By Gwynne Dyer - With the sole exception of the 50 people on Pitcairn Island, the United Kingdom (once known as the British Empire) liquidated its holdings in the Pacific Ocean long ago. France, by contrast, has a half million citizens in the Pacific (and another 2 million living in other bits of its former empire on islands in all the world’s major oceans).
By Gwynne Dyer - Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is a free man at last after spending almost all of the past 14 years in jail or other forms of confinement. He has just arrived home in Australia to be greeted by his family, including two young sons who have never seen him except in Belmarsh Prison in London. But it is the bad guys who won.
By Gwynne Dyer - If you are wondering why Hamas launched its all-out assault on Israel on Saturday, I wrote it right here last week. “The Arab world has basically abandoned the Palestinians to their fate, whatever that may be. Six Arab countries have established diplomatic ties with Israel and several more, including Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of doing so.”
By Gwynne Dyer -The French government has just published a decree banning the use of terms like “steak,” “spare ribs” and “ham” on plant-based foods. It’s not that the French are so stupid that they don’t know which is meat from dead cattle and which is “plant-based steak,” a label that has been used in French supermarkets for at least 40 years.
By Gwynne Dyer - “I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban),” declared Ashraf Ghani, the ex-president of Afghanistan before fleeing. “We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations at the table or break their knees on the battlefield.” Good luck with that, Ashraf.
By Gwynne Dyer - Blaming the victims is never a good look. As Britain finally leaves the European Union, 1,651 days after the Brexit referendum of 2016, we should try to remember that 48% of the turkeys didn't vote for Christmas.
By Gwynne Dyer – Down on the turkey farm, the Scottish and Irish birds noticed the smiling man was holding a hatchet behind his back and hid. The Welsh turkeys looked confused and huddled together squawking. But the English turkeys marched bravely up to the chopping block, confident this would be a Christmas to remember.
By Gwynne Dyer – There is a tension at the heart of populist political parties that may ultimately lead most of them to electoral defeat. They depend heavily on the votes of the old, the poor and the poorly educated — “I love the poorly educated,” as Donald Trump once put it — but they are also right-wing parties that do not like what they call “socialism.” (Other people call it the welfare state.)
By Gwynne Dyer - It has been suggested that Boris Johnson (who becomes the prime minister of the United Kingdom, UK) is what you would get if Donald Trump had been educated at Eton and Oxford. Maybe, although there is a great gulf between Trump’s bombastic self-promotion and Johnson’s self-deprecating, rather shambolic persona.
By Gwynne Dyer - Oscar Wilde described fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Brexit may be similarly defined as the unhinged in pursuit of the infeasible.