Like most extraordinary days, Friday began as an ordinary one. I was anchoring the news and ready to wind up the last program of the night when, 10 seconds before the end, my producer slipped into the studio, handed me a piece of paper, and asked me to read the three or four paragraphs of text she had just given me.
In black and white, the words stared right back. An explosion had torn through Norway’s capital, Oslo, ripping through the 17-story government headquarters that house the Prime Minister’s office, and setting the nearby Oil Ministry ablaze. With their façade crumbling and windows blasted open, the buildings had been cruelly de-skinned. Down below, people whose only mistake was to come to work that day were now trying to find a way back to safety while, on an island called Utøya, hundreds of young people ran and swam from gunfire.
