John Baker’s Blog

According to This Is London:
Under anti-terrorism measures due to come into force within two years, the US authorities insist they need to do background checks on all UK air passengers travelling to Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and South America.
Direct flights to popular holiday destinations such as the Bahamas, Barbados, Toronto and Mexico City would all [...]

On AlterNet, David Michael Green, professor of political science at Hofstra University, examines some aspects of American Foreign Policy and asks, If America Loves Peace So Much, Why Are We Always At War?
Maybe we can detect America’s dislike for war in another metric, say military spending. Oops. Turns out that’s going to be a bit [...]

“A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country’s rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after “liberation” and under the democratic rule of the West’s ally Hamid Karzai.”
If [...]

Sam Smith on Undernews has some pertinent observations about the so-called struggle against terrorism:
The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the [...]