The Snowden revelations keep coming

The NSA revelations seems to be steadily making relations between the US and Germany worse. Yesterday Der Spiegel had another blockbuster report based on the Snowden documents that the US was spying on chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone for over ten years, even before she became chancellor, and that president Obama has known about it for some time and has lied about it. [Read more…]

More on border abuses

From reader Sarah, I heard the story of Dutch writer Niels Gerson Lohman who describes what happened to him as he was trying to enter the US from Canada by train. He had spent the year traveling all over the world and had hoped to end the trip by visiting New Orleans, a city that his father had spoken of fondly. But the US Customs and Border Protection people had other ideas. After a lengthy questioning and searching of his belongings on the train, they then took him off it so that the train left without him and took him into a corrugated tin shed. [Read more…]

We still can’t handle the truth

If you ask Americans what the major flashpoints are that worsened relations between the US and Iran, the takeover of the US embassy in Teheran and holding the embassy personnel hostage will be easily recalled. Less likely to be recounted is the CIA-backed coup of 1953 that ousted the elected prime minister of that country and replaced him with the despotic Reza Pahlavi who adopted the grandiose title of the Shah of Iran. [Read more…]