21 November 2022 COP 27: Glass Half Full By Gwynne Dyer As after every climate summit, the air is filled with shouts of rage and despair. What was agreed was unclear and inadequate, and what was left undecided or simply ignored was vast and terrifying. For example, they still haven’t managed to agree that the …
27 December 2021 ‘Nuclear Twilight’: Something Else to Worry About By Gwynne Dyer As a dreadful year draws to an end and the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers …
‘Nuclear Twilight’: Something Else to Worry About Read More »
20 December 2020 The ‘Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance’ was passed into law in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 28 November, providing jail sentences of up to ten years for Muslim men who marry Hindu women with the intention of converting them. ‘Love Jihad’ must be stopped at all costs, to …
16 December 2020 Ten years ago this week Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, set himself alight in front of a government building in rage at the corrupt dictatorship that had ruined his young life. His sacrifice wakened hope in millions of others – but then half a million of them also died, although …
27 July 2020 “A glance at the history of nuclear weapons manufacture shows that all 11 countries that wished to build bombs did so within three to 10 years,” wrote Yossi Melman, intelligence and strategic affairs correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, on Sunday. So why, he asked, has Iran failed to do it in over …
20 July 2020 If you wanted evidence that reasonably competent government – not great, not corruption-free, just not awful – produces good results in the end, here it is. Back in 1971, when the two countries split apart, Bangladesh had 65 million people and Pakistan had 60 million. By the end of this century, Bangladesh …
The murders happened 45 years ago, and what remains of the family has been seeking vengeance ever since. One of the killers was caught a week ago – and he was hanged at one minute past midnight on Sunday morning. Justice long delayed, but swift enough when it came. Abdul Majed, then a young officer …
God knows what novelist V.S. Naipaul really meant half a century ago when he called India ‘the wounded civilisation’ in his travelogue-cum-psychoanalysis book about the home of his ancestors. But it is a handy phrase, because it encapsulates the vision that drove Prime Minister Narendra Modi to destroy the deal that bound Kashmir to India …
Kashmir: The ‘Wounded Civilisation’ Strikes Back Read More »
Muslim governments were not silent when Burma murdered thousands of Rohingya, its Muslim minority, and expelled 700,000 of them across the border into Bangladesh. They were unanimous in their anger when the Trump administration moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But they are almost silent on China’s attempt to suppress …
After the terrorist attack on Indian troops in Kashmir two weeks ago that killed 40 Indian soldiers, but before Tuesday’s retaliatory air strikes across the border into Pakistan by the Indian Air Force, the Indian government did something unprecedented. It threatened to cut off Pakistan’s water. Or at least, it sounded like that. On 21 …