International issues

The Security Council on Friday evening renewed a UN operation delivering humanitarian aid across the Syrian border to millions of civilians, but some of the body’s members expressed disappointment that the “watered down” measure cut in half the number of crossing points…

By Ramesh Jaura “Stop escalation. Exercise maximum restraint. Re-start dialogue. Renew international cooperation.” This is the four-point message of UN Secretary-General António Guterres spelling out what needs to happen now, in capitals across the world, to de-escalate geopolitical tensions, which…

The following is a response to President Trump’s remarks at the White House by Kevin Martin, President of Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund: President Trump once again blamed President Obama for the “foolish Iran nuclear deal.” In reality,…

In the wake of an Iranian ballistic missile attack on air bases which house US forces in Iraq, the UN Secretary-General said on Wednesday that he would “continue his active engagement” to de-escalate tensions and avert full-scale war. In a statement released…

By Nayema Nusrat  “Right now, I don’t want to get married. I have a long life and a dream in front of me”, a 14-year-old young girl from Bangladesh told her parents as she was just not ready to get…

Being a universal city, any conflict happening somewhere on the planet usually ends up on New York’s streets. During the year we have been covering some of them, but while working on this article we were surprised by the scale…

The world will welcome more than 392,000 babies on New Year’s Day, according to estimates from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).  The agency believes 2020’s first baby will be born in Fiji and that globally, over half of all births on…

By Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. “We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long. We are approaching a reckoning. This is the point, as the…

The Amazon rainforest is a crucial life-support ecosystem. Without its wondrous strength and power to generate hydrologic systems across the sky (as far north as Iowa), absorb and store carbon (CO2), and its miraculous life-giving endless supply of oxygen, civilization…

Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut!…