“India is shrinking the flow of water into Pakistan,” said Pakistan’s Chief Justice Saqib Nisar on Saturday, renewing a ban on showing Indian TV shows and Bollywood films on Pakistani television. “They are trying to [obstruct the construction] of our dam and we cannot even close their [television] channels?” On the face of it, this …
It was a bit like appointing Count Dracula as the goodwill ambassador for the blood donor service. Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint, and regularly produces events that would never be credible in a novel. Like the decision last Thursday to appoint Zimbabwe’s Robert …
There are a number of ways to win an African election. The simplest, obviously, is to win the most votes, but this is sometimes hard to achieve, especially if you have been the president for a long time and people are getting fed up with your rule. If your country’s constitution only allows two terms …
I had malaria once, and it was extremely unpleasant. I had been working in Yemen, but I actually contracted it when I was flying home on a Dutch airline that must remain nameless. The flight made a stop in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and the plane was parked out on the runway while waiting to …
Everybody knows where the population explosion came from. Two centuries ago birth rates and death rates were high everywhere, and population growth was very slow. Then clean water, good food and antibiotics radically cut the death rate—and the human population of this planet increased 300 percent in the past 90 years. Eventually, as people moved …
14 October 2013 The African Union and the ICC By Gwynne Dyer Surprise of the week: the club of African presidents (aka the African Union) has held a special meeting and declared that African presidents should be immune from prosecution for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes while they are in office. They are …
15 September 2013 Rape is an African Problem By Gwynne Dyer Last May, with considerable trepidation, I wrote an article about what seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rape in Africa. The original data came from a study by South Africa’s Medical Research Council in 2009 which found that more than a quarter of …
24 June 2013 World Population: The African Exception By Gwynne Dyer The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations’ World …
22 May 2013 An African Iceberg? By Gwynne Dyer Keeping a file of random clippings is an old-fashioned thing to do, but sometimes it offers you unexpected connections. Sometimes it’s a connection that you don’t even want to see. But there it is, so what are you going to do about it? In June, 2009, …
24 October 2012 Predicting Disaster: A Risky Business By Gwynne Dyer Six years in jail and an average fine of over a million dollars: that was the punishment given to six Italian scientists on 22 October for getting their earthquake advice wrong. So what will the expert geologists and vulcanologists in Italy say the next …