America
Let’s All Eat Maggots
“We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of 200 years ago ate in a whole year” John Yudkin 1963 All WW2 Far East Prisoners of War were heroes, but in [more…]
USA
20th Century
Somalia: Political Fallout And Ramifications
Like the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the political fallout caused the usual sea change in the US bringing the Somalia adventure to an end. Paul Watson, though not a professional photographer, who won the Pulitzer [more…]
20th Century
Day of the Rangers
Independent journalists and non-UN aid workers had already done enough to discredit the approach taken under Operation Restore Hope and so were treated by the US-UN as “the enemy”. Throughout Somalia’s “peacekeeping war”, independent journalists [more…]
Communism
Role Reversal
Starting around 1989 the Soviet empire started to crumble. The time period between the forming of NATO in the late 1940’s and the retreat of Russia from Eastern Europe and the eventual collapse of communism [more…]
20th Century
Keystone Cops And 12th July
Relief work had been halted overnight following the death of the Pakistanis. UN [read US] commanders tipped off aid agencies a “massive strike” would be carried out sometime in the next two days, imploring them [more…]
20th Century
New World Order Falls at First Hurdle
Each morning in early 1993, UN Pakistan contingent troops answered the muezzin call to prayer. The purported common Islamic bond between Somalis and Pakistanis was considered by both sides to contribute to a special rapport [more…]
19th Century
The Wild West Trail, Part Twelve
Last in a series by my uncle John Alldridge. This article first appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph in February 1968 – Jerry F We had camped that last night on the Crow Indian reservation [more…]
America
History does not repeat, but sometimes it rhymes
Puffins of a certain age will recall that seminal moment in 1987 when Mathias Rust, a West German teenager, seemingly did the impossible when he flew a Cessna light aircraft through 500 miles of the [more…]
19th Century
The Wild West Trail, Part Eleven
Eleventh in a series by my uncle John Alldridge. This article first appeared in the Derby Evening Telegraph in January 1968 – Jerry F I found him sitting beside me at a snack bar on [more…]