30 November 2021 The new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus was discovered last week by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, the only countries in southern Africa that have the skills and resources to detect a new variant. So what did the rich countries of the world do? Like the drunk looking for his …
Covid-19: Digital Peasants and the Ignorant Rich Read More »
22 September 2021 After Merkel By Gwynne Dyer Last January Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) were ahead in the German opinion polls by fifteen points. She was stepping down after sixteen years as chancellor (prime minister), but she was still by far the most trusted politician in Germany. Indeed, she is universally known as ‘Mutti’ …
1 September 2021 Afghanistan: Keeping the Elephants Away By Gwynne Dyer A man is sitting in a train somewhere in Europe, tearing sheets of paper into little pieces and throwing them out the window. (It could have been in America too, but passenger trains are pretty scarce there.) The only other person in the compartment, …
20 January 2021 When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to Moscow on Sunday after convalescing in Germany from an attempted poisoning by the FSB domestic spy agency, the regime-friendly media loyally failed to mention his arrival. With one striking exception: Vremya, the flagship news show of Russian state television. Presumably somebody there was hoping …
28 December 2020 Blaming the victims is never a good look. As Britain finally leaves the European Union, 1,651 days after the Brexit referendum of 2016, we should try to remember that 48% of the turkeys didn’t vote for Christmas. Brexit was not exactly a national act of self-harm; it was really an attack by …
23 December 2020 Surely you don’t want to read about the new, faster-spreading variant of the coronavirus today, or the fourth Israeli election in two years, and I certainly don’t want to write about them. So here are a few matters of lesser import, culled from yesterday’s media. First, we have a transcript of the …
9 December 2020 In Brussels this week, the English-speaking journalists are all speculating about which way British prime minister Boris Johnson will jump. He’s there now, dithering over whether to cave in to the European Union’s terms for a post-Brexit free trade deal. Most people reckon it’s his last face-saving show of defiance before he …
30 September 2020 I have just spent two weeks driving around Germany interviewing people (mostly climate scientists, since you ask), and I have come to the conclusion that it is the best-run – and quite possibly just the best – major country in the world right now. Some small countries are absolute jewels, of course, …
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 …
The fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 years ago on Saturday, was one of the best parties I ever went to, and certainly the longest. But when I finally sobered up, it was also quite frightening, because nobody knew what was coming out of the box next. There had been scary moments in Germany during …