Scientists seem untroubled by signs that the north and south magnetic poles will switch.

We need a significant overhaul, changing the world food system on a scale not seen before

Those lamenting the election of Tshitsekedi accept that it's probably the least bad option

Bangladesh is now a one-party state where about half the population hates the ruling party

How has this nonsense dominated the politics of two countries for more than two decades?

British Prime Minister Theresa May doesn't convince as a suicide bomber.

Putin and Poroshenko use religion for their own purposes. Bartholomew did what was right.

MbS is likely to stay in power -- perhaps to the ultimate ruin of the country he rules.

Would the Syrian Kurds rather be conquered by the Turks or by Assad?

It's looking good for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe.

92-year-old can give his country a second chance - if he removes privileges

A US-North Korea summit - this is what the deal might actually look like

US propaganda sees one stray missile turn into invasion threat

The US may be ordered to close down the Mexican border completely within 20 years.

Universal health care is a no-brainer

The Russians and Chinese will respond, and the world will become a little more dangerous.

COMMENT: Do the outside powers that have intervened in the war accept Bashar al-Assad's victory, or do they keep the war going?

COMMENT: Park Geun-hye has 15 months left of her five-year term, but she is finished politically, and that just feels sad.

COMMENT: Even before Donald Trump hijacked the Republican Party, he was loudly declaring that the science of climate change, like President Barack Obama, had not been born in the United States.

COMMENT: On average around 200 Americans are killed and wounded in mass shootings every month

COMMENT: I learned all our calculations for dealing with climate change could be swept aside by a non-linear event. This could be it.

COMMENT: The only way to seal a frontier is to kill people who try to cross it illegally. The Iron Curtain worked pretty well, for example.

COMMENT: If the US Congress had not imposed a two-term limit on the presidency in 1947, Barack Obama would be a safe bet for a third term next November.

COMMENT: The man who is taking charge of everything, President Xi Jinping, is now turning into the first one-man regime since Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

After an eruption of protests the skin-whitening ad was withdrawn with "heartfelt apologies" from Seoul Secret. But they didn't withdraw the product, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Islamic law forbids the enslavement of Muslims, but all that did was to encourage a roaring trade in the enslavement of non-Muslims that lasted for over a thousand years, writes Gwynne Dyer.

The Turkish leader has two goals: to ensure the destruction of Assad's regime, and to prevent the creation of a new Kurdish state in Syria, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Those military officers will continue to dominate politics, because 25 per cent of the votes, according to the 2008 constitution, can block any changes to the constitution, writes Gwynne Dyer.

After the IMF took part in the 2010 bail-out it was deeply embarrassed. It had broken its own rules, and found it hard to admit it, writes Gwynne Dyer.

What drives Putin is a grab-bag of emotional motives. His man in Kiev got overthrown, and he doesn't like to lose face, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Here are four reasons why President Barack Obama's decision last week to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba was a good idea.

Why would anyone believe Seymour Hersh?

'I prefer death to surrender," said Pakistan's former military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, on April 1 to the special court that is trying him on five counts of high treason.

If you want to go on eating regularly in a rapidly warming world, live in a place that's high in latitude or high in altitude.

They lied, they're still lying, and they'll go on lying until Libya calms down enough to allow a thorough search of its archives, writes Gwynne Dyer.

The Yanukovych era is finished; the former president will not make another comeback, writes Gwynne Dyer. He has killed too many people.

When a Government announces an "anti-terror operation", that generally means it has decided to kill some people.

The standard climate change predictions said people in the tropics and the sub-tropics would be badly hurt by global warming.

It's always dangerous to declare "mission accomplished". Former US president George W. Bush did it weeks after he invaded Iraq, and it will be quoted in history books a century hence as proof of his arrogance and his ignorance.

Purges in Communist states have rarely stopped with the execution of one senior party member.

Since China declared an "Air Defence Identification Zone" (ADIZ) that covers the disputed islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese.

The Curse of Mars also applies to Asian countries, writes Gwynne Dyer. About two-thirds of the attempted missions to Mars have failed, many of them even before leaving Earth's orbit.

Civil wars always kill many more people than mere terrorism, writes Gwynne Dyer. The fear is that Iraq is drifting towards a sectarian civil war as well.

Eighty per cent of the Republicans in the House of Representatives don't have to worry about what the general public thinks, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Two governments did bold, brave things last week. One of them quit and called a new election even though it had a viable majority in Parliament.

Last May, with considerable trepidation, I wrote an article about what seemed to be extraordinarily high rates of rape in Africa.

When someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, it's natural to be suspicious. Magicians are professionals in deceit - and so are diplomats. But sometimes the rabbit is real.

Why do Russians continue put up with being ruled by Vladimir Putin, asks Gwynne Dyer, when there are alternatives available?

Every step onward increases the scale and complexity of the computer systems, until they are too big and complex for any one person to understand, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Gwynne Dyer asks, " What, if anything, should the rest of the world do about the tragedy in Egypt?"

The standard internet routing protocol sends messages not by the shortest route, but by the fastest and least congested, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Science writer Matt Ridley once described the human mating system as "monogamy plagued by adultery," which sounds a little judgmental.

The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected.

As I write this, Nelson Mandela is still with us, writes Gwynne Dyer. "How will South Africa do without him? Wrong question. In practice, South Africa has been doing without him for more than a decade."

Egypt depends utterly on irrigation water from the Nile to grow its food. Even now there is not enough and Egypt's population is still growing fast, writes Gwynne Dyer.

Sometimes, in diplomacy, a translator is not enough. You need a code-breaker.

Not everybody in the world, exactly, but at least everybody with $8000 to buy a 3D printer on e-Bay, or access to one of the 3D printing shops, writes Gwynne Dyer.

George W. Bush wasn't lying about Iraq after all, and those of us who said that he was owe him an apology.

Margaret Thatcher was the woman who began the shift to the right that has affected almost all the countries of the West in the past three decades.

Hostility to the European Union is mainly an English thing, writes Gwynne Dyer, but that matters a lot in the United Kingdom, where 55 million of the kingdom's 65 million people live in England.

If North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong Un, wanted to end the brutal and destructive tyranny his father and grandfather imposed on the country, he would need support from abroad.

The whole Middle Eastern business is a red herring, because the US does not depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil, writes Gwynne Dyer.

It is quite likely we will one day create a machine - a robot, if you like - that can "think" faster than we do, writes Gwynne Dyer.

What has just happened in Sandy Hook, Connecticut is the seventh massacre this year in which four or more people were killed by a lone gunman, writes Gwynne Dyer.

The Scots, the Catalans and the Basques tend to see themselves as victims, but nobody else does, writes Gwynne Dyer.