13 June 2022 Latin America: The Pink Tide Is Rising By Gwynne Dyer “Corruption isn’t fought with slogans on TikTok,” complained veteran Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro. But social media can win elections, and a right-wing dark horse called Rodolfo Hernández, who calls himself the ‘King of TikTok’, may crush Petro’s hopes of becoming Colombia’s …
8 June 2022 Boris Johnson: Dead Man Walking by Gwynne Dyer ‘Cad.’ ‘Scoundrel.’ ‘Rotter.’ The words that members of the British public used to describe Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the aftermath of last weekend’s failed attempt by parliamentary members of his own Conservative Party to remove him from office had a weirdly antique ring. …
6 June 2022 Jealous Gods By Gwynne Dyer As everybody knows, the gods are thin-skinned, both the many gods of the classical pantheons (Greek, Roman, Hindu) and the jealous single gods of the monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Criticise them in any way, and they will punish you severely – or at least their earthly followers …
1 June 2022 How to Stop Sea Level Rise By Gwynne Dyer “Ninety percent of ice flowing to the sea from the Antarctic ice sheet, and about half of that lost from Greenland, travels in narrow, fast ice streams measuring tens of kilometres or less across. Stemming the largest flows would allow the ice sheets …
25 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer ‘What happens in Davos stays in Davos’, they say – or at least it should stay there, because some foolish things are said at the ‘World Economic Forum’, the annual conclave of the rich and famous. Well, the rich, the famous, and this time also the very old, because …
18 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Russian President Vladimir Putin will almost certainly not be in power three years from now. The war he foolishly began in Ukraine has fatally undermined his political credibility among the Russian elite (and among a large though mostly silent part of the population). One way or another, he will …
16 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer It’s easy to imagine Vladimir Putin coming into the shop marked ‘Sweden’, breaking some fine china accidentally on purpose, and growling: ‘Nice little shop you’ve got here. It would be a pity if something happened to it.’ But Sweden is not a pottery shop, Putin is not a Mafia …
11 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer ‘Bongbong’ Marcos didn’t just win the presidential election in the Philippines this week. He won it by a two-to-one landslide, despite the fact that he is the extremely entitled son of a former president who stole at least ten billion dollars and a mother who spent the loot partly …
9 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer Four months ago Jonathan Powell warned that the ‘Good Friday’ agreement of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland was at risk. “What worries me is the casual political vandalism. They really don’t seem to care (about) the damage they are doing to the very fragile …
4 May 2022 By Gwynne Dyer We were talking recently about how clever the Ukrainians had been to call the invading Russian troops ‘Orcs’ even before all the atrocities in the Russian-occupied towns around Kyiv came to light. Then Tina said: “If Putin’s troops are Orcs, then he must be Sauron.” You can guess what …