London

Well, you probably have all at least heard of the terrorist attacks that happened in London (if you have had your head under a rock for a while, or just want some more detail, check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/html/default.stm). For me, these strike pretty close to home: I was in London a couple years ago with my uncle, and traveled very close to the affected area. In fact, the second attack came on a train on the Piccadilly underground line, one of the lines that we took. These attacks have hit me even closer to home than September 11th, because I've never been to New York, but I know and love the London area. I think that people are starting to become a bit desensitized to terrorism, seeing as it is so prevalent these days. It still receives a huge amount of exposure, but I think many people are beginning to feel that it's "just another attack". In my opinion, it's truly a shame that this is the case: terrorism should never be a part of our daily lives. One truly tragic story I read was of a group of Israeli children, who had had the privilege to travel to London in order to get away from the threat of violence and the frequent bombings. As far as I know, none of them were killed in the attacks, but it must have been incredibly frightening to find that a supposedly "safe" place was just as dangerous as what they normally go through.
Fortunately, it looks like the terrorists will not win this time around and Madrid will not be repeated. There, the terrorist attacks swung the balance of an election, and convinced the government to pull out of Iraq. This didn't seem to help much, as Spain was struck by another attack shortly thereafter, proving that appeasing terrorism really doesn't work. However, the British have more backbone, and have first-hand experience of the folly of appeasing the power-crazed, under the infamous Mr. Chamberlain. It looks like this attack might even wind up strengthening their national resolve to keep fighting terrorism around the globe.
There is some bad news for us Canadians, however. With this hit, it looks like we might now have the giant bullseye painted squarely on us. A while ago, Al-Qaeda promised to hit the U.S., U.K., Spain, Canada, Denmark, and Italy for their roles in Afghanistan. The first three have now been hit: are we next in line?