Showing 1 - 10 of 16
Several bad options for US in Iran standoff
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/04/2026
» The Iranians know they have won, but President Trump doesn't get it yet. He's still at the stage of counting up the US and Israeli air strikes and assuming that those numbers mean a US victory is possible. But five gets you ten that the Iranians are already thinking about nuclear weapons. Not their own, which don't exist. America's.
Palestinians are pawns in a deadly game
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 31/07/2024
» The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip since last October's Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements will reach 40,000 people in the next week or so. (It's back up around 50-100 civilians dead per day.)
The bigger game: Israel and Saudi Arabia vs Iran
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/06/2024
» Gaza, IDF, Hamas, Mr Netanyahu, famine, terrorism, genocide, and on and on: the loud, incessant clatter of local issues and tactical moves almost drowns out the low, grinding noise as the Middle East shifts inexorably into a new strategic alignment. But it's happening, and it's still about oil, sort of.
Second chance beckons for South Africa?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/06/2024
» Cyril Ramaphosa is the president of South Africa again, but everything else is different. He got his job back in a vote late on Friday, but only because at the last moment he managed to cobble together a coalition that has a majority in parliament. It's so new that the coalition partners still haven't agreed on who does what in the new government.
Has crunch time arrived for 'Bibi' Netanyahu?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/05/2024
» It has not been a good week for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, chief decision-maker in the war in the Gaza Strip that has already cost at least 35,000 civilian deaths. (Some thousands of those 35,000 may have been Hamas fighters.)
Iran, Israel is a panto crisis, not a real war
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/04/2024
» Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's "Supreme Leader", is embarrassed and humiliated by the complete failure of his drone and missile attack on Israel, but does US President Joe Biden have the empathy to feel sorry for his old adversary in his time of trouble?
Life elsewhere will someday be possible
Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/09/2023
» This week's real news is the discovery of life on another planet. As Cambridge University's Nikku Madhusudhan said in the first sentence of his report: "The search for habitable environments and biomarkers in exoplanetary atmospheres is the holy grail of exoplanet science." And he has probably found the Holy Grail.
International law must prevail in Ukraine war
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/02/2023
» Just before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which falls tomorrow France's President Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted to see Russia "defeated, but not crushed". That is a very fine distinction, but an important one.
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.
Playing football won't turn boys into manly men
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/02/2021
» It seemed innocent enough at the start: just a surge in the number of boys coming to school with notes from doctors saying they were excused from playing contact sports. But pretty soon high schools all over China were having trouble finding enough willing young men to make up a football team.