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Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer is a historian and independent journalist who has published several books.
Hamas’ leaders desperately want the de facto veto Palestinians once had on concessions other Arabs make to Israel, and this is the only way they might get it. Political considerations on the part of Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah all threaten to make an already bloody state of affairs even more dangerous.
During WWII, 130,00 people were employed and US$23 billion spent in the race to build an atomic bomb. We should be pouring at least as many resources into slowing down the break-up of glaciers and rise in sea levels, but we can’t seem to garner the same sense of urgency.
Using ‘referendums’ to turn conquered regions into ‘Russian territory’, Putin can say any Ukrainian attempt to recapture them is an attack on Russia. Perhaps the Russian president could even persuade his generals to deploy one nuke, but the war is still unlikely to end well for him.
Humanity tends to lack a long-term perspective because there has been little in our evolutionary history that rewards such thinking. But long-term strategies can help avert existential threats we create ourselves, such as climate change, lab-engineered viruses and rogue AI.
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As well as passing new laws targeting groups that tend to vote Democratic, Republican-run states are also going after the officials who run the election machinery and keep the system fair.
The WikiLeaks founder should not have sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012. The Obama administration then had no intention of extraditing him. Now Assange is facing a US government led by the wildly inconsistent Trump.
Trump’s targeting of manufacturing that moved offshore ignores the fact that more jobs were lost to automation, while Democrats seem unsure how to deal with the problem.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said something cryptic last Friday, shortly after the Israelis began their latest round of attacks on the Gaza Strip.
The most important hamburger in history was cooked - but only half-eaten - in London on Monday. It was grown in a lab, not cut from a cow, and it tasted - well, not quite good enough to fool the experts, but then they forgot the ketchup, mustard, cheese, onion, bacon, tomato and lettuce. Not to mention the fries.
Two massacres committed by the Egyptian army in one week. At least 130 people killed in the streets of Cairo for protesting against the military coup. It is worse than a crime (as the French diplomat Talleyrand remarked when Napoleon ordered a particularly counterproductive execution). It is a mistake.
