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A typical day of visitors at the UN in New York: French officers heading to meet with Secretary-General António Guterres and Florence Parly, defense minister of France, March 19, 2019. A wave of new or continuing allegations of harassment and corruption plagues the UN system, already battered by...
Amal Clooney, the British human-rights lawyer, told the Security Council that now is its “Nuremberg moment” to push for prosecuting cases of sexual violence in conflict. Nadia Murad, right, a Yazidi, had been held by ISIS in Iraq. In 2018, Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize with Dr. Denis Mukwege,...
A resident returned to his home in the Mopti region of Mali after attacks in February 2019 in the Bankass Circle area, where at least 18 people died by shooting and burning. Deadly violence is increasing in central Mali, targeting civilians, Malian soldiers and peacekeepers with no resolution in...
In a refugee camp in South Sudan, people escape the fighting in the country’s civil war, including rampant rape by militias and national armed forces. Members of the UN Security Council are drafting a resolution to strengthen such victims’ rights, but the United States is refusing language on...
In a refugee camp in South Sudan, people escape the fighting in the country’s civil war, including rampant rape by militias and national armed forces. Members of the UN Security Council are drafting a resolution to strengthen victims’ rights, but the United States is resisting language on sexual...
President Trump with Prime Minister Netanyahu at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, May 2017. From the start of his presidency, Trump’s Middle East policies have amounted to a “bromance” with the Israeli leader, the author writes, but where is the mysterious peace plan for Israel and Palestine, and...
A new advocacy campaign started by Madre, an American nonprofit group, aims to introduce women in the developing world to lawmakers in Washington to explain how US foreign policy affects women at the receiving end. Life in Burkina Faso, above, can entail battling bad air, terrorist threats and...
Carlos Holmes Trujillo, left, Colombia’s foreign affairs minister, with Jonathan R. Cohen, center, deputy ambassador of the US to the UN, and Karel van Oosterom, Netherlands’ ambassador to the UN, in the Security Council, Oct. 10, 2018. Cohen has been nominated by Trump as ambassador to Egypt,...
In Aleppo, another victim in the Syrian war, led by President Bashar al-Assad against his own people since March 2011. The UN Security Council recently passed a resolution that ensures that countries’ counterterrorism measures comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law,...
Christoph Heusgen, Germany’s ambassador to the UN and rotating president of the Security Council for April, introduced a German-made hourglass in Council meetings to keep speeches to five minutes each. The Russian ambassador asked in one instance that the timer be laid flat when he spoke. ...
In 2015, only three African nations made the top 10 globally in numbers of Christians in the population: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, about 216 million Christians total. The continent is projected to hit 727 million Christians by 2060, with Nigeria leading. Here,...
The grave of Robert Bowie, the author’s paternal grandfather and a doctor who lived in Nagasaki, above, and died in 1911. The gravesite survived the American atomic bombing of the city, Aug. 9, 1945. BRIAN BURKE-GAFFNEY
NAGASAKI, Japan — The live fish of the day, taken from a tank that...
India is swept up in a growing “maternalization” trend: the federal government is offering cash-transfer programs to pregnant women to improve maternal health, sidelining other safety-net programs for women. ADAM JONES/CREATIVE COMMONS
Social policy in developing countries provides...
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump at lunch with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi, Feb. 27, 2019. Pompeo and Trump marked international women’s month in March by actively eroding the reproductive health rights of women globally. RON PRZYSUCHA/STATE...
City life in Bangkok, above. A new World Bank report found that work and legal protections are missing in rich and poor countries alike, including the US. Only six nations, all in Europe, scored perfectly in providing women equal legal standing as men across their working lives. UN WOMEN
...Hasmik Egian, center, director of the Security Council Affairs Division of the UN, receiving requests from diplomats who want to speak at the emergency Council session on Venezuela, Jan. 26, 2019. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO
Jockeying for a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council...
