Gwynne Dyer

It was the moral equivalent of a fart in a hurricane. The ‘hurricane’ was the explosion of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991, which boosted 17 million tons of ...

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” wrote Sam Johnson 250 years ago, and the Israeli prime minister has just confirmed ...

By Gwynne Dyer Some lucky boys and girls are going to find micro-suicide drones in their stockings this Christmas! Get your orders in now! I was idly scanning the website ...

Nuclear fusion, the ‘holy grail’ that would finally end all the world’s energy problems, has been receding into the future at the rate of about one year per year ...

By Gwynne Dyer “We appear to be witnessing a dramatic and childlike scenario,” said Pope Francis in Bahrain on Friday. “In the garden of humanity, instead of cultivating our surroundings, ...

Elon Musk is that rarest of things, a benign sociopath, and therefore a person of considerable value to the world. He has just made a mistake that could ruin his ...

Israeli voters are indefatigable. The election on November 1 will be the fifth in just three-and-a-half years, and yet the turnout is still likely to be around 70 per cent. That’s ...

The reports about Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s impending comeback as Brazilian president verged on the ecstatic in the week before last Sunday’s vote. He was after ...

By Gwynne Dyer “The queen’s final act of service to the nation was to selflessly buy the economy one last fortnight,” said one tweet when all four wheels finally ...

Vladimir Putin’s desperation was plain in the emergency measures he declared last week: immediate mobilisation of at least 300,000 more troops, the sudden decision to use fake referendums to turn ...

There’s an election in Italy on Sunday, almost exactly 100 years after Benito Mussolini’s ‘blackshirts’ marched on Rome and brought the first fascist dictator to power. Giorgia Meloni, the ...

On Monday, about eleven million kilometres from Earth, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will make the first attempt to divert an asteroid from its orbit. But forget ...

Which would be worse: a global nuclear war with all buttons pressed, or real, self-conscious artificial intelligence that goes rogue? You know, the central theme of the ‘Terminator’ movies. An ...

I never thought I’d be writing a column in defence of Donald Trump, but a journalist has to go where the evidence leads. Over the years I have written ...

As a child, outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly said he wanted to be ‘King of the World’. He ended up in a somewhat humbler role, was rejected by ...

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 ...

Last Tuesday, on the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn India into a developed country within the next 25 years. If all goes well, that ...

It’s only one year since the fall of Kabul last August 15 and everybody in the countries that sent troops to Afghanistan has already forgotten about it (apart from journalists ...

Tunisia would seem to have everything going for it. Average salaries are the third highest in all of Africa’s fifty countries, just behind Morocco and South Africa. Literacy is 97 ...

About six weeks ago Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), warned that the attempt to revive the 2015 deal that restricted Iran’s ability to enrich ...

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked (in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’). “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” Sri Lanka is much the same. ...

Another 15 million people joined the Nato alliance on Tuesday. Finland and Sweden, formerly neutral countries but near to Russia, gave in to Turkish blackmail, and that cleared the way for ...

There was a rare moment of grace in Israeli politics last Monday, as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced they would dissolve their extraordinary coalition and ...

How would we know if the United States is deliberately starving Ukraine of weapons in order to force it into a compromise peace settlement that leaves some Ukrainian territory – maybe ...