Smart phones seem to be directly linked to a worldwide crash in the birth rate. It is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling,” said Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame. She has to […]
11 January 2025 Climate Feedbacks – Not in Front of the Children By Gwynne Dyer “This does not mean the international +1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades.” If those carefully chosen words don’t set your alarm bells ringing, you have not traveled much in the land of
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23 October 2024 Chagos Islands: No Happy Ending By Gwynne Dyer If you believe the British government (which you should never do), a new agreement will bring justice for the people of the Chagos Islands, who have lived in exile for more than half a century after the main island, Diego Garcia, was turned into
20 March 2024 Non-White Britain By Gwynne Dyer Nobody planned it, hardly anybody realised it was happening, and suddenly there it was: done. In the space of less than two years, the entire senior leadership of Great Britain has become non-white. I’m choosing my words carefully here, because the country as a whole is called
8 April 2023 Good Friday Agreement Plus 25 By Gwynne Dyer US President Joe Biden is visiting Ireland this week* to celebrate an anniversary that almost didn’t happen. It’s the 25th anniversary of the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ of 1998 that ended thirty years of killing in Northern Ireland, but it almost unravelled this year. The
17 October 2022 UK Clown Car By Gwynne Dyer Italy is getting nervous. The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party (aka the Tories) has now been led by four different prime ministers in only six years. Italy still holds the long-term record – a new government every thirteen months since 1945– but Britain is now nipping at
17 October 2021 International treaties are serious business. A lot of time and effort goes into negotiating them, and they become part of international law. It’s very rare for a politician to say, only a couple of years after negotiating a treaty, that his country always felt it was “a little bit provisional and open
6 June 2021 It’s not Bretton Woods, but it’s a start. The decision by the finance ministers of the G7 countries to create a global minimum tax rate on corporate profits is a step in the right direction, if only a baby step. The tide was due to turn about now, according to one theory,
9 May 21 Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland declared in 2014 that the referendum on Scotland’s independence that her Scottish National Party (SNP) demanded and lost later that year would be “once in a generation.” It has turned out to be a very short generation. As soon as the United Kingdom voted to leave
12 April 2021 Twenty-three years of peace in Northern Ireland, after a sectarian war that lasted thirty years and killed 3,700 people, but nothing lasts forever. Every night for the past week there were violent mobs of youngsters in the streets of Belfast attacking each other, Protestant against Catholic. And it’s all Boris Johnson’s fault.