Category World Affairs

Impeaching Donald Trump

It doesn’t get much sadder. The United States has devolved into a cartoon democracy. The House of Representatives will vote this week on two articles of impeachment. With the vote expected to follow party lines, a Senate trial is a certainty. Certain also is his acquittal, as the Republicans control the Senate. The entire thing […]

The Never-Ending War

I was looking back through the archives for a “Flashback Friday” post yesterday, and came across this one from September 2014 that I though was worth sharing again. A century later, it haunts them still. The last Canadian veteran of the First World War died in 2010, and I would imagine that is pretty much […]

Making America Great Again

I woke Wednesday morning to an “Impeachment Alert” in my email inbox. It got through my spam filter, so it must be important. And I had been trying hard to ignore the ongoing impeachment proceedings in Washington. The Republicans want me to contribute to an emergency fundraising goal to “defend Trump.” They called me “Fellow […]

Wilhelm Who?

One of the things I find most appealing about travel is the opportunity to learn new things. You never know what you are going to discover, such as when I looked up information about this statue in downtown Vienna. Wilhelm von Tegetthof, who I had never heard of before, was an admiral in the Austrian […]

Remembrance Day 2019

  Canada remembers its war dead today, as it does every November 11th. It was on this date in 1918 that the “Great War,” the “War To End All Wars” came to an end. Today we know that the First World War was just the beginning. Most years of the 20th century saw war being […]

The Other Side

  Remembrance Day is tomorrow – in Canada anyway. When we moved to Germany I was surprised to discover that Germans don’t remember their war dead on November 11. Germans will take time to remember next Sunday. Growing up as a Canadian I never thought much about the casualties on the other side. Which made […]

An Anniversary Somewhat Forgotten

It ended seventy-nine years ago today, though they probably didn’t know it was the last day. They expected the bombers back to continue the Battle of Britain. As they had every day since July 10, 1940, Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, had bombed British targets. Unprepared for war, the few fighter pilots of the […]

Still Brooding

A flashback for this Monday morning, a post originally published in October 2014.    One of the highlights of the Belgian leg of our tour of Europe was the Brooding Soldier at St. Julien. After Vimy Ridge this may be the biggest, best known, Canadian war memorial in Europe. It is a poignant site, a […]

Foreign Interference

I saw a news report about foreign interference in the Canadian federal election. Nobody was making a big fuss about it. Maybe that is because it was American interference. If the situation was reversed, there would have been howls south of the border. Apparently it is different though when it is Americans who are doing […]

Remembering The Battle

It has been 75 years since D-Day, and the generation that fought that battle is almost gone. This week though, we have been remembering a pivotal moment in world history with a series of posts I write five years ago. When we visited the Juno Beach Centre I came away with a feeling of not […]