Darwin Loves...

Grenades

I must admit that when I read the first paragraph, I was not at all tempted to make fun of it. It seemed very sad, with three "youths" being killed while playing ball with a grenade. Kids who were probably so poor they couldn't afford a baseball.

That just shows you how wrong first impressions can be. I read the next paragraph:

Two youths aged 19 and 20, one of them from neighboring Croatia, were killed instantly while a 20-year-old woman died on her way to hospital

Any sympathy I felt instantly fled. These were idiots, plain and simple. They were more than old enough to know what a grenade is, and not to play with it. They were playing the fool, and they paid for their stupidity. Fuck them.

Reuters is notorious for this sort of yellow journalism. They will typically refer to anyone over 18 as "men" or "women." But when they want to generate sympathy--and take a sidelong swipe at American foreign policy in the process--they describe those same 18+ people as "youths" in an attempt to mislead and create a false impression of events. Despicable.

Apparently, the Bosnian police aren't real swift, either:

Police said an inquiry was under way and declined further comment. It was not clear why the grenade exploded.

I'm going way out on a limb here, and guess it was because the safety clip had been released, the pin removed, and the spoon flew off. That's the normal reason that grenades explode.