Smart phones seem to be directly linked to a worldwide crash in the birth rate. It is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling,” said Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame. She has to […]
Democracy is in retreat or at least on the defensive almost everywhere, while wars are getting bigger and more frequent. The trend lines are frighteningly bad. There are big wars in Ukraine and Sudan and another one is only on temporary hold in Gaza. Smaller wars are underway in Yemen, Burma, and Thailand/Cambodia, and a
18 December 2024 The Daily Miracle By Gwynne Dyer One of the daily miracles of the media world is that there is always exactly enough news to fill the slot. Whether it be a news broadcast, an online blog or a newspaper column like this one (‘800 words, with indicated cuts to 700’), something important
31 August 2024 31 August 2024 New Caledonia: Pragmatism 3, Nationalism 0 By Gwynne Dyer With the sole exception of the fifty people on Pitcairn Island , the United Kingdom (once known as the British Empire) liquidated its holdings in the Pacific Ocean long ago. France, by contrast, has a half million citizens in the
10 June 2024 Macron’s Strategy By Gwynne Dyer Even before the final results were in from all of the 27 European Union countries that voted in the EU elections last weekend, President Emmanuel Macron had called national elections in France for the end of this month. What does he know that other European leaders don’t?
31 December 2023 Abandoning the Sahel By Gwynne Dyer On Sunday, the last of 12,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops left Mali, ordered out by the military regime that seized power after two successive coups in 2020 and 2021. They leave behind them 310 Blue Helmets killed over ten years, and a country in chaos. Also
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