25 January 2023 Ukraine: Will Western Tanks Bring Victory? By Gwynne Dyer On Tuesday they reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. How did they know that Germany would agree to give Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine on Wednesday? Now we’re all doomed! No time to run! Ninety seconds is barely time to …
11 December 2022 Two Coups (Failed) and Some Random Speculation By Gwynne Dyer Could there be anything more ridiculous than last week’s failed coup attempt in Peru? Last Wednesday morning, President Pedro Castillo made an unscheduled broadcast announcing that he was dissolving Congress, suspending the constitution, and would rule the country by decree. But within …
24 February 2022 Ukraine: Ten New Realities By Gwynne Dyer Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine and foreclosed his and everybody else’s other options, certain aspects of the near future have become clear. So have some aspects of the longer run. Here are ten predictions, made with varying degrees of confidence. 1. …
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 …