2 July 2023 Violence in France By Gwynne Dyer On Saturday, the fifth day of violent protests all over France against the police killing of an unarmed teenager, Nahel Merzouk, the daily arrests dropped below 1,000 for the first time – but the violence became even more extreme. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, …
14 December 2022 Nuclear Fusion: IN and OUT By Gwynne Dyer Nuclear fusion, the ‘holy grail’ that would finally end all the world’s energy problems, has been receding into the future at the rate of about one year per year all my adult life – it was always “about thirty years away” – but suddenly …
Here’s an interesting fact. Only 14 per cent of people in England and Wales are ‘Black, Asian, Mixed or Other’ (i.e. non-white). Yet half the candidates vying to take the place of disgraced British prime minister Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party-and therefore the new prime minister-are non-white. Four out of eight. In …
Political Leaders and the Great Multicultural Experiment Read More »
Here’s how the French presidential election is going to work. This Sunday’s vote will pick the leading two candidates, who will then have another two weeks to campaign for the run-off vote. But the leading four candidates are now bunched together so closely in the polls that any two of them could make it through …
12 October 2021 Polexit? By Gwynne Dyer It’s possible that the tide which brought hard-right populist governments to power in a number of Central European countries is starting to go out again. In the Czech Republic, billionaire oligarch Andrej Babiš suffered a surprise defeat in his bid to be re-elected prime minister on Sunday. The …
5 October 2020 On Sunday New Caledonia voted to remain French by a majority of 53.3% to 46.%. That’s hardly an overwhelming majority, but it was the second referendum in two years to reject independence in the South Pacific archipelago, so we may take it as a done deal. The odd thing about that outcome …
Human beings respond well to a crisis that is familiar, especially if it is also imminent. They don’t do nearly as well when the threat is unfamiliar and still apparently quite distant. Consider our response to the current coronavirus threat. Countries in East Asia with recent experience of similar viruses (SARS, etc.) immediately responded with …
What Coronavirus Teaches Us About Climate Change Read More »
When you lock the people down (to save their lives), you inevitably close down a lot of the economy as well. And the lockdown will definitely have to last in most countries until May or June: Donald Trump’s promise of a ‘beautiful timeline’ to reopening the US economy just two weeks hence is delusional. So …
Germany and Japan are finally winning a war together. Unfortunately, it is the War on Rationality. Coal, as everybody knows, is by far the most damaging source of energy we use, in terms of both the harm to human beings and the impact on the climate. It’s twice as bad as natural gas, and dozens …
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not an ‘Islamist’, in the extreme sense of the word. He doesn’t wear a suicide vest, he doesn’t behead people, he doesn’t even go around holding one finger up in the air to signify his hatred of those who fail to acknowledge the One True God. But he certainly …