Showing 1 - 10 of 14
Could the Palestinians be bought out?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/05/2024
» Last week a despairing reader asked me if the solution to the "Middle East Problem" might be to throw money at it: just buy the Palestinians out. Offer every Palestinian in the Israeli-occupied territories enough money to settle somewhere else, and the endless wars might finally end.
2024: the year it got (really) hot
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/01/2024
» The year 2023 has probably been the hottest in the past 10,000 years -- but everybody agrees that 2024 will be even hotter. That's because we are now entering El Niño, the part of a seven-yearly oceanic cycle that heaps extra heat on whatever is already occurring.
Artificial intelligence for dummies
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/11/2023
» I'm sorry that I didn't get my article on artificial intelligence in last week during the "AI Safety Summit" at Bletchley Park, the historic Second World War decoding centre in England. I got distracted by some other stuff that was happening in the Middle East.
Boing! The Anthropocene is upon us
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/07/2023
» 'I was there when the Anthropocene was born. It was so amazing," said Dr Katherine Richardson, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen. "It was actually in 2000, at one of these meetings of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Scientific Steering Committee."
COP27 meet: A case of the glass being half full
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/11/2022
» 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 world needs to stop burning fossil fuels.
The 'defence' follies of 'little boys' at play
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/03/2021
» In the early decades of the Cold War, this was the season when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) defence chiefs would announce their spending plans for the next year, and they would almost always "discover" some new threat from the Soviet Union to justify the money. In the United States, for example, the intelligence services traditionally found a Soviet armoured brigade hiding in Cuba every February or March.
Taiwan is still in China's web of war games
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/01/2021
» Most news agencies reported on Sunday that China sent large groups of fighters and bombers into the Taiwanese airspace two days in a row. Much fluttering in the dovecote: the Chinese are testing the resolve of newly installed US President Joe Biden.
Honouring Assange, who is (almost) free at last
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/01/2021
» On Monday morning, a British judge finally rejected the US attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and jail him forever (or at least for 175 years in a high-security 'supermax' prison) on the grounds that he is, as Joe Biden once called him, a "high-tech terrorist".
The democratisation of airpower
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 25/09/2019
» Big shifts in the military balance happen quietly over many years, and then leap suddenly into focus when the shooting starts.
The bug-eyed monster search needs discussion
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 31/07/2019
» 'There is absolutely no procedure enshrined in international law to respond to a signal from an alien civilisation," said Martin Dominik, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews. "It makes sense to create a legally binding framework that is properly rooted in international law."