Stories by Gwynne Dyer
Why COVID killed more English speakers
The ‘loose’ cultures on average had five times the infection rate of the ‘tight’ ones, and eight times the death rate.
This suggests that the pattern is getting stronger—and the latitudes where the loops are stalling include most of the major ‘breadbasket’ regions of the northern hemisphere. If we’re looking at a future of synchronized crop-killing droughts and heatwaves in those regions, world food production is in big trouble.
Now the UN is getting involved: the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said it will soon question the United Arab Emirates about Princess Latifa.
To people elsewhere, it sounds like a bunch of early 20th-century Englishmen in wing collars declaring that 'the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.'
So the first priority for the sane wing of the Republicans must be to provoke a split as soon as possible—and make sure that it looks like the Trumpites who are to blame. 
What happens now? Probably a new president and commander-in-chief to replace Min Aung Hlaing within weeks, and then another prolonged period of military rule. Foreign sanctions? Definitely. 
Real AI will arrive in some form in the not-too-distant future, but predicting its social and political impact is hard. As hard as it would have been for the Čapek brothers and their audience to foresee in 1921 what robo
This is not charity; it’s self-interest. So long as the virus is circulating widely in poorer countries, it constitutes an enormous reservoir in which new mutations will occur frequently.Author
Xi once declared that 'reunification' of Taiwan with the PRC is an 'inevitable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.' This makes about as much sense as saying that unification with Puerto Rico is
Alexei Navalny is probably not the man who will finally take Vladimir Putin down. What he is doing to great effect is mobilizing the tech-savvy young.
Mike Pompeo is setting slow-burning fires in plain sight, which is why a European foreign minister recently described him as a ‘political pyromaniac’—and this is his ‘scorched-earth’ policy.
The U.K. took brave and potentially momentous decision in announcing that the scheduled second shot of the vaccine would be postponed to 12 weeks after the first for everybody who hadn’t already had it.
American democracy will probably survive its current difficulties. Democracy as the default mode in the world certainly will.
There is the ‘military-industrial complex’ in every developed country, of course: millions of jobs and billions in profits. But that still depends on a perception of threat, even if the threat isn’t really there. 
The United States may be back soon, but the world could certainly use a second powerful advocate for democracy and the rule of law. Brexit may be giving us just that by freeing the EU to move on, and we should be gratefu
The investigative website Bellingcat tracked down the mobile phone numbers of eight members of the FSB team that poisoned Alexei Navalny (Russian secret police apparently can’t even afford burner phones).
Indian journalist Tavleen Singh may have been right when she wrote recently in the Indian Express: 'We seem in India to be regressing into a Hindu version of Pakistan.' After 73 years of democracy in India, that would be a very great pity.
The problem resides in the Arab world, where the political climate has only two seasons: brief springs and very long winters. It may not be an insoluble problem, but there’s certainly no solution in sight.
If the U.S. Supreme Court re-bans abortion, they will certainly unleash mass protests on a scale that the U.S. has not seen before, just like in Ireland and Poland.
Boris Johnson's dithering over whether to cave in to the European Union’s terms for a post-Brexit free trade deal. Most people reckon it’s his last face-saving show of defiance before he surrenders to the bitter truth.
Vegetarianism and veganism alone will not solve the problem because they still depend on growing crops on the land, and also because people are very conservative about diet.
Populist leaders across the West seem to believe that somehow or other their fates are tied to Trump’s. It shows in the growing recklessness of their behaviour, and in the frequency of their failures.
Here we are only less than two weeks later, and the federal government’s troops have already captured Mekelle, a city of half a million people that is Tigray’s capital.
The United States is the oldest democracy, but it’s a pretty primitive one. Consider the antique and ridiculous Electoral College, or the rudimentary social welfare system.
There is a long, dark winter still ahead of us, no doubt, but miracles may await us over the horizon. And we can now be sure that the light at the end of this particular tunnel is not an oncoming train.
Hong Kong’s relative freedom was always conditional and ultimately doomed (2047 at the latest), but this blundering collapse was premature and far from inevitable.
Why Armenia couldn’t exploit its diaspora more effectively is a mystery, but that’s the difference. The military defeat was the eventual, inevitable result of a long-running political failure.
In only a week, they’ve worked their way up from local clashes to airstrikes.
The great majority of Myanmar’s Buddhists share the army’s fear and hatred of Muslims, and rebuking the army for the genocide was the one way the Lady could lose the next election.
The Republicans are almost certain to keep their majority in the Senate, in which case they can block any new legislation the Democrats want to pass even if Biden does win the presidency. 
Now the Azeri refugees will go home and 150,000 Armenians will have to seek new homes in Armenia proper. None of it is fair, but that’s how it still works in much of the world. 
If you were young, had hair of a different colour or tattoos, and were in a flash car, you stood a statistically significant chance of having an unpleasant encounter with SARS.Politics This Morning
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