Gwynne Dyer
GOOD news from Africa: after two decades of bloody anarchy, Somalia is finally on the mend. There is something resembling a government coming into being in Mogadishu, with much help from African Union
Published 13 Aug, 2012 12:01am
ONE of the best tax-avoidance tactics in the late Roman Empire was to sell yourself into slavery. You didn’t really have to work as somebody’s slave, of course — it was more like rock star Hotblack Desiato being “dead for a year for tax reasons” in Dougla
Published 29 Jul, 2012 12:00am
What has been happening in North Korea recently is straight out of the Hereditary Dictatorship for Dummies handbook. Kim Jong-un, the pudgy young heir to the leadership of one of the world’s last communist states, is removing powerful people who were loya
Published 20 Jul, 2012 09:01pm
ABRAHAM Lincoln was right: You can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Published 19 Jul, 2012 12:00am
IT was 42 degrees C in St. Louis, Missouri, last weekend, about the same as in Saudi Arabia. Along the US Atlantic coast, it was cooler, but not much: 41°C in Washington DC, just short of the city’s all-time record. And 46 Americans were already dead from
Published 10 Jul, 2012 12:00am
Last weekend’s Nato summit in Chicago was mostly about how to get Nato troops out of Afghanistan without causing too much embarrassment to the western governments that sent them, and a little bit
Published 26 May, 2012 08:01pm
THE second president of the United States, John Adams, predicted in 1780 that “English will be the most respectable language in the world and the most universally read and spoken in the next century, if not
Published 23 May, 2012 10:01pm
Last year, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel warned: “Nobody should believe that another half-century of peace in Europe is a given.
Published 15 May, 2012 12:00am
IT has just been revealed by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Military Academy in the United States that I am on a short list of journalists (eight in western countries, and seven others in India, Pakistan and Arab countries) to whom Osama bin
Published 05 May, 2012 11:01pm
“MY true adversary does not have a name, a face or a party,” said François Hollande, France’s likely next president. “He never puts forth his candidacy, but nevertheless he governs.
Published 30 Apr, 2012 12:00am
IN the midst of the Taliban attacks in central Kabul on Sunday, a journalist called the British embassy for a comment.
Published 20 Apr, 2012 12:00am
WE have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended it. For the media, nuclear weapons are yesterday’s issue because nobody expects a nuclear war.
Published 30 Mar, 2012 07:40pm
NOW we have something close to a global civilisation. Most of the world’s people work in similar economies, use the same machines, and live about as long.
Published 25 Mar, 2012 11:30pm
FACED with renewed allegations that Muammar Qadhafi had poured up to 50 million euros into his presidential campaign in 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the prime-time television: “If he did
Published 16 Mar, 2012 07:30pm
SOME firm of public relations consultants has persuaded the West Bengal state government that all official buildings and assets in Calcutta, right down to the lane dividers on highways, should be painted light blue.
Published 04 Mar, 2012 10:31pm
ON February 15, just as Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping arrived in the United States for a four-day visit, US President Barack Obama told an audience of American workers in Milwaukee: “Manufacturing is coming back!” Coming back from China, that is.
Published 23 Feb, 2012 09:30pm
SUDAN was bombing South Sudan again last week, only a couple of months after the two countries split apart. Sudan is mostly Muslim, and South Sudan is predominantly Christian, but the quarrel is about oil, not religion.
Published 19 Feb, 2012 11:30pm
The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law ne
Published 28 Jan, 2012 10:01pm
THE most important thing in Taiwanese politics is always left unsaid. When I interviewed Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, just before he won the presidency for the first time, he was happy to talk about the details of his plans for
Published 24 Jan, 2012 12:00am
THE `Arab Spring` was fast and dramatic: non-violent revolutions in the streets removed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in a matter of weeks
Published 05 Dec, 2011 12:57am