Abigail Disney, the filmmaker, in 2009. In an interview about women peacemakers and the current debut of her second documentary series of “Women, War & Peace,” she said: “I’m very consciously trying to interrupt the sleepy narrative of war in the American cultural landscape.” EIRIK SOLHEIM...
Koki Muli Grignon, a Kenyan diplomat, center, who managed the negotiations on the final document summarizing the annual UN meeting on women’s rights, told delegates that she had been sent nearly 1,000 text messages attacking her because of her work leading the debate. LAURA E. KIRKPATRICK
...Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 in Washington. As president, he has let the US ambassadorship to the UN, the country’s second-most important foreign policy role, sit empty for months. GAGE SKIDMORE/CREATIVE COMMONS
More than six months ago, the...
A first-time voter with her ID card at a polling booth during national elections in 2014, in Sikkim. This year’s national election in India spans 39 days across April and May. A new book reveals that 21 million women are not registered to vote, reflecting social resistance to women doing so....
Ana Menéndez, a former Spanish diplomat, leads the UN’s internal gender parity strategy and oversees the institution’s policymaking. In an interview with PassBlue, she said that the UN stands for certain “values,” and an integral part of those beliefs is gender equality. Here, she attends a UN...
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are meant to improve the lives of everyone universally, but the system tracking their progress is showing flaws resulting from politics and a heavy reliance on numbers. Women offering food at Cuba’s Independence Day celebration, Caimito, 2015. JOE PENNEY...
In August, 2017, more than half a million Rohingya refugees flooded across the border from Burma to Bangladesh to escape violence in Rakhine State, including pregnant women and children. The United States gave about $28 million in food and other goods, but the government’s global gag rule banned...
Kelly Knight Craft, the US envoy to Canada, has been nominated by President Trump to be the next US representative to the UN. Here, she celebrates the Fourth of July in Ottawa with her husband, Joseph Craft III, a billionaire coal investor. The couple’s coal wealth could present a conflict of...
Recently, Caribbean leaders met in the French islands of Guadeloupe to introduce a regional project, Carib-Coast, to deal cooperatively with repeated storm crises and rising sea levels. Here, a hiking path to the Soufrière volcano, Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe. CREATIVE COMMONS
GOSIER,...
At the 2018 meeting of the annual UN megaconference on women, a scene of which is captured above, the United States delegation created controversy over its conservative stances on women’s rights. This year, days before the meeting starts, the US has offered scant information on how it will...
Nikki Haley, the former US envoy to the UN, has been nominated to join the Boeing board, among other new ventures that could raise a lot of money for a possible presidential run by her. As governor of South Carolina, she helped Boeing expand its plant there, a move celebrated above, May 10, 2013...
François Delattre, left, the French ambassador to the UN and president of the Security Council for March, with Christoph Heusgen, Germany’s UN ambassador and president of the Council in April. They presented the agenda of the Council’s first twin presidencies to the media on March 1, 2019.
...Phil McAuliffe, an Australian midcareer diplomat who has created a website, the Lonely Diplomat, for fellow professionals to “genuinely reconnect with ourselves, with those around us and with the communities in which we live,” he said.
“We diplomats have a strange life,”...
Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, and Karen Pierce, the British ambassador, right, in the Security Council before a meeting on Libya, Jan. 18, 2019. The authors of the op-ed essay argue that Britain’s role in the UN may diminish as Brexit unfolds. LOEY FELIPE/UN PHOTO
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Venezuelans in Florida “strike for democracy,” as they called their demonstration for their home country, Feb. 2, 2019, above. A new initiative by a group of female Nobel laureates offers a database of female experts for journalists to interview for reporting on international conflicts. CREATIVE...
In Dakar, staff members from UN Women Senegal and other UN agencies attend a presentation on sexual harassment in the workplace, part of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 2016.
As multilateralism takes a beating from President Trump amid the “new world...
Brexit protesters, near Parliament, London, January 2019. Women will likely take the biggest hit from Britain’s exit from the European Union, say rights specialists in the country and a UN rights advocate.
NOTTINGHAM, England — It has been more than two and a half years since Britain...
