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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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A session of the 139th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Geneva, October 2018. Changes in the makeup of national legislatