Bob Collins
America’s luck on the ice hasn’t changed in Sochi since the U.S. men’s hockey team came home empty-handed and the women settled for a silver after having the gold practically around their necks. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
War
Arlington National Cemetery loses track of what soldiers are buried where, Dover AFB’s mortuary is caught throwing body parts in a landfill, veterans needing medical assistance stuck in a scandalous backlog of neglect. It’s not as if the nation’s soldiers — dead and alive — needed another reminder of the disconnect between the public posturing Read more →
By now, you’ve probably heard the story of Myles Eckert, the Toledo-area boy who found $20 outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant and then decided to give it to a soldier who was having dinner inside. He did it, he told CBS’ Steve Hartman, in memory of his father, who was killed in Iraq on Mother’s Day 2005.
There’s another kid in that family, and she’s got a pretty good story, too. Read more →
Another anchor from the state-run Russia Today network is protesting the actions of Russia. Liz Wahl, an American, quit on the air this afternoon. “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government which whitewashes the actions of Putin,” Wahl said. She said her grandparents emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. to Read more →
Joe Bell put on his uniform to honor runners who were raising money for scholarships for veterans. So they honored him. Read more →
The situation in Ukraine is occupying our attention. And now it’s almost hard to remember what the big crisis was before that?
Syria is still happening. Read more →
Oh, Canada! Cpl. Justin Stark, an infantry soldier with the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, killed himself in October 2011. He was just 22 years old. Stark had been on a a seven-month tour in Afghanistan that started in 2010, including patrolling Nakhonay, a village southwest of Kandahar city. Nobody really knows what pushed Read more →
“Has it ever before happened that people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a Muslim? Can we who pride ourselves in our diversity and tolerance think of anything remotely similar in our own histories?” Timothy Snyder asks in his marvelous recap of Read more →
If some of the statements from the United States in the wake of the Russian takeover of Crimea sound familiar, we need only go back to Russian statements in the aftermath of the U.S. attack on Iraq years ago. Read more →
This is a perfect example of why news organizations in the U.S. are so anxious for the FAA to adopt regulations allowing them to use drone cameras to report news events.
Many of the images coming from Kiev have been otherworldly. Read more →
A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes 999 of the words are wrong. This tweet raced across the Internet this week. It showed a boy “all alone” in the desert, fleeing the violence of Syria. It was based on a picture distributed by a U.N. agency. Here 4 year old Marwan, who was Read more →
At a time when the world of journalism needs more George Espers, it sadly has one fewer.
I don’t think there will ever be a day when I unfold this picture and fail to stare at these faces for a long, long time.
The story Wally couldn’t tell