• OPINION

  Only the poor end up dying screaming

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/01/2018

  » If you had a million dollars to spend (but not on yourself), where would it do the most good? Well, the cost to cover morphine or a morphine-equivalent pain relief treatment for all the sick children younger than 15 years who are in really serious pain in low-income countries would be just $1 million (33.4 million baht) per year. About half of them of those children are going to die, but with morphine at least they wouldn't die screaming.

• OPINION

  What shall we do with climate refugees?

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 29/08/2022

  » You wait ages for the bus, and then three come along at once. Books are a bit like that, too, although in this case it's only a pair of them, both tackling the question of what to do about all the "climate refugees". (The United Nations' International Organization for Migration estimates that 1.5 billion people may be forced to move in the next thirty years alone.)

• OPINION

  War narrative a fable not fit for the times

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/05/2022

  » We were talking recently about how clever the Ukrainians had been to call the invading Russian troops "Orcs" even before all the atrocities in the Russian-occupied towns around Kyiv came to light. Then Tina said: "If Putin's troops are Orcs, then he must be Sauron."

• OPINION

  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?

• OPINION

  Are we ready for the first real automatons?

  Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/01/2021

  » They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. The coronavirus pandemic got in the way of that, and it will now only be available free online late next month. Kind of symbolic, really: the future is quite different than what they expected.

• OPINION

  A tale of two bombs -- in Manchester and Bangkok

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/05/2017

  » There were two bombs on Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber named Salman Abedi and claimed by the Islamic State (IS). The other was in Thailand, and injured 22 people at a military-linked hospital in Bangkok; nobody has claimed responsibility yet. But what happened afterwards was very different.

• OPINION

  China and its repression of the Uighurs

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/08/2018

  » Two weeks ago, Prof Gay McDougall, co-chair of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, alleged that up to a million people belonging to the Uighur and other Muslim minority groups in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang have been detained in concentration camps to be "re-educated" about religion.

• OPINION

  Silly buggers: Russia, US play chicken

  News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/06/2017

  » I don't remember which navy I was in when I first heard the term "silly buggers", but the meaning was clear. It included some sensible exercises like "man overboard" drills, but the heart and soul of the game was high-speed manoeuvres by ships travelling in close company. These sometimes got quite exciting, because ships don't have brakes.

• OPINION

  Democracy survives crucial test in Senegal

  Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/04/2024

  » The crisis in Senegal, the one country in West Africa that has never had a military coup, has passed. Few people outside Africa were paying close attention to it, but I'm sure you will be pleased to know that democracy has survived.

• OPINION

  South Korea: Very competitive and childless

  Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 05/03/2024

  » There are enough people to go around: eight billion now, compared to two billion less than a hundred years ago. Fifty-one million in South Korea, compared to only twelve million a hundred years ago. So why are South Koreans obsessed about their low birth rate?

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