Gwynne Dyer

In the 80 hours between Wednesday, January 15, when the Gaza ceasefire agreement was announced, and Sunday, January 19, when it went into effect, Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip killed 123 Palestinians ...

Turning yourself from a democratically elected president into a dictator is a tricky operation, and most people who try it fail. It’s called a ‘self-coup’, from the Spanish ‘auto-golpe’, ...

New Year is when we do the accounts for the year, and the bad news always gets top billing: how many wars are going on, how big were the natural ...

Six months ago, at the end of Iran’s presidential election, I finished an article by speculating that the long-lived theocratic dictatorship in Iran may be a lot closer to ...

They’re still celebrating the miraculous fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, and the killing has stopped in Syria except for parts of the north, east and south. So ...

Botswana’s elections have always been seen as a model for Africa, but the one last week has a somewhat wider relevance. The way its politicians handled victory and defeat ...

If you believe the British government (which you should never do), a new agreement will bring justice for the people of the Chagos Islands, who have lived in exile for ...

Donald Trump knows that he could lose the US election in two weeks’ time and he thinks that he knows why. “You have one issue, you have the issue of ...

Elon Musk’s ‘Starship’ project did something spectacular this week. The 160-tonne booster landed safely in the arms (or rather, the ‘chopsticks’) of a rocket-catching device that will soon allow ...

Two weeks ago Iran, in response to Israel’s assassinations of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas, its most important allies in the Arab world, fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. ...

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has launched his invasion of Lebanon. As usual in the opening stages of Israeli incursions into that fragile country, the signs and portents look ...

A bit behind the curve (it was first posted last April), I have stumbled across ‘The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’. It is a brave attempt by a coalition ...

Six Jewish hostages were murdered by Hamas last week just before the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) reached them, and a controversy has erupted in Israel about whether Prime Minister Benjamin ...

Fortress America and Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) are just starting to take shape; bare outlines of what they will have grown into ten years from now. But the trend is ...

Elon Musk is heading for a crash. It’s only a matter of time before one or another of his random enthusiasms brings him down. But if I had the ...

When you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed. “By August, if ...

It really doesn’t matter whether Joe Biden is in peak condition intellectually during a second term as president. He did some useful things in his first term, but his ...

 “I have heard that people’s zeal and interest is higher than in the first round [of Iran’s presidential election],” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian TV just ...

Nothing else in France looks like the 1930s, so why should fascism? There really is a fascist movement in France, although it avoids torch-lit marches and jackboots. It has even ...

There is one thing almost all populist nationalists agree on: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the continuing carnage there was the fault of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. ...

Gaza, IDF, Hamas, Netanyahu, famine, terrorism, genocide, and on and on: the loud, incessant clatter of local issues and tactical moves almost drowns out the low, grinding noise as the ...

Scarcely a week passes without some media pundit or attention-seeking historian warning that a Great War is nigh. As always, there are enough signs and portents around to make that ...

It was technology that got us into this global climate crisis, and it will be technology that gets us out of it. Specifically, technology that lets us go on living ...

“Why did he do it? We were all told it would be the autumn and we were hoping by then we could turn things around. It is very perplexing,” said ...