Category World Affairs
Refugees I – The Flight Out
Twenty-five years ago today I became a refugee. Technically I suppose I still am one. We’ve never gone back. In April 1990 we were living in Monrovia, capital of Liberia (West Africa if you need to find it on a map). A civil war had started on Christmas Eve. Government troops seemed mostly ineffective, and […]
Is Tradition Important?
Who cares about tradition? The Pope misses his late night pizza runs, which I guess is his tradition. In a recent interview the Pope Francis I revealed that he doesn’t expect to be pope for very long, maybe three to five years. He has already been sitting on St. Peter’s throne for two. And thus […]
The Un-Canadian
Ted Cruz has declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for the 2016 American presidential election. He is unlikely to win. He is the first to declare his candidacy. Voting day is still 20 months away. Historically those who declare first don’t capture the prize. I suspect party members become tired of them over […]
Buyukada Orphanage
I wrote about visiting one of the Princes Islands in Istanbul, and my interest in the abandoned building at the top of the hill. I recently discovered there is more to the story of that abandoned orphanage than what I learned on the trip. It has fairly recently been part of an important court case. […]
The Costs of War
When we toured the First World War battlefields in the Ypres area of Belgium last summer, the enormity of the human toll was apparent. The numbers are staggering. Daily casualty figures were measured in hundreds or thousands as more than a half a million men died in combat on Flanders fields in four years of […]
Stuff Happens
Went to Canada’s National Arts Centre on Saturday night to take in the play Stuff Happens, which is a look at the players and their actions surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. You know the war – the United Nations decided Saddam Hussein could be given more time, so George W. Bush put together his […]
Lost Boys
There has been a lot of media coverage in my area about John Maguire, the young Canadian killed in action in Syria fighting for the Islamic State. There has been much written about his youth, asking how someone could grow up to renounce Canadian values and embrace such an extremist form of Islam. When I […]
Dead Terrorists
I saw the report about the death of a Canadian terrorist last week, first online then, the next morning, in my newspaper. I read the whole article instead of just skimming, noted some interesting details and that was about it. I thought about doing a blog post, but decided against it. Why give extra publicity […]
Panda Diplomacy
Having a monopoly on an endangered species has had certain advantages for Mainland China. I thought about that on a visit last year to the zoo in Toronto. The Toronto Zoo has a couple of giant pandas on loan. They will be there until 2018, when they will relocate to Calgary for a time in […]
What’s In A Name?
William Shakespeare has many memorable, oft quoted lines, including the one about the rose. You know the one, from Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The implication is that names are unimportant. I disagree. Names help define who we are and how we feel about ourselves. Parents spend […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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