Gwynne Dyer

"The Russians had a more realistic analysis of the situation than practically anybody else,'' said Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations special envoy to Syria.

Rodrigo Duterte, who has just been elected president of the Philippines, comes across as Donald Trump on stilts.

If you spend a lot of time talking to scientists about climate change, there's one word you'll hear time and time again, and yet it's hardly ever mentioned in the public discussion of climate change. The word is ‘‘non-linear''.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

A recent headline on the leading French newspaper Le Monde said it all: ‘‘Migrants, the Euro, Brexit: The European Union is mortal.'' And it's true. The EU could actually collapse over these three threats.

"These are my principles, and if you don't like them ... Well, I have others.'' (Groucho Marx)

After the Syrian army recaptured the city of Palmyra from Islamic State a week ago, US State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted that the liberation of the ancient city was a ‘‘good thing''.

He wasn't standing on an aircraft carrier with a banner saying "Mission Accomplished'' behind him, but Russia's President Vladimir Putin was a lot more credible than former US president George W. Bush when he declared his country's military intervention in the Middle East a success.

The French left does political correctness and moral outrage much better than the American left, so the row over what Algerian novelist and journalist Kamal Daoud recently said about sex in the Arab world has been bigger and louder in France than in the United States. But it is equally stupid in both places.

Opening the National People's Congress in Beijing last weekend, Prime Minister Li Keqiang set China's growth target for the coming year at 6.5%-7%, the lowest in decades. Only two years ago, he said 7% was the lowest acceptable growth rate, but he has had to eat his words. He really is not in charge of very much any more.

What would you call a country that called for "a structure under which can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom ... a kind of United States of Europe'' at the end of World War 2 (Winston Churchill, 1946), but refused to join it when its European neighbours actually began building it (European Economic Community, 1957)?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,'' said John Maynard Keynes (or maybe it wasn't him, but no matter).

"Europe has forgotten that history is fundamentally tragic,'' said Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister.