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MercoPress, en Español

Montevideo, November 21st 2024 - 18:24 UTC

Tag: Gwynne Dyer

  • Friday, September 13th 2024 - 07:37 UTC

    Why independence movements fail in French Overseas Territories

    Nine people were killed, a state of emergency was declared, French President Emmanuel Macron paid an emergency visit — and nothing much happened.

    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).

  • Friday, June 28th 2024 - 23:41 UTC

    The whistleblowers a free, well informed world most needs

    Julian Assange’s enormous dump of documents in 2010 concentrated on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

    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.

  • Saturday, October 14th 2023 - 06:35 UTC

    The Hamas trap; the Arab world has abandoned Palestinians to their fate

    The “mighty vengeance” that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises to rain down on the Gaza Strip is exactly what Hamas actually wants, the mightier the better

    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.”

  • Wednesday, October 11th 2023 - 19:52 UTC

    Clock is ticking for the Big Meat “sunset industry”

    The techs and the bosses of “Big Meat” — Tyson Foods and Cargill (USA), JBS and BRF (Brazil), Vion Food Group (Netherlands) and the WH Group (China) — know exactly what the future holds

    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.

  • Monday, August 16th 2021 - 06:45 UTC

    Afghanistan: Western armies always lose guerilla wars in the “Third World,” but it never really matters.

    The final weeks in Vietnam before the helicopters started plucking Americans from the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon in 1975.

    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.

  • Saturday, January 9th 2021 - 23:15 UTC

    UK leaves EU: 48% of turkeys did not vote for Christmas

    Having had four years to think it over, most British now think it was a mistake ― by a 48-39 majority, according to a YouGov poll last October.

    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.

  • Friday, January 3rd 2020 - 09:19 UTC

    Boris Johnson and English nationalism victory in the Brexit election: death knell for UK?

    The United Kingdom will continue to be called that for several years, but this election has sounded its death knell

    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.

  • Thursday, November 14th 2019 - 18:30 UTC

    As populism advances, beware of the Polish secret

    In the recent Polish election, the populist Law and Justice Party won 43.6% of the vote in an election that saw the biggest turnout since fall of Communism in 1989

    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.)

  • Thursday, July 25th 2019 - 08:09 UTC

    Boris, the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

    Johnson wouldn’t be in Downing Street today if there had not been an election in Britain two months ago

    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.

  • Saturday, July 6th 2019 - 12:50 UTC

    Brexit and Conservative nationalism: fantasy collides with reality next October

    Johnson and Hunt both vow to junk May’s deal and renegotiate a better one, but that truly is infeasible

    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.

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