Showing 31 - 40 of 114
Chagos: a 50-year-old UK-US crime
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/02/2022
» 'The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours.... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls," wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes was taking shape in 1966. "We must surely be very tough about this."
Hypersonic missiles are a needless complication
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 13/11/2021
» 'I saw in some of the newspapers they used the term 'Sputnik moment'," said General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I don't know if it's quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it's very close to that. It's a very significant technological event that occurred."
COP26: Mixed bag of hope, despair
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/11/2021
» It's not too early to assess the success or failure of COP26, the climate summit that began in Glasgow on Oct 31. The first week, while the heads of state are there, is when all the big promises are announced; the second week is devoted to haggling over the details of the deals. So we already know that it hasn't been an absolute failure.
Donkeys finally twig to climate change message
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/07/2021
» Zeitgeist is a slippery word. At best it's just a fancy German way of saying "the spirit of the times"; at worst it is only pretentious noise. So maybe we should say "inflection point" instead. I think we are passing through an inflection point.
Killer 'Wave-7' heat getting far more common
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/07/2021
» First the "heat dome", with temperatures in the mid-to-high forties Celsius in many parts of western North America for up to a week (49.6°C in Lytton, British Columbia). Then, when the forests were tinder-dry, came the wildfires (which wiped Lytton out). From northern California to northern British Columbia, the records were being broken every day.
When 'mowing the grass' will no longer do
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/05/2021
» 'We didn't want this conflict, but now that it's started it has to end with a sustained period of quiet," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "That can only be achieved by Israel taking out Hamas -- their military structure, their command and control." Or, as the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) would put it, by "mowing the grass".
Objective allies: Netanyahu and Hamas militants
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/05/2021
» 'Objective allies' generally don't even talk to each other. They don't have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they want by acting together in certain ways.
Shipping is worse than aviation
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/03/2021
» 'We're waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we've got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts," said Steve Parks of Seaport Freight Services in England, who is awaiting twenty of the 18,300 containers aboard the Ever Given. Which of those things cannot be sourced from somewhere closer than Asia?
Syria's suffered enough: End the sanctions
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/03/2021
» The Syrian civil war is 10 years old this week, and it's time to stop it. At least half a million Syrians are dead, a quarter of the pre-war population are refugees abroad, and another quarter are refugees inside Syria. Thirty percent of the country's housing stock is destroyed or badly damaged -- and we have known who won the war for at least four years now.
The Sheikh of Dubai and his two daughters
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/02/2021
» Dubai can be amusing, in a voyeuristic way, for a week or two. The tallest building in the world and the mall with the shark tank, but it's the people, really.