russia

Tag: russia

Robbie Rogers – meteoric

By Alec,

It has been an earth shattering news day!

Scanning the papers today I read that the meteor that landed in the Ural mountains, Russia yesterday having done extensive damage which was widely reported in spectacular video had according to scientists, nothing to do with the giant one that sailed gaily past Australia last night.

That horsemeat has entered the UK food chain almost everywhere and people are now finally questioning the ‘ethics’ of the supermarkets who demand such ludicrously low costs from their product suppliers… 2 pence per sausage what can they think goes into a sausage produced at that cost?

And the first professional UK footballer since Justin Fashanu had come out as openly gay.

The heroic guy in question is 25 year old Robbie Rogers, a real good looking Californian who as a former United States international, earned 18 caps, played at the Beijing Olympics, and narrowly missed out on a place at the 2010 World Cup.  In the UK he played for Leeds United and Stevenage.

Here is a link to his blog where he made the announcement: http://robbierogers8.moonfruit.com/#

I heartily congratulate Robbie, and hope that his announcement has opened the gates to other professional footballers to find the courage to come out as gay and make the sport more honest.

Katyn – A personal post

By Alec,

As usual on waking I turned on the radio this morning and tuned in to the BBC news programme, I love hearing about Britain, its tangled politics and knowing that I need not get upset or angry about it.   It is a source of great merriment as the party leaders jockey for position in the upcoming election.  This morning a headline on a different subject caught my attention.

My Father was imprisoned during the last war in Starobielsk by the Stalinist Russians.  He was one of the lucky ones, one of the very few, he survived, damaged, and bearing the tremendous guilt of surviving when his friends and compatriots did not, but he survived.

A kind thoughtful, gentle and wonderful father, he remained tormented throughout his life by his experience in Soviet Russia.  In 1939 he was a young officer in the Polish Army captured by the Soviets and sent to prison camps in what became know to us as Katyn – the massacare in the forest.    Polish film director Andzrej Wajda made an emotional film about Katyn in 2007  that gives a good feel of what it must have been like.  For years my father quietly fought for recognition of the massacare denied also by the Britih government

Sadly my father never lived to see a ‘Free Poland’ or Soviet admission of guilt or British admission of Soviet guilt, but today he would have a smile of contentment and jutice on his face as finally after decades of denial the Russians and Poles for the first time will jointly mark the anniversary of the massacare now 70 years ago.

BBC news link: BBC news report on Katyn Massacre

Sadly the world has not learnt from this and similar experiences polititians are still, as former British Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong famously said “Economical with the Truth”