Don’t watch US media unless it is to laugh at Fox News from time to time.

Not that it will ever happen now, but isn’t it obvious that Ukraine, after having Crimea invaded and suffering from Russian-backed insurrection in the Eastern Donbas, might think it a good idea to try and protect itself from further Russian aggression? And as for Sweden and Finland…hello? They have just seen Russia invade a European sovereign country and not surprisingly are also a little bit concerned for their own protection as long as a dictator like Putin remains in control (by locking up or murdering anyone who opposes him).
Where is the threat from Russia? This cannot be a serious question. Yes, China is a big threat, but the existence of the Chinese threat does not negate the existence of the Russian threat…that would be like saying we don’t need to worry about ebola because haven’t you heard about malaria…ie absurd.
Agree 100% that China is a big, malevolent threat to the free, democratic world, but you can make that case much more strongly if you don’t undermine yourself with other absurdities.

Have to disagree with you, Alan. Seems there is a strange variety of person living in New Jersey, New York and Ontario who have problems dealing with very simple procedures (that my teenage kids can do with their eyes closed) and who love spewing hypocritical rubbish as well as bare faced lies.
The process is simple (unless you have serious mental challenges); I’ve personally done it at least half a dozen times during the pandemic and the travel visa (when Bahamians needed it) never once took more than 2 hours to get approved, and normally was ready in under 45 minutes. If a tiny country like ours can make it easy for people to get an antigen test, then people living in G7 countries can only blame their own governments if they have dropped the ball…it’s not our fault if they are having problems doing something that the rest of the planet seem to have worked out how to do.
And how dare they insinuate that our 3 day rule is strict when the US is still forcing everyone to get a test within 24 hours…we are 3 times as generous.
And as for the stories of all the business we are losing…pull the other one. Hotels have been jammed packed this season and just today when I passed through the domestic and non-US international terminal, the line to check in for Westjet was out the door…funny how a bunch of not particularly clever looking Spring Breakers must have been perfectly capable of dealing with our “ridiculously difficult entry rules”.
There is no doubt that the entry rules will slowly continue to be relaxed, but please can these whining hypocrites stop with their crybaby misrepresentations.

Yay! I have been waiting for another laugh out loud letter from Comrade Allen. I love it...the West have been pursuing an endless war in Ukraine! Nearly spat my coffee out I laughed so hard. Yeah, the West didn't send countless envoys and diplomatic missions to try to stop Putin invading Ukraine. And I suppose Putin (that sweet, kind hearted, peace loving, democratically driven lover of all mankind) wasn't the one who ordered the attack (after lying for weeks and saying he had no intention of invading Ukraine).
"Western politicians are so determined to avert a truce"...what a crock. The only thing any rational reader can believe in Comrade Allen's diatribe is "don't be fooled by the lies", because in this reader's opinion Comrade Allen's latest missive is, like so many of his other rants, full of them.
Nevertheless they are very amusing, so please keep them coming!

More hypocritical whining about procedures that are NOT complicated unless you have serious mental challenges. I suggest the writer looks in the mirror at all the hoops you had to jump through to visit Canada...when they were letting people visit at all! Download an app, fill out forms, 2 weeks of isolation etc. And this guy has the gall to complain about filling in an online form that my teenage kids have been able to complete on their own in less than 5 minutes. Not exactly complicated and time consuming. And if you can't get hold of the tests, that is your country's government's fault, not ours...if our tiny little country can make it easy for residents to get antigen tests at just $30 a pop, then the mighty G7 member Canada damned well ought to be able to do it too. Sick of these whiners...at least he didn't pretend to be a travel agent like the others who send these pathetic letters to the Tribune.

Still suffering? Don't be ridiculous. Give an example!

The idea that anyone today should have to apologise for actions taken centuries ago by people they did not know and with whom they would not agree is absurd and would in itself be an injustice. For the religious out there, "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father".
I believe that reparations can only ever be relevant and just when they are paid by the actual perpetrators of a wrongful act, and they are received by those who actually and directly suffered from the harmful act.
To claim that reparations need to be paid now, centuries later, can only be camouflage for a desire for a free hand out, for the only way reparations could be justified now would be if people genuinely felt they were worse off and suffering now than they would have been if slavery had never occurred. My ancestors were brought here in chains by British or Americans, but do I think my life would be better if I was now living in West Africa...hell no. Those who truly suffered the abhorrent degradation and abomination of slavery are no longer with us; the human excrement who perpetrated the slave trade (including the Africans who sold their own people) are also gone, and hopefully burning in hell. For the whole Caribbean to be asking for reparations now is, I believe, a shameful and transparent attempt at a money grab by countries that have done appalling jobs at ruling their own destinies since they became independent. Now they seek to use emotional blackmail and current woke and politically correct excesses to make a windfall profit.
P.S. there is one country in the Caribbean that does, legitimately deserve reparations for a crime that lasted 122 years and which only ended in 1947, and that is Haiti. Up until 1947 France was receiving payments from Haiti as compensation for the slaves that were freed when Haiti became independent, payments that amounted to extortion at gun point and would equal some $21 billion in today's terms. 1947 isn't that long ago...some direct perpetrators and many direct victims are still living. France should pay up. And no, I'm not Haitian.

