Showing 211 - 220 of 339
So far, so good as it's all quiet on the climate front
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 17/11/2017
» 'Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit," said Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, but President Donald J Trump did exactly that. He sent a team of American diplomats and energy executives to the annual world climate summit, being held this year in Bonn, Germany, to extol the wonders of "clean" coal.
Future looks bleak for Grace Mugabe
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/11/2017
» 'Someone, anyone, with close links, please make sure Uncle Bob reads the correct speech ... Old man reads the 2013 inauguration speech and we're in kak for another five years," tweeted Mubaiwa Bandambira just before Zimbabwe's beleaguered president, Robert Mugabe, went on television with what was supposed to be his resignation speech. After all, Mr Mugabe is 93 years old, and he has read the wrong speech before.
Looking back at the October Revolution
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 02/11/2017
» China Mieville, a novelist I much admire, has published a history of the "October Revolution" to mark its hundredth anniversary (which is actually on Nov 7, since the Russians were still using the Julian calendar in 1917). It had an unusual effect on me. It made me question whether I was right about the utter futility of that revolution.
Silent majority in Catalonia need to find their voice
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 31/10/2017
» It's been going on for a while. "Recently in Catalonia we have been living through a kind of 'soft' totalitarianism... the illusion of unanimity created by the fear of expressing dissent," wrote best-selling Catalan author Javier Cercas in the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2014. Those who didn't want independence kept their heads down and their mouths shut, in other words.
Adult supervision a tricky business at the White House
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/10/2017
» Here's the scenario. Late one evening Donald Trump is watching Fox News and a report comes on that North Korea is planning to launch a missile that can reach the United States. (Kim Jong-un's regime has said it is going to do that one of these days -- but only as a test flight landing in the ocean somewhere, not as an attack.)
Trump won't be able to stop Iran nukes if treaty axed
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/10/2017
» 'One orb to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
Balfour Declaration and 100 years of bloody conflict
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 28/10/2017
» One hundred years ago next week, in the midst of WWI, the British government sent a letter known as the Balfour Declaration that led, three decades later, to the creation of the state of Israel.
Germany and the rise of the right
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 28/09/2017
» Angela Merkel's slogan in her campaign for a fourth term as chancellor was terminally bland and smug -- "For a Germany in which we live well and love living" -- but it did the job, sort of. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is back as the largest party, so Ms Merkel gets to form the next coalition government. But the neo-fascists are now in the Bundestag (parliament) too, for the first time since the collapse of Nazi Germany.
Puigdemont's tactics mostly work in Catalonia vote
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 03/10/2017
» Catalan nationalist leader Carles Puigdemont got most of what he wanted out of the chaotic pseudo-referendum on Sunday: 761 people injured by the Spanish police trying to block it.
Climate change creeps up on us all
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/09/2017
» At least a decade ago, a retired general at the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies said to me that the rich countries will never take climate change seriously until some very big and apparently climate-related disaster happens in a first-world country. Hurricane Harvey was not that disaster.