International issues

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 his Spokesperson, António Guterres re-iterated the “passionate appeal for… »

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 married. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG… »

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 of the discontent. Over forty countries, on every continent, have… »

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 1 January will take place in… »

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 poet W. B. Yeats warned, when things fall apart and… »

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 would cease to exist beyond scattered tribes, here and there. »

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! Fossil fuel usage must be cut! Today: Following Paris ’15,… »

By Farhana Haque Rahman By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced migrations of people. As seen through the… »

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on… »

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon: ‘I dismounted,… »