12 February 2014 Israel: Nuclear Hypocrisy When Mordechai Vanunu, a humble Israeli technician who worked for years at Israel’s secret nuclear site at Dimona, spilled the beans about Israel’s nuclear weapons in 1986, very bad things happened to him. He was lured from safety in England for an Italian holiday by a woman who was …
27 January 2014 The Arab Spring Three Years On By Gwynne Dyer It has taken a little longer than it did after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, but on the third anniversary of the Egyptian revolution we can definitely say that the “Arab Spring” is finished. The popular, mostly non-violent revolutions that tried to overthrow …
2 January 2014 EU Citizenship: The Gold Standard By Gwynne Dyer New Year’s Eve is always loud in our part of London, but it quieted down after all the drunks eventually staggered off home – and to our astonishment, it stayed quiet all the next day. We waited and waited for the predicted hordes of …
26 December 2013 2013 Year-Ender By Gwynne Dyer It’s always dangerous to declare “mission accomplished.” Former US president George W. Bush did it weeks after he invaded Iraq, and it will be quoted in history books a century hence as proof of his arrogance and his ignorance. British Prime Minister David Cameron did it a …
10 December 2013 Australia and East Timor By Gwynne Dyer And now for something completely different: a spy story that isn’t about Edward Snowden’s disclosures and the US National Security Agency’s surveillance of everything and everybody. This one could come straight out of a 1950s spy thriller: a microphone buried in a wall, a listening …
20 November 2013 Bad Times in Libya By Gwynne Dyer A little over two years after the former Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was captured and killed by rebel militiamen outside the town of Sirte, the Libyan state is teetering on the brink of collapse. A dozen different militia organisations have more authority than the central …
18 November 2013 Chinese Demographics By Gwynne Dyer The big news of the week is that China’s one-child policy is being relaxed. After 34 years when most Chinese families were officially limited to only one child, most couples will now be allowed to have two children. The reality, however, is that it will make very …
11 November 2013 Iran Nuclear Deal: The Aftermath By Gwynne Dyer What will the Middle East look like after Iran and the great powers that are negotiating over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) – sign a deal that ends the confrontation? It’s …
6 November 2013 Congo: A Good Start By Gwynne Dyer Can it really be as easy as that? Get Rwanda to stop supporting the rebels in eastern Congo, pay the soldiers of the Congolese army on time, send in a United Nations force that actually has orders to shoot, and presto! The bad guys surrender …
5 November 2013 The Race to Mars By Gwynne Dyer The Curse of Mars also applies to Asian countries. About two-thirds of the attempted missions to Mars have failed, many of them even before leaving Earth orbit, and most of the rest when they tried to land. Japan’s only Mars mission failed in 1998, China’s …