12 April 2023 Taiwan: Ignore China’s Conniptions By Gwynne Dyer China has been having conniptions again. President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan had a courtesy meeting last week with the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. Beijing reacted by issuing a “stern warning” to the United States, and then “encircled” the island (its …
8 April 2023 Good Friday Agreement Plus 25 By Gwynne Dyer US President Joe Biden is visiting Ireland this week* to celebrate an anniversary that almost didn’t happen. It’s the 25th anniversary of the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland, but it almost unravelled this year. The …
4 April 2023 Before the Great Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer Monday’s stunt, where Yevgeny Prigozhin held a Russian flag in his hands and declared that his ‘Wagner’ mercenary soldiers have finally conquered the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, probably marks the end of Russian winter offensive. It was just a charade, of course. The footage …
2 April 2023 Pakistan: Endless Turmoil By Gwynne Dyer Last year US President Joe Biden called Pakistan “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” presumably because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics. But somehow it staggers on endlessly, never resolving its permanent political crisis but never quite exploding …
29 March 2023 Israel: The Fascists and the Fanatics By Gwynne Dyer Imagine that Donald Trump had been the president of the United States, in office and out and in and out and in yet again, for more than half of the past 25 years. What would the US look like today? Well, that’s about …
27 March 2023 Precision Fermentation: Catastrophe Lifeline By Gwynne Dyer On Saturday Asteroid 2023 DZ2 flew by our planet at 27,000 km per hour, closer to us than it was to the Moon. It was less than one-hundredth of the diameter of the gigantic asteroid that took down the dinosaurs and most other animals 66 …
23 March 2023 UN Climate Report: Clutching at Straws By Gwynne Dyer The final report of the United Nation’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has come out at last. The desperate optimism that characterised the last few volumes (this is Part Four of four) has frayed away to almost nothing. UN …
19 March 2023 ICC Arrest Warrant on Putin By Gwynne Dyer Although the arrest warrant issued on Russian President Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court last week was welcome, there was a certain puzzlement about the actual crime he is being charged with. This is a man who launched an unprovoked invasion of a …
14 March 2023 Freddy and the Ice: Messages From the Future By Gwynne Dyer Two new things on the climate front this week, both bad news. Hurricanes* used to be like drive-by shootings: one pass, one hit and then gone. Now they’re starting to come back for a second hit. And until now scientists only …
12 March 2023 China: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves By Gwynne Dyer Xi Jinping was confirmed in a third term as president of China at the National People’s Congress last week, and not one of the 3,000 delegates voted against him. Why would they? Everything is perfect in the People’s Republic of Oz, …
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