Showing 1-10 of 357 results
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After Erdogan's win, Turkey inches closer to civil war
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/11/2015
» "You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time...", begins Abraham Lincoln's aphorism about democracy -- but in a multi-party democratic system, that is usually enough. In a parliamentary system like Turkey's, 49% of the popular vote gives you a comfortable majority of seats, and so Recep Tayyib Erdogan will rule Turkey for another four years. If the country lasts that long.
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Why Turkey shot down the Russian plane in a heartbeat
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 27/11/2015
» The key fact is that the Russian plane, by Turkey's own admission, was in Turkish airspace for precisely seventeen 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 backed them, as loyal allies must.
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Terror is our biggest fear, but not our biggest threat
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 08/12/2015
» On Sunday President Barack Obama spoke about a mass shooting in the United States for the 17th time in the past seven years. (There have actually been 335 mass shootings in the US already this year, but he only does the big ones.) But this time Mr Obama spoke from the Oval Office.
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Climate pact underestimates risk
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/12/2015
» The climate deal that almost 200 countries agreed to in Paris on Saturday was far better than most insiders dared to hope even one month ago.
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Five years on from Arab Spring, democracy can still work
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/01/2016
» Five years ago this month, the "Arab Spring" got under way with the non-violent overthrow of Tunisia's long-ruling dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. He dared not order the army to open fire on the demonstrators (because it might not obey), and eventually he flew off off to Saudi Arabia to seek asylum.
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Closing borders and bidding the Schengen zone goodbye
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/02/2016
» 'Europe has forgotten that history is fundamentally tragic," said Manuel Valls, the French prime minister. "If Europe can't protect its own borders, it's the very idea of Europe that could be thrown into doubt. It could disappear -- not Europe itself, not our values, but the European project, the concept we have of Europe, that the founding fathers had of Europe."
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North Korea's real nuclear deterrent
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/02/2016
» Here we go again. North Korea launched a ballistic missile of intercontinental range on Sunday (saying it was just putting up a satellite) only weeks after it carried out its fourth nuclear weapons test (which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb). The United Nations Security Council strongly condemned it, and even the People's Republic of China, North Korea's only ally, expressed its "regret" at what the country had done.
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The triumph and tragedy of Egypt
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 15/02/2016
» Exactly five years after Egypt's democratic revolution triumphed, the country is once more ruled by a military office. General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power in July 2013, and he is even nastier than his predecessors.
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Saudi Arabia's risky gamble is driving the oil downturn
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/02/2016
» ‘The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” said John Maynard Keynes (or maybe it wasn’t him, but no matter). At any rate, that was the eternal verity the Saudi Arabians were counting on when they decided to let oil production rip — and the oil price collapse — in late 2014.
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British petulance is shaping European Union's future
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 24/02/2016
» What would you call a country that called for "a structure under which [Europe] can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom ... a kind of United States of Europe" at the end of the Second World War (Winston Churchill, 1946), but refused to join that structure when its European neighbours actually began building it (European Economic Community, or EEC, 1957)?
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