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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at the extreme brevity of this obituary; were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100 and didn't have anything prepared? I would have expected at least an brief summary of his career, highlights, major points of controversy, etc. e.g. like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/29/henry-kissin... (and undoubtedly many others).

Also, this ruins my "Jimmy Carter v. Henry Kissinger in 2024"-joke.

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We've changed the URL from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67574495 to the NYT piece which (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38469147) has obviously been in the works for...decades at this point.

I had a grandfather who was a boozing, gambling, cheating, abusive, no-good man who had a similarly short obit.

This is how it works. If you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all.

Your grandfather's obituary was written by his kin, right? But the beeb doesn't have to treat him like a relative. Seems like any controversies about them are very relevant to an article about their death.

> were they taken by surprise someone could die of old age as young as 100...?

I doubt it. The economy of Henry Kissinger Grim Reaper claw machine memes has been going strong for the last four years at least.

I saw one that says "GOT HIM!"

That one might actually be new.

Four years? The Venture Brothers had a "Dr Killinger" character with his 'Magic Murder Bag' about 15-ish years ago. Kissinger's crimes have been known about for a loooong time... but the establishment didn't seem to care.

EDIT: Apologies if you meant "forty" years. That'd be about right for mainstream.

I think they were referring to predictions of Kissinger's death, not of general recognition of his crimes.

I was referring to a specific image template and heavily hedged with "at least", but you're right - anti-kissinget sentiment had been around for decades.

It's all good :)

I’m really surprised to see such a glaring typo, I don’t think I ever seen one before from the BBC:

> Born in Germany in 1973,

It is a side-effect of the learning cutoff date for the LLM they are using to write articles. </sarc>

If that was the only issue with BBC reporting, that'd be nothing...

Seeing as he was 100, I doubt they were taken by surprise. These things are usually canned and updated once in a while for people of interest, especially past a certain age (or at least that's my understanding).

Yes exactly, so why doesn't the BBC have more than 3 lines on Kissinger?

Maybe they couldn't find anything nice to say about him?

I'm fairly certain that a large swath of society (rightly) thinks that he's not worth more than three lines.

There you go: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19872410

The BBC tend to keep separate breaking news (which they usually keep short, or run a live feed) and more long term articles about the state of the world, obituaries, etc.

If you talk about the good things he did one group of people will get very mad, and if you talk about the bad things he did another group of people will get very mad. Much easier to just say nothing.

They omitted the war crimes out of "respect for the dead". That left the article fairly short.

I think it’ll come. Probably within fifteen minutes or so.

The BBC usually takes its time (sometimes to the point of absurdity — more than any other news outlet I can think of).

BBC are asleep.

Well, it is nearly 3 in the morning.

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