John Baker’s Blog

Dockworkers in South Africa have blocked a Chinese arms boat from reaching Zimbabwe… but the crackdown continues. As the ship moves up the Southern African coast looking for a new port - and China weighs whether to recall the weapons - African unions, citizen groups, and church organisations are launching a campaign to stop arms [...]

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown greeted the Olympic torch behind Downing Street’s closed steel gates in front of a vetted crowd on Sunday as his way of condemning the Chinese government’s suppression and murder of unarmed peasants and monks in Tibet.
Instead of a smooth free-flowing journey by foot, open-topped bus, boat and bicycle, many of [...]

June

by Shi Tao
My whole life
Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in romance’s pool of blood
June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled [...]

Anne Applebaum at The Washington Post takes a critical look at some Olympic fallacies:
“The Olympics are a force for good.” Not always! The 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany, were an astonishing propaganda coup for Hitler. It’s true that the star performance of Jesse Owens, the black American track-and-field great, did shoot some holes in [...]