Stories by Gwynne Dyer
Scoring China’s coronavirus response
The Chinese doctors will do their duty, as always, but it would be nice if China had its political act a bit more together before then.
Even if we finally start taking serious measures against global warming now, a lot of people are going to die from the damage that has already been done: millions at least, and possibly a great many more than that.
Russians sometimes call themselves 'Italians of the North,' and they don’t mean it in a good way. So he wants a strong state, run with a firm hand, even after he has retired, which means that a clear succession.
The deadline between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan passed on Jan. 15. Now the dispute goes to the three heads of government to agree on a mediator—and if they can’t agree, maybe we’ll see our first real 'water war.'
All these shoot-downs are fundamentally a political and military phenomenon, not a technical malfunction or mere human error. 
Donald Trump is belatedly frightened by the potential consequences of his impulsive order to kill Qassem Soleimani, and he’s trying to threaten his way out of an open U.S.-Iran war.
Stalin was a complete idiot to trust Hitler, but went on supplying Germany with oil and various other scarce goods until the day before Germany invaded Russia in June 1941. It’s not a story that reflects well on Russia, so it’s no wonder that Putin keeps trying to change the narrative.
The best that can be said about COP25 is that they stopped a concerted attempt by the biggest emitters, led by Brazil and Australia, to gut the proposed rules for a global carbon market.Author
The relationship will stay very cool, because Russian popular opinion would never allow Putin to hand back Crimea.
It has now become clear that Saudi Arabia is never going to win. 
The alleged Russian threat is still the glue that holds the alliance together, but French President Emmanuel Macron doesn’t believe in that. 
Which way will it go? Impossible to say, but a major obstacle to a negotiated outcome is that the protesters have deliberately avoided having recognized leaders.
Governments have been making these promises since the early 1990s, and they are never kept because the political pressures are far stronger from those who profit in the present.
Maybe the fossil fuel industries can at least deflect and divert the pressure for effective action on climate change on to targets that do not directly threaten the sales of their products.
Today’s ‘dog bites man’ story is the White House announcement that the United States no longer views Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank as ‘inconsistent with international law.’
This latest and biggest outburst of defiance in the streets is at least partly due to the unilateral trade sanctions imposed on Iran last year by the Trump administration.
Labour sought to redistribute the wealth, the Conservatives tried to defend the existing order, and most people made their choices according to their position in the economic pyramid.
The fall of the Berlin Wall did not lead automatically to the benign reunification of Germany. It created the opportunity for positive change, but making it happen took clear thinking and hard political work.
Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia went well, because Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman has been seeking friends elsewhere after Donald Trump did nothing in response to the recent drone attacks.
The tactics of today's protests have moved on from the strict nonviolence that characterized would-be democratic revolutions from the mid-1980s until the early days of the Arab Spring nine years ago.
So far, it has been almost entirely non-violent, but the traditional pro-independence civil society groups, the Catalan National Assembly and Omnium Cultural, are now being outflanked by Tsunami Democratic.
People have been nibbling around the fringes of the fuel problem, but biofuel won’t cut it: it would take an area the size of Australia to grow the plants needed as feedstock for the fuel that aviation industry consumes.
If you are not fond of populism, pray that populists elsewhere do not discover Poland’s secret. They do need to be culturally conservative, because they are always blood-and-soil nationalists.
We must also consider the possibility that the whole thing has been a charade, masterminded by the Russians, to get the Americans out of Syria and restore Syrian government control over all of eastern Syria. 
The country still depends on oil for its income, but it is no longer ‘oil-rich’. There is little prospect for a radical improvement in the lives of those angry young men in the streets of Baghdad.
Erdogan’s strategy is quite clear. He says he is going to create a 'safe zone' in northern Syria by driving the 'Kurdish terrorists' out.If Boris Johnson could engineer an emergency, he could ignore the 'surrender bill' (as he calls it) that forces him to seek an extension rather than crash out on Oct. 31.
Beijing's relative restraint is evidence of how worried it is.
Air forces are run by pilots, and they like to fly planes, but what happened in Saudi Arabia two weeks ago will finally give the civilian authorities arguments that the aviators cannot resist or ignore.
Donald Trump doesn’t want a full-scale war with Iran, and neither does Saudi Arabia. It probably won’t happen.Politics This Morning
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