20 September 2023 So Hard to Choose: Canada or the Quad? By Gwynne Dyer First Prize: Two Fabulous Days in Beautiful Delhi! Second Prize: Four Days in Delhi! Having to wait an extra two days in Delhi after the G20 while the Canadian armed forces fixed a plane to bring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau home …
17 September 2023 Guyana: Oil and Time By Gwynne Dyer Guyana is not a ‘hellhole country’ of the sort Donald Trump complained about when he said he wanted immigrants to come to the US from white places like Norway instead, but it did used to be poor, tropical and largely populated by people of colour. …
13 September 2023 Life Elsewhere By Gwynne Dyer This week’s real news is the discovery of life on another planet. As Cambridge University’s Nikku Madhusudhan said in the first sentence of his report: “The search for habitable environments and biomarkers in exoplanetary atmospheres is the holy grail of exoplanet science.” And he has probably found …
10 September 2023 Armenia: Last Round? By Gwynne Dyer The Armenians are a people of great antiquity – the first Armenian kingdom was in the 8th century BC – but they grew up in a tough neighbourhood, and they have been in retreat for a very long time. They lost their independence to the Persians, …
6 September 2023 Culinary Counter-offensive By Gwynne Dyer The French government has just published a decree banning the use of terms like ‘steak’, ‘spare ribs’ and ‘ham’ on plant-based foods. Sausages and ‘poultry nuggets’ will escape the ban so long as the plant protein content is less that 6%. It’s not that the French are …
4 September 2023 Thailand: The Last Rigged Election? By Gwynne Dyer Lèse-majesté is the ‘crime’ of offending the dignity of the king, and these days it has gone out of fashion. In Britain you can say anything you like about King Charles the Turd (as an Irish friend calls him), and no one turns a …
30 August 2023 Pope Francis: Some Confusion, Perhaps By Gwynne Dyer Javier Milei, who is very likely to be elected president of Argentina in the October election, is fairly frank in his view of Pope Francis, a fellow Argentine. He calls Francis “a Communist turd” and “the representative of the Evil One on Earth”. Even …
27 August 2023 Expanding the BRICS By Gwynne Dyer You can expand the curious organisation called the BRICS, but you can’t define it. In fact, it’s hardly even an organisation: no headquarters, no secretariat. Even the (British) Commonwealth and la Francophonie have more substance: at least they share a former oppressor. Yet the BRICS are …
23 August 2023 China: A Message from Russia By Gwynne Dyer The Ukrainians have been cheering themselves up recently by sending drones to hit targets in Moscow’s business district and the more exclusive western suburbs. (The Russians, who bomb Ukrainian cities and kill civilians almost every night, refer to this as ‘terrorism’.) On Monday evening …
20 August 2023 Zimbabwe and the ‘Ruling Party Syndrome’ By Gwynne Dyer “No-one will stop us from ruling this country. You will be lost if you don’t vote for ZANU-PF,” said President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe. A bit more arrogant than the usual election pitch in most parts of the world, perhaps, but not unusual …