Mr. Allen writes well, but so many points are such a clear spinning of the truth.
If Putin and Xi both believe that the West is trying to militarily encircle their countries, then they are both living in the same delusional parallel universe. Russia and China are the countries doing the sabre rattling, invading or threatening to invade neighbouring nations to enlarge their own countries. China is the country building military bases on artificial islands in the middle of the territorial waters of other countries. Any position the West takes with regard to Russia or China is clearly only a defensive reaction to their offensive (in multiple ways) actions.
The Western interventions of our lifetimes have always been with a guiding moral imperative of protecting those who did not wish to be forcibly subjugated or cruelly and inhumanely treated by ideologues and tyrants, or they have been in direct response to attacks launched against the West first. Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Syria...happily Vietnam is now a success story, and is the one case out of those four where I will agree that Western intervention probably did more harm than good, although I am certain there were many millions of South Vietnamese who didn't want to have communism forced down their throats. In the other three cases, look at how many political prisoners those dictatorships hold in their prisons, how many of their citizens are desperately unhappy and lack the basic freedoms that we take for granted. Mr. Allen would seem to believe that holding political prisoners, lack of basic freedoms and dropping chemical bombs on women and children who oppose the rule of a tyrant are all acceptable things and the West is evil for opposing them.
Ukraine in 2014 wasn't a "right wing coup" (that's Mr. Allen/Putin's propaganda), it was a popular uprising against an unpopular Russian puppet leader.
Yes, indeed very many more civilians died in Iraq than have died so far in Ukraine...the crucial difference that Mr. Allen intentionally ignores, is that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, schools and hospitals.
The point about Nicolas Maduro is comical in its blatant spinning of the truth. The West isn't interested in having Maduro as a "friend". As is obvious to everyone, apart from Mr. Allen apparently, the West just needs more oil to be able to switch off the Russian tap...their dislike of Maduro and his ways remains, but it is far lower down the totem pole than the need to stop buying Russian oil.
Mr. Allen started a previous letter with "sensible people stopped taking the western media seriously at the time of the 2003 Iraq war". With this latest pro-Putin, anti-West diatribe, I imagine sensible people have stopped taking Mr. Allen seriously.

A "journalist" who seeks to undermine a democratic country's national security and to endanger the lives of it citizens by publishing classified documents is, in my opinion, a criminal who deserves to rot in jail. If he had a legitimate concern about alleged crimes committed by the US Government, information about which he had obtained illegally, then there were other ways he could have acted to address the problem, which would not have landed him in the trouble that he has created for himself.
Everyone agrees that the WMD accusation turned out to be rubbish; everyone also agrees that the Allies did an awful post-war job in Iraq...but that doesn't take away from the fact that Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant whose demise made the world, and the lives of all Iraqis besides those in his inner circle, better.
"Every other Western military operation"...so you would have preferred the Serbs to commit genocide in Kosovo? You would prefer General Noriega to be pumping more cocaine into the US? You would prefer Bin Laden to still be living a life of luxury in Pakistan?
Maintaining peace, especially when doing it by running away from what is the right thing to do, is pretty easy. Lloyd George managed to maintain peace for an extended period of time...by appeasing Hitler...ah, but I guess in your eyes he should have been given an award and heralded in the media for achieving "peace in our time".

I think the only "puppet" here is the writer, whose expressed views have come straight from Putin's propaganda machine. If there's one thing you can guarantee from reading Mr. Allen's frequent missives, it is that they will give you genuine LOL moments. I love how he spews his twisted, ulterior-motive versions of history as "facts"...they are about as truthful as Putin's insistence for weeks and weeks that "Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine"!

There will only ever be one, authentic place to see the real swimming pigs, and that is Big Major Cay in Exuma, where nobody exactly knows how the pigs first got there, and where the pigs learned to swim themselves, voluntarily. These copycat, fake and artificial "pig experiences" are an embarrassing attempt to rip off unsuspecting tourists who have heard of the famous (original, in Exuma) swimming pigs and think they are going to see the real deal. The real swimming pigs in Exuma are a quirky and charming facet of the wider, upscale out island tourism product...these copycat con artists sully our tourism image with their cheap, fake alternatives and misrepresentations. They should all have to cease and desist.