Things continue

Bill writes: London life is continuing, but there's definitely more of a sense of day-to-day tension. There are now police on a lot of the underground carriages, they get on at one stop, look us over as they walk up and down the carriage, and then get off at the next stop. Other police are placed in front of the tube stations as well as in front of some banks and even grocery stores. Our bags are examined by security when we go into museums and movie theaters, and we can't leave our coats in the cloakrooms anymore. This has been increasing in the past week, so I guess the alerts are at a higher level. I can certainly sympathize with this--we were on the Number 26 bus on the same spot three days before a terrorist tried to blow it up, and one of the suspects was just arrested at a flat a few blocks from here.

One disconcerting thing we've noticed is that some newspapers are starting to shift from saying that extremist muslim groups are in back of this to subtly (or not so subtly) implying that one should keep an eye on muslims in general. For example, the normally staid paper, "The Independent," had the headline yesterday "Veiled Threat?" in reference to the clothing worn by two muslim women who were arrested. It was hard not to catch the implication that this referred potentially to any muslim woman with a veil.