2 August 2023 El Salvador: ‘The World’s Coolest Dictator’ By Gwynne Dyer “It’s not perfect, but it’s good. We’ve done something really good here,” said El Salvador’s vice-president, Felix Ulloa, defending the government’s no-quarter war against the street gangs that have dominated the Central American republic for decades. President Nayib Bukele agrees, calling himself “the …
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, …
4 June 2023 Australia: War Crimes and Justice By Gwynne Dyer “Guys just had this blood-lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.” So said an Australian soldier about the war crimes committed by the Australian SAS (Special Air Service) when the scandal first broke in 2016. And the Australian Defence Force, bless its heart, …
31 May 2023 Yet Another Article on AI, Part 2 By Gwynne Dyer I’m looking at a headline this morning that screams ‘AI Creators Fear the Extinction of Humanity’, and I suppose they could turn out to be right. But it’s still a bit early to declare a global emergency and turn all the machines …
7 May 2023 Massacres and Guns By Gwynne Dyer Here’s how to sound wise when writing a story about mass killings and gun control. Last week saw two such massacres in Serbia (eight deaths and nine deaths respectively) and only one in the United States (eight killed in a mall in Allen, Texas). There was …
5 May 2023 A Spike in the Ocean By Gwynne Dyer There is a fever raging in the ocean. Last month it was worst off the eastern coast of North America, where the sea surface temperature was as much as 13.8 degrees Celsius higher than the 1981-2011 average for this time of year. Not only …
30 April 2023 Thailand: Another Round? By Gwynne Dyer There have been occasional violent episodes in Thai politics and one recent massacre (2010), but the struggle for a genuine democracy has usually been relatively restrained. Maybe that is why it has lasted so long. In fact, the tug-of-war between the army, the monarchy and the …
22 April 2023 Starship: The Iterative Design Methodology By Gwynne Dyer “Obviously, this is not a nominal situation,” said John Insprucker, a senior engineer at Space-X, who was doing a webcast on Thursday’s launch attempt of Elon Musk’s gigantic Starship rocket. So why did Musk’s employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer when it …
19 April 2023 What Goes ‘Moo’ And Then Explodes? By Gwynne Dyer “When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino,” said Prof. Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense …
16 April 2023 Sudan: The Thieves Fall Out By Gwynne Dyer It’s a pity that both sides can’t lose in the war that broke out between rival generals in Sudan on Saturday, but the best that the 48 million Sudanese can hope for now is that one side loses quickly. Beyond that, it’s all bad: …