18 August 2006 The Fat and the Starving By Gwynne Dyer Being fat is the new normal, but it won’t last. The global surge in overweight people is concentrated among lower-income city-dwellers, and some may choose to slim down as they climb further up the income scale. (“You can never be too rich or too […]
4 July 2006 Nelson the Terrorist By Gwynne Dyer The oddest bit of news this week has been the tale of the hunt for Nelson Mandela’s pistol, buried on a farm near Johannesburg 43 years ago. It was a Soviet-made Makarov automatic pistol, given to Mandela when he was undergoing military training in Ethiopia. (He
10 May 2006 The South African Succession By Gwynne Dyer You couldn’t make it up. Former South African deputy president Jacob Zuma, defending himself in court against a charge of rape, explained that the woman who brought the complaint, a family friend less than half his age (she is 31, he is 64) who was
15 August 2005 South Africa — Beyond a Joke By Gwynne Dyer Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, South Africa’s recently appointed Deputy President, has a sense of humour, so maybe she was just joking. But it was the political equivalent of shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre, and it has severely shaken confidence in the good sense of
27 March 2005 Mugabe: Outstaying His Welcome By Gwynne Dyer Like the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a revolutionary who would have served his people best by dying a long time ago. Instead, at the age of 81, he is now deliberately starving people who
11 April 2004 South African Election By Gwynne Dyer Patricia de Lille, leader of South Africa’s Independent Democratic Party, took a very public HIV test as part of her campaign — and challenged all the other candidates in the country’s third democratic election (on 14 April) to do the same. Not many will, for fear
17 September 2003 New Gang in Town By Gwynne Dyer Something very important happened in Mexico last week. You could tell, because the European and American trade negotiators were so cross as they left the 146-nation trade talks at Cancun that they were practically spitting. The European Union’s trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, damned the World
29 November 2007 Israel Sixty Years On: Partition or Apartheid By Gwynne Dyer Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the Annapolis summit where President George W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More importantly, last week was also the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled