It's too bad that a figure as divisive as Thaksin was the first to try to open Thai politics up to the concerns of the poor, but a less flamboyant and abrasive politician would probably never have tried.

A thousand stories have been written about the latest category three storm for every one that is written about what is happening in the Arctic, where the loss of ice cover may surpass last year's record low.

it would be a perfectly rational (if utterly immoral) strategy if the Bush administration were trying to boost John McCain's chances in November by persuading the American public that it faces a great threat by starting a new Cold War.

Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Barack Obama's pick for running mate, has never met an international problem that he didn't think the U.S. should help to solve.

Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Barack Obama's pick for running mate, has never met an international problem that he didn't think the U.S. should help to solve.

The Russians are only pretending to be worried about the missile defence system in Poland; they and the Americans know it doesn't work, but they play along to maintain their military might elsewhere.

NATO survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and expanded to take in all of its former satellite states of Eastern Europe. But the debacle in Georgia and U.S. pressure over membership could break the organization.

With Russian troops probably out of Georgia within a week and the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili likely gone by the end of the year, it should leave a certain chill in the air but not global conflagration.

There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn't strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend.

Now that Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has resigned amid corruption charges, what happens next is hard to predict. And what hangs in the balance is no less than the future of Israel.

The terrorist attack that claimed 16 lives in western China on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games revealed potential weaknesses in the 100,000-strong force being used to ensure security in Beijing.

The economics team says the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in the early 2040s, unless climate change puts a dent in its progress.

The Serbian authorities knew where Karadzic was all along, and were actually protecting him from the agents of the international court, says Gwynne Dyer.

All the opposition groups in Darfur celebrated when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced on 14 July that he was seeking the indictment of Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir on the charge of genocide, but almost everybody else had a problem with it. They don’t doubt that Bashir is a ruthless dictator who is guilty of ordering many thousands of deaths. They just think that putting him on an international “wanted” list is unwise.

Gwynne Dyer puts the odds of a 2008 American or Israel attack on Iran at six to one. The Iranians clearly agree, concluding that all the threats to do so are merely bluff.

We may be about to leave that blessed time of stable, warm climate, and unchanging sea levels in which human civilization grew to its present size.

In an interview published in the July issue of Fortune magazine, Charlie Black, chief strategist to John McCain, observed that the Republican presidential candidate would benefit from a surge of support if there were a terrorist attack on the United States before the election.

Last week in The Hague, a Dutch court began hearing a case brought by surviving relatives of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians, supposedly under UN military protection, who were murdered by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995. The survivors are claiming $4 billion in damages from the Dutch state and the United Nations, which had created the “safe haven” at Srebrenica and sent Dutch troops there to protect it. It’s about time.

Morgan Tsvangirai was right to withdraw from the run-off presidential "election" in Zimbabwe on Sunday, says Gwynne Dyer. President Robert Mugabe was determined not to let the opposition win, regardless of what the voters did.

With oil in the high US$130s, we are already seeing a move away from monster vehicles, says Gwynne Dyer. But 1970s-style conservation won't bring the oil price down this time; we need an alternative fuel.

The treaty that the White House is forcing on Baghdad is designed to justify a permanent military occupation of Iraq and to tie the next administration’s hands when it comes to pulling U.S. troops out of the country

Out of 27 countries in the European Union, only Ireland is holding a referendum on the new constitution. Sorry, it's not a "constitution". It's just a "treaty", because French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution back in 2005.

When they started planning the food summit in Rome a year ago, it was going to be about the impact of climate change and biofuels on the world’s food supply. It turned out to be mainly about the runaway price of food, which is having a big impact on the world’s poor—and that’s a pity, because there’s not a lot that an international conference can do about a short-term problem like that.

The recent discovery of huge cracks in the Ward Hunt ice shelf off Ellesmere Island increase environmental worries over potential oil exploration and of a new Colder War with Russia.

The root problem of the recent violence in Johannesburg townships was the government's refusal to control or even count the number of people arriving in South Africa from other African countries.

The Burmese regime is not to blame for the cyclone that struck early this month. But it certainly will be to blame for the next wave of deaths if aid does not soon reach the survivors.

As the delay in announcing the results of Zimbabwe’s presidential election stretched out endlessly, the political jokes proliferated across southern Africa.

Recessions in the world's most developed economies and an increasing demand for clean sources of energy could ease oil prices.

All praise to former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. After meeting Zimbabwean opposition leaders in Kenya on Friday, he asked bluntly: “Where are the Africans?"

Gwynne Dyer writes that if he were the Chinese bureaucrat responsible for guarding the sacred Olympic flame, the place he'd worry about most is Australia.

It might be 20 years before the climate catastrophe breaks out, but false solutions are creating disasters that will be upon us long before then.

The Russian president has not recognised breakaway states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, despite condemning Kosovo's independence earlier this month as an illegal and dangerous precedent.

All the players are sticking to their scripts. China insists that“the recent sabotage in Lhasa was masterminded by the "Dalai clique". The Dalai Lama insists that he is not seeking Tibetan independence from China, but only more autonomy for Tibet’s culture and its Buddhist faith.

Gwynne Dyer writes that bad news is old news in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Something strange happens to the roads in eastern Colombia. As you near the Venezuelan border, you suddenly come across long, dead-straight stretches that are about eight lanes wide. They are, of course, emergency airstrips for the Colombian air force to use in the event of a war with Venezuela, and they date back to a period long before the current crisis between the two countries. But they are still there, and the topic is on the table again.

Gwynne Dyer says if Barack Obama becomes president and pulls U.S. troops out of Iraq, Iran will benefit and the biggest loser will be Israel.

Gwynne Dyer writes that as the Pentagon asks Congress to approve the biggest defence budget since the Second World War, it isn’t terrorism that’s on its mind, but China.

It’s an old joke: everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The same, unfortunately, is true for the climate.

Forty years ago this week, the American public realized that the United States was not going to win the Vietnam War. Lulled by assurances that “progress” was being made in the fight against the insurgents, Americans had patiently borne five years of growing military casualties in Vietnam, but the Tet Offensive shattered their illusions. Could the same thing happen this year in Iraq?

Western alarm over auto ownership in India ignores global need for fewer cars.

More than two years ago, when Kenya’s current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, was ousted from President Mwai Kibaki’s government, I wrote the following: “The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage.…Bad times are coming to Kenya.”

The recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto did five years of hard time in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, after her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown and hanged by the worst of Pakistan's military dictators, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. But she was a woman who liked her privileges and her luxuries, and she was never a very effective politician.

Jacob Zuma won the leadership of the ANC with a 60 percent majority, playing off the fears of the ANC rank-and-file that they will otherwise be forgotten. Will Zuma fulfill their hopes, or wind up in jail on corruption and rape charges?

Al Gore saved the day when he told the international delegates in Bali that climate change can be addressed - just as soon as obstructionist George W. Bush is booted from office

"In one hundred days we've explored almost every humanly known option for squaring the circle of Kosovo's status," said German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger last month, admitting that his three-person mediation team (one American, one Russian, and one from the European Union) had not been able to find a future for the territory that was acceptable both to Serbia and to the Kosovars themselves.

As Palestinians move toward a demographic majority, some are suggesting abandoning the "two-state solution" in favour of a multi-party, post-Zionist, Arab-controlled democracy

Though it may take decades, signs are appearing that the heyday of the US dollar is over, with the euro and the Chinese yuan

War-hungry West ignored the International Atomic Energy Agency's findings on Iraq back in 2003. The agency must feel a strong sense of déjà vu now with Iran

The market is a simple-minded beast: supply is tight and disruptions are possible, so the price goes up. But the market is so tight because demand has been growing faster than supply for years, mainly due to the economic boom in Asia, and now the fear is that supplies may have stopped growing altogether. The German-based Energy Watch Group declared last month that global oil output peaked in 2006 at 81 million barrels per day. It will fall to 58 million barrels per day by 2020, it predicts, and to only 39 million by 2030. That would give us just over 20 years to cut our use of oil by half—or, rather, by two-thirds, since world demand for oil is set to increase 37 percent by 2030, according to the annual report of the U.S. Energy Department’s forecasting arm, the Energy Information Administration

And here’s something even more peculiar. Iran, like Turkey, is already shelling Kurdish villages on the Iraqi side of the frontier that it suspects of sheltering or supplying the PKK/PJAK. How come President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney simply ignore these actions when they have been working hard for the past year to build a case for attacking Iran?