How rare?

I blogged here and here about the BBC's rather strange title for their news piece about the recent suicide bombing in Israel. At that time I believed that the original headline had been "Rare suicide bombing hits Israel". I have just done some digging on News Sniffer and the results are odd.

The original title for the piece as posted at Mon Feb 04 09:10:17 UTC 2008 was "Blast rocks southern Israel town"

Half an hour later at Mon Feb 04 09:40:33 UTC 2008 the title was changed to "Suicide bomb kills three Israelis"

It was only 40 minutes later at Mon Feb 04 10:20:26 UTC 2008, by the time that more senior BBC staff had finished their first skinny latte of the morning that the BBC changed the headline to "Rare suicide bombing hits Israel"

It was another 8 hours and 40 minutes later at Mon Feb 04 19:01:39 UTC 2008 that the headline was changed to the less controversial "Israeli killed in suicide bombing"


Oddly at the same time as the headline was changed, the final "the blockades have been condemned as "collective punishment" by the UN." was added.