From the White House, Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement on June, 1, 2017, claiming, among other misleading information, that the pact could impinge on America’s sovereignty.
THE HAGUE — It is now well documented that global...
Afghan migrants in Iran are leaving in droves for urban areas back home as US sanctions squeeze Iran’s economy. The influx could further destabilize Afghanistan, with young male returnees vulnerable to recruitment by insurgents. A Kabul bazaar, above. FARDIN WAEZI/UNAMA
After fleeing...
U.S. Department of State Follow Spokesperson Nauert Delivers Remarks at a Reception in Support of the United States’ Bid to Host the 2023 World’s Fair at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. on October 26, 2017. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]Heather Nauert, who was nominated...
The author, an Australian who has been researching the lives of women and girls worldwide, risked traveling in Afghanistan by herself, yet she said she would return, despite the problems she met. Here, a woman heading into the village of Ishkashim, near the Tajikistan border. JOHANNA HIGGS
...A United Nations police officer from Benin working for the mission in Mali, one of the most dangerous operations in the UN portfolio, Nov. 7, 2018. The officers conduct daily joint patrols in Gao, a hotbed of jihadist activity, to ensure general security in the city. MARCO DORMINO/...
In Cairo last year, Melania Trump toured the Giza Pyramids, a Unesco World Heritage site. The author of the essay toured Unesco sites across five continents, noting how designations can increase tourism to an area but can also hurt a place’s physical integrity. ANDREA HANKS/White House
In...
A World Bank report on foodborne diseases says food-safety regulations are most deficient in low-income countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, which can result in early deaths, especially among children. A dried-fish market in Kathmandu, Nepal, above.
Poverty’s...
United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, left, was the guest of honor at an official reception in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Congo, on Sept. 13, 1961, with Cyrille Adoula, the head of the country, right, and his deputy, Antoine Gizenga (with glasses). Five days later, the secretary-...
Ambassador Anatolio Ndong Mba of Equatorial Guinea in his office in New York, Jan. 30, 2019. On the wall is a portrait of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The country is leading a Security Council trip in February to its fellow West African nations of Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau....
Kelley Currie, the No. 2 ambassador at the UN mission to the UN, speaking with reporters on Oct. 16, 2018, regarding Cuban political prisoners. Currie is leaving the US mission as it awaits a formal ambassador to arrive to succeed Nikki Haley, who resigned on Oct. 9. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO
...Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo spoke at a UN Security Council session on Venezuela, Jan. 26, 2019, where he insulted China and Russia, the author writes, in his speech asking all Council members to back the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó. (Immediately behind Pompeo is Elliott...
Protests against a new overtime law in Hungary, Dec. 12, 2018, Budapest. Women who defend human rights are subjected more than ever before to a range of threats, from online trolling to torture, a new Swedish report finds.
More than two decades have passed since the United Nations...
Achim Steiner, center, is a longtime specialist who now runs the UN Development Program, based in New York. The current restructuring of the UN may be sidelining Steiner, jeopardizing development work.
As the first effects of Secretary-General António Guterres’s ambitious organizational...
Secretary-General António Guterres holding a global town hall meeting with United Nations staff members, Jan. 17, 2019. The authors cite instances of tough resistance to Guterres’s systemwide gender parity strategy, including from certain staff unions. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
One year into...
Because of gross inefficiencies, the total number of children separated recently from a parent or a guardian by US immigration officials at the US-Mexico border is unknown, says a new US government report. Wikipedia has added US border detention centers to its list of concentration camps....
The General Assembly elected five nations to two-year terms on the Security Council, starting on Jan. 1, 2019: Belgium, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa. Heiko Mass (left), Germany’s foreign minister, congratulates Christoph Heusgen, his country’s ambassador to the UN....
President Trump arriving at the United Nations with Nikki Haley, Sept. 18, 2017. The author describes how Haley, who is no longer US ambassador, is continuing to keep the spotlight on herself through Twitter, just as her former boss deploys the social media tool. RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
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