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Gwynne Dyer

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Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years; his articles are published in 45 countries. His book, "Climate Wars," deals with the geopolitical implications of climate change and has been translated into Japanese, French, Russian, Chinese and a number of other languages.

COMMENTARY

Feb 16, 2011

Good sense of the Arabs

They wouldn't do it for al-Qaida, but they finally did it for themselves.

COMMENTARY

Feb 11, 2011

Israel's post-Mubarak fear

LONDON — In his first public comment on the unfolding drama in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, worried aloud last week that the right analogy may be the Iranian revolution of 1979: "Our real fear is of a situation . . . which has already developed in several countries including...

COMMENTARY

Feb 5, 2011

The Arab world's '1989'?

LONDON — It was the Egyptian Army's statement that brought it all back: "To the great people of Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people . . . have not and will not use force against the Egyptian people." In other words, go ahead and overthrow President Hosni...

COMMENTARY

Jan 30, 2011

Vietnam delusion endures

LONDON — Communist party congresses are generally tedious events, and the 11th Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party (Jan. 12-17) was no exception. The changes in personnel at the top were decided by the elite inner circle of the party long before the congress opened, and the rhetoric was...

COMMENTARY

Jan 27, 2011

The nature of the next Mideast war

LONDON — The release by the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera of 16,000 leaked Palestinian documents covering the past 10 years of peace negotiations has driven a stake through the heart of the already moribund "peace process."

COMMENTARY

Jan 26, 2011

Why did Duvalier return to Haiti?

LONDON — A confidential 2006 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, made public by WikiLeaks, said the United States viewed the possible return of either of the two exiled Haitian ex-presidents, Jean-Bertrand Aristide or Jean-Claude Duvalier, as "unhelpful." But one of them, former president-for-life...

COMMENTARY

Jan 9, 2011

The vanishing two-state solution

LONDON — What does it mean when the United States, Britain, France and Spain upgrade the diplomatic status of the Palestinian delegations in their capitals, as they all did in the past year? When the number of countries recognizing Palestinian statehood now exceeds 100?

COMMENTARY

Jan 6, 2011

Crisis shows African Union's limits

LONDON — "It's not a bluff," said an adviser to Alassane Ouattara, the real winner in November's presidential election in Ivory Coast, who is now besieged in a hotel in Abidjan, the capital, under United Nations protection. "The (African Union) soldiers are coming much faster than anyone thinks."...

COMMENTARY

Dec 22, 2010

U.S. trapped in a civil war

LONDON — U.S. President Barack Obama seems to be working under a serious misapprehension. Releasing the White House's annual strategic review to the public on Dec. 16, he declared that U.S. policy in Afghanistan was "on track" to defeat al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Who told him that the United States...

COMMENTARY

Dec 15, 2010

The accusations against Julian Assange

LONDON — The U.S. government is doing all it can to silence the WikiLeaks organization, including starving it of funds by getting PayPal, Visa and MasterCard to freeze its accounts. But has it also persuaded the Swedes to accuse Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, of raping two women, in order...

COMMENTARY

Dec 12, 2010

Preparing the ground for the Egyptian heir

LONDON — Egyptian elections are always highly predictable affairs, but the second round of this year's parliamentary elections on Dec. 5, was completely pointless. The first round on Nov. 28 showed that the regime was going to suppress even the marginal role permitted to prodemocracy parties in...

COMMENTARY

Dec 9, 2010

No emissions deal at Cancun

LONDON — The U.N. climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, is nearing its end, and while the ending will not be as rancorous as last year's train wreck in Copenhagen, there will be no global deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions this year either. However, there is some hope for the longer run.

COMMENTARY

Dec 3, 2010

Penny for your WikiLeak

LONDON — The U.S. government, faced with the publication on the Internet of a quarter-million cables sent by U.S. embassies in recent years, has responded just as it did when WikiLeaks posted similar troves of secret messages about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the web earlier this year....

COMMENTARY

Nov 18, 2010

Release of Suu Kyi is no 'Mandela moment'

People love historical analogies, so it's easy to think of Aung San Suu Kyi's release from house arrest Nov. 13 as Burma's "Mandela moment." When Nelson Mandela was freed from 27 years of imprisonment in 1990, it marked the start of a process that saw the negotiated end of the apartheid regime and genuinely...

COMMENTARY

Nov 4, 2010

Biodiversity and small mercies

Sometimes we have to be grateful for small mercies. The deal on biodiversity that more than 190 countries agreed to in Nagoya last Friday was, as these things usually are, "a day late and a dollar short," but it's a lot better than nothing. It's even better than most people expected.

COMMENTARY

Oct 31, 2010

The West's Mideast obsession

LONDON — The media in the Middle East carry a lot of Middle Eastern stories, of course, but why do most of the other media in the world do the same?

COMMENTARY

Oct 27, 2010

Brace for the race to put bases on the moon

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has just released the full data on last year's mission to find out whether there are usable amounts of water on the moon, and the news is good. There is plenty of frozen water on the moon, plus frozen gases like methane, oxygen and hydrogen that would...

COMMENTARY

Oct 14, 2010

Netanyahu is a deal-breaker, not a racist

"With this law Israel buys an exit ticket from the family of nations," wrote Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea last week in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "The proposed loyalty law . . . is really racist. It obliges non-Jews to declare that they would be loyal to the Jewish state but exempts Jews from...

COMMENTARY

Oct 10, 2010

Less tolerance forecast in the Netherlands?

LONDON — If Gert Wilders were some underemployed bigot ranting in a pub, you'd just move away from him. He calls the Islamic veil a "head rag" and says it should be taxed for "polluting" the Dutch landscape. He condemns Islam as "the sick ideology of Allah and Mohammed" and the Quran as "the Mein...

COMMENTARY

Oct 6, 2010

Pirates and private navies

The good news is that something is finally going to be done about the pirates who infest the Somali coast and raid far out into the Indian Ocean. A group of London-based insurance companies led by the Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group (JLT) is planning to create a private navy to protect commercial shipping...

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Exploring Japanese culturevia Tohoku’s festivals

Exploring Japanese culturevia Tohoku’s festivals

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