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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 / World
Jul 25, 2001
Why Japan won't back down on whaling
LONDON -- "They do not allow them free for a moment -- not even at cocktail parties," said Atherton Martin, former Environment and Fisheries Minister of Dominica, describing how the Japanese ride herd on the representatives of countries whose votes they have bought at International Whaling Commission...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 20, 2001
Genoa: the recession summit
LONDON — Only a dozen streets from Genoa's Ducal Palace, the protesters will be assaulting the barricades this weekend like medieval siege engineers. Inside the palace, the eight men who rule the world's richest economies — well, seven of the world's richest economies plus Russia, which is there...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 19, 2001
Washington's 'satellites' scupper Kyoto
LONDON -- "If nothing moves forward in Bonn then we will lose momentum and the process will sink," said Olivier Deleuze, the energy minister of Belgium, which holds the European Union's rotating presidency at the moment.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2001
U.S. isn't isolationist, it's just isolated
LONDON -- There are a few countries that line up with the United States in opposing the creation of an international criminal court -- Cuba, China, Iraq, and Libya -- but no other respectable, democratic countries oppose it.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 2, 2001
French success has economists wondering
LONDON -- For Americans who work long hours, get only two weeks holiday a year, and live under a system that defines job security as a socialist vice, the apparent success of the French experiment is a puzzle and an affront.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 18, 2001
The price of the 'New World blitzkrieg'
LONDON -- "The survivors are scraps," says evolutionary biologist Dr. John Alroy about the large mammal species that remain in North America after the wave of extinctions that followed the arrival of the first humans less than 14,000 years ago. And there is no longer any question about why all the rest...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 7, 2001
Can democracy live in the Muslim Mideast?
LONDON -- "No stable system of government can be established unless it is popular." It would be an unremarkable statement in most parts of the world, but in Iran it is a subversive remark faxed by a man who has been under house arrest since 1997. The fact that he is Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, one...
COMMENTARY / World
May 12, 2001
Apologizing for a slight case of genocide
LONDON -- "Not one word of apology has been heard from your lips about the Fourth Crusade," said Archbishop Christodoulos in a hectoring tone, as Pope John Paul II sat with the head of the Greek Orthodox Church last Friday just hours after his arrival in Athens. It is, after all, the age of apologizing...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 14, 2001
Russia's dark clouds have silver linings
LONDON -- Forty years ago Thursday, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go into space. Last month, the decrepit space station Mir plunged back into the atmosphere, incinerating among other things the photograph of a youthful, happy Gagarin (he died in a plane crash in 1968) that had hung on...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 4, 2001
The second intifada at a turning point
Over 350 Palestinians dead, Israeli army blockades wherever they turn, growing poverty and nothing to show for it all: Six months into the second intifada, the Palestinian facade of unity is crumbling, and leader Yasser Arafat's authority, never very impressive, is getting weaker by the day.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 24, 2001
NATO's weakness threatens Macedonia
LONDON -- Ethnic peace has withstood an entire week of shooting around the Macedonian city of Tetovo, despite the efforts of ethnic Albanian guerrillas based in neighboring Kosovo to topple the small Balkan republic into civil war. Another week of fighting would probably do the trick, however -- so it...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 19, 2001
An African win in the war against AIDS
LONDON -- Half of all teenage boys in South Africa will eventually die of AIDS, predicted a United Nations report last year. "The world has never before experienced death rates of this magnitude across young adults of both sexes across all social strata," it added -- and noted that 70 percent of all...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 17, 2001
Taliban fanaticism is not typical of Islam
LONDON -- The problem is that the world is actually a very provincial place. Most people in the non-Muslim parts of the world have never been in any Muslim country, so if Muslims anywhere in the world do something really stupid, they will readily believe that those actions are typical of Islam -- and...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 3, 2001
Tightening the noose on war criminals
LONDON -- For years, former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic lived openly in Belgrade at 119 Vlagoja Parovica Street. He treated with utter contempt his indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia for directing the slaughter of 7,045 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July,...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 1, 2001
The spy game: high stakes, low payoffs
LONDON -- It's an impressive list: CIA official Aldrich Ames jailed for life in 1994 for spying for Moscow; CIA agent Harold Nicholson jailed for 23 years in 1997 for the same offense; FBI employee Earl Pitts sentenced to 27 years later the same year for passing information to Moscow; U.S. Army Col....
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 3, 2001
Afghanistan and the gods of little things
God's preferences on dietary matters are well-known: no pork for Jews or Muslims, no beef for Hindus, and no saturated fats or refined sugar for the Western upper-middle class. But this is the first time he has taken such a strong line on haircuts.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 11, 2001
China's 'democratic' option
LONDON -- The recently released details of the secret debate among China's leaders before they crushed the prodemocracy protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 don't just tell us about China's past. They also tell us a lot about its present, and even about its likely future.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 7, 2001
Corruption trials show justice is working
LONDON -- The impeachment trial of President Joseph "Erap" Estrada resumed in the Philippines Senate on Jan. 2, with further revelations promised by the prosecution and "even more explosive" evidence promised by the defense. Estrada is accused of bribery, betrayal of public trust, violation of the constitution,...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 27, 2000
Signs of hope in Kashmir
LONDON -- Eleven years of killing, over 50,000 dead, and the highest ratio of soldiers to civilians in the world, with a nuclear war between India and Pakistan as the payoff if things get out of hand: The conflict in Kashmir dwarfs every other global confrontation in its potential for harm. But the prospects...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 9, 2000
Refuges are running out for Pinochet
LONDON -- The freedom to murder your fellow citizens with impunity used to be what made up for the long hours and all the paperwork. Some people simply wouldn't have taken the job of president without it, and Augusto Pinochet was one of them. If somebody had told the former Chilean dictator that he would...

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