Showing 281-290 of 290 results
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China: Another Chairman Mao?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/03/2016
» Opening the National People's Congress in Beijing last week, Prime Minister Li Keqiang set China's growth target for the coming year at 6.5-7%, the lowest in decades. Only two years ago, he said that 7% was the lowest acceptable growth rate, but he has had to eat his words. He really isn't in charge of very much any more.
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Havana social call for Obama family
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 22/03/2016
» A British journalist compared the huge American delegation (800-1,200 people) that is accompanying US President Barack Obama on his first visit to Havana to Japanese soldiers stumbling out of the jungle to discover that the war ended a generation ago. And the Rolling Stones, who are staging a free concert for half a million people in the Cuban capital on Friday, explained that Mr Obama was their opening act.
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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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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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Retaliation would fulfil the terrorists' strategy
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 16/11/2015
» As always when there is a major terrorist attack on the West, the right question to ask after the slaughter in Paris is: what were the strategic aims behind it? This requires getting your head around the concept that terrorists have rational strategies, but once you have done that the motives behind the attacks are easy to figure out. It also becomes clear that the motives have changed.
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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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West's reproach of Russian realism reeks of hypocrisy
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/10/2015
» It's a week since the Russians began their air strikes in Syria, and the countries that have already been bombing there for over a year -- the United States and some other Nato countries -- are working themselves up into a rage about it. The Russians are not bombing the right people, they are killing civilians, they are reckless, dangerous, and just plain evil.
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