8 October 2023 Another October War By Gwynne Dyer If you are wondering why Hamas launched its all-out assault on Israel on Saturday, I wrote it right here last week. “The Arab world has basically abandoned the Palestinians to their fate, whatever that may be. Six Arab countries have established diplomatic ties with Israel and …
4 October 2023 A Short War Fifty Years Ago By Gwynne Dyer In 1973, fifty years ago on Friday, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, coincided with Ramadan, the Islamic lunar month of fasting. But nobody raised an alarm in Israel when it was reported, two days before the Arab attack, that …
29 September 2023 Armenia: Not a Genocide By Gwynne Dyer It is a tragedy, but it is not a genocide. In a single week, almost all of the 120,000 Armenians who lived in the enclave in western Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh have fled across the border into Armenia. Most say they don’t expect ever to go …
27 September 2023 Pantomime Politics in Eastern Europe By Gwynne Dyer The Polish hate the Russians The Slovaks hate the Czechs, The Bulgars hate Ukrainians And everybody hates the Jews. With thanks and apologies to Tom Lehrer Tom Lehrer’s original song, ‘National Brotherhood Week’, was about how different kinds of Americans hated each other, but …
24 September 2023 Ukrainian Breakthrough By Gwynne Dyer It’s nothing like the great breakthroughs of the mid-twentieth century wars, when combined air and ground forces would tear a hole in the enemy line, the tanks would pour through, and the front would roll back several hundred kilometres before it stabilised again. The breakthrough in Ukraine …
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 …