LOCAL Gwynne Dyer YOU CAN TRUST.
On a path to a new Ireland?
Bertie Ahern, who was the taoiseach (prime minister) of the Irish Republic from 1997 to 2008, was a brilliant machine politician, not a nationalist or…
Is the ‘devil virus’ a ‘black swan’?
China officially went back to work on Monday, after an extended two-week Lunar New Year holiday, while the authorities struggled to get the spread of…
Overstepping Erdogan vs. the world
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not an ‘Islamist,’ in the extreme sense of the word. He doesn’t wear a suicide vest, he doesn’t behead…
A failing grade for coronavirus
In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is that it can respond very fast. The bad thing is that it won’t respond at…
Putin the immortal? Probably not
Five years ago somebody posted photographs on the internet showing a man who looked a lot like Vladimir Putin in photographs from 1920 and 1941.…
Downed planes are collateral damage
One of the main causes of death for airline passengers in recent decades is being shot down by somebody’s military. Not the very biggest, of…
Iran likely to play the long game
If the Iranians played the game the same way that Donald Trump does, then their revenge for the American assassination of Iran’s leading general, Qassem…
Putting the hype in hypersonic missiles
Hypersonic missiles are not a terrifying new weapon. They are just another cog in the terrifying but remarkably stable old strategy called nuclear deterrence. “The…
Deadlock at Madrid, Aussie firestorms
“The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” warned UN secretary general António Guterres as the 25th climate summit (COP25) opened in…
English turkeys vote for Christmas
Down on the turkey farm, the Scottish and Irish birds noticed that the smiling man in the festive costume was holding a hatchet behind his…
