Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Long live the Dalai Lama, but who is next?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 08/07/2025
» The whole business of succession would be a lot simpler if the Dalai Lama could just regenerate, like Doctor Who -- a long-running British science fiction series. When the time comes for The Doctor to stop looking like David Tennant and start looking like Matt Smith, there's flame coming out of his head and gushing out of his sleeves, and then he explodes. When the smoke clears, there's the new Doctor.
Turning a little debate into a major crisis
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/12/2024
» One of the daily miracles of the media world is that there is always exactly enough news to fill the slot.
Curious case of Sunak's snap election decision
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/06/2024
» 'Why did he do it? We were all told it would be the autumn and we were hoping by then we could turn things around. It is very perplexing," said a former cabinet minister after Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a surprise election for July 4.
Tunisia: The last Arab democracy goes under
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 29/07/2022
» Tunisia would seem to have everything going for it. Average salaries are the third-highest in all of Africa's fifty countries, just behind Morocco and South Africa. Literacy is 97% among the under-30s, population growth is only 1% a year, and it's a democracy that functions under the rule of law. Or rather, it was.
Lebanon was cursed even before the blast
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/08/2020
» Beirut has been living with car bombs and air raids on a sporadic but continuing basis for so long that it would probably make sense to rebuild this time with shatterproof glass. The torrent of broken glass falling from a thousand shattered buildings probably accounted for half the 158 dead found so far in Beirut and certainly for most of the 6,000 wounded.
Long trek to democracy in SE Asia
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/08/2018
» A quarter-century before the Arab Spring of 2011, there was a democratic spring in Southeast Asia: the Philippines in 1986, Myanmar in 1988, Thailand in 1992 and Indonesia in 1998. The Arab Spring was largely drowned in blood (Syria, Egypt, Libya), but democracy really seemed to be taking root in Southeast Asia -- for a while.