Britain. “September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible,” the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais. “Some Americans will think I’m crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be,” she said in an interview published Sunday. “Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was [attending]. People forget,” she said. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. About 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were maimed in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which caused most of the deaths, disarmed in 2005.

Shuttle countdown

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA kept close watch on the weather on both sides of the Atlantic on Monday as Discovery’s launch countdown entered its final hours with no major technical problems. Rain was expected right around launch time and threatened to delay this morning’s liftoff. At the overseas emergency landing sites, good weather was expected at one of the three locations, which was all NASA needed. But while the outlook improved for Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, bad weather was expected at all three emergency landing sites in Spain and France. NASA would postpone the launch if none of those locations was usable in the event of an engine or other serious problem during ascent.

Cookbook author dies

Peg Bracken, the dry-witted former advertising executive who relieved the kitchen anxieties of millions of readers with her 1960 best-seller, “The I Hate to Cook Book,” died Saturday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 89. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, said her daughter, Johanna Bracken of Long Beach, Calif. Bracken sold more than 3 million copies of “The I Hate to Cook Book,” which helped women save time in the kitchen by cutting steps and shamelessly relying on convenience foods such as dry onion soup mix as key ingredients. She wrote for reluctant cooks such as herself, who knew that some activities — particularly childbearing, paying taxes and cooking — “become no less painful through repetition.” Her book, she wrote, was “for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry martini instead of a wet flounder.”

Missile defense obstacle

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — The Bush administration is aiming to strike deals by the end of the year to establish missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, yet that ambitious timetable may be in jeopardy. Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested Monday he still believes Warsaw will cooperate after Poland’s opposition party ousted ruling conservatives in parliamentary elections Sunday. The opposition doesn’t oppose hosting a U.S. missile base, but has criticized the outgoing government for not negotiating harder. Gates, asked about possible ramifications for the Pentagon’s missile defense expansion plan, said the United States has enjoyed good cooperation from Poland regardless of the makeup of its government. The Pentagon wants to install 10 interceptor rockets in Poland that — when linked to a proposed tracking radar in the Czech Republic and to other elements of the U.S. missile defense system based in the United States — could defend all of Europe against a long-range missile fired from the Middle East.

Fatal Chinese factory fire

BEIJING — A fire at an unlicensed shoe factory killed 37 people and injured more than a dozen, Chinese authorities said Monday, one of the deadliest industrial accidents this year in a country plagued with dangerous workplaces. The fire started Sunday night in a workshop making shoe uppers, said a woman surnamed Zhou in the information office of the Communist Party committee in Putian, an export manufacturing town in southeastern Fujian province. It was likely caused by an electric wire that caught fire, according to a spokeswoman for the city police. None of the 56 workers at the factory escaped unhurt. Putian is a center of shoe manufacturing in China and the export business has helped turn Fujian into one of the country’s most prosperous provinces.

Combined dispatches