8 June 2003 Italy Is In Trouble By Gwynne Dyer “Italy is in danger,” said centre-left leader Francesco Rutelli early last month. “We risk becoming a regime without even realising it.” Since then, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s close political ally and personal lawyer Cesare Previti has been convicted of bribery on Berlusconi’s behalf and sentenced …
5 June 2003 Asia in Space By Gwynne Dyer The first British mission is on its way to Mars: a sophisticated package the size of a portable barbeque called Beagle 2 that is travelling as a passenger on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, launched by a Russian rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome on 1 June. …
1 June 2003 The ‘Weapons of Mass Disappearance’ By Gwynne Dyer “We know where [the weapons] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, north and south somewhat.” — US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 30 March 2003 “It is…possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.” …
29 May 2003 Africa’s Thirty Years War By Gwynne Dyer In the next few days a French-led multinational force will begin arriving in the Congo’s north-eastern Ituri province, empowered by the UN Security Council to use “all necessary means”, including force, to stop the bloody struggle between the rival militias of the Lendu and Hema …
25 May 2003 The US and the UN By Gwynne Dyer “The French foreign minister…said he was not completely satisfied with the resolution but supported it in the interests of ‘unity of the international community’. Translation: we give up, you’re bigger than we are.” That was how the Los Angeles Times greeted the UN Security …
21 May 2003 Who Is Human? By Gwynne Dyer Once upon a time it was acceptable to eat people who didn’t belong to the tribe. Human beings have come a long way since then, and we may yet go further. We might even make killing some non-humans a crime. The idea that the great apes, …
18 May 2003 The Scale of the Problem By Gwynne Dyer There’s no point in writing about anything but ‘terrorism’ this week, even if there’s little useful to be said about the recent rash of attacks and alarms beyond the fact that it was hardly a surprise. After all, why would conquering Iraq do anything …
14 May 2003 Terrorism and Patience By Gwynne Dyer The bomb attacks on foreigners’ residential compounds in Riyadh on 12 May were about as surprising as rain in Ireland. There was no surprise in President George W. Bush’s response, either: “The United States will find the killers and they will learn the meaning of American …
8 May 2003 The Next Genocide By Gwynne Dyer There may be another genocide coming in Africa, this time in Burundi, and the most frustrating thing about it is that you can’t even pin the blame for it on some monster of wickedness. It’s just the situation. Burundi got a new president recently. On 30 …
4 May 2003 Re-United Cyprus in United Europe? By Gwynne Dyer “The Cyprus problem has to be seen as part of the struggle between pro-European forces and those who resist democracy in Turkey,” explained Izzet Izcan, one of the organisers of the mass demonstrations on the Turkish side of Nicosia last December that began the …