Published:Friday | March 30, 2018 | 12:00 AMGwynne Dyer
Why do they bother?Last week, Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, got 're-elected' to his fourth six-year term by a 76 per cent majority on a 76 per cent turn-out. This week (March 26-28), the Egytian dictator, former general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi...
Donald Trump has spent a lot of time in the courts, so he must be familiar with the legal concept of cui bono - 'who benefits?' When a crime is committed, the likeliest culprit is the person who benefited from the deed. But he certainly did not...
Published:Friday | March 31, 2017 | 12:00 AMGwynne Dyer
“My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” said Donald Trump, surrounded by the usual gaggle of officials and (in this case) coal miners, as he put his supersize signature on the Energy Independence Executive Order. But...
Published:Friday | April 15, 2016 | 12:00 AMGwynne Dyer
You couldn't make this stuff up.Today, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil faces an impeachment vote in the Lower House of Congress. The charge? That she manipulated government accounts to make the deficit look smaller than it really was before the...
Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany's doors to a million refugees and migrants last year - three times as many as the rest of the European Union put together. Critics in Germany predicted a popular backlash and warned that even her own Christian...
Most powerful new technologies are double-edged. Cars are a vast improvement on horses as a means of transportation, but they also kill more than 3,000 people a day and they are a major source of pollution.So, here comes another double-...
Published:Friday | November 27, 2015 | 12:00 AMGwynne Dyer
The key fact is that the Russian plane, by Turkey's own admission, was in Turkish airspace for precisely 17 seconds. That's a little less time than it takes to read this paragraph aloud. The Turks shot it down anyway - and their allies publicly...
Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, is an outspoken man, but he knows when to hold his fire. He condemned the killing of an 18-month-old Palestinian child in an arson attack in the West Bank by suspected Jewish settlers last Friday as "terrorism...
Would it be all right if I called Geert Wilders a piece of human waste? No? Damn. Well, then, can I call him a deeply cynical politician who is willing to get people killed to advance his political career? Okay, thanks.Geert Wilders is a deeply...
Just before he sat down to a traditional Bavarian meal of sausage and beer with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the start of the G7 summit on Sunday, US President Barack Obama told the media that one of the meeting's priorities would be...
Left-wing, right-wing, it makes no difference. Almost every elected government, confronted with even the slightest 'terrorist threat', responds by attacking the civil liberties of its own citizens. And the citizens often cheer them on.More than a...
Published:Thursday | May 7, 2015 | 12:00 AMGwynne Dyer
The picture of the two Asian giants that most people carry around in their heads shows China racing ahead economically while India bumbles along, falling ever further behind. People even talk about the 21st Century as 'China's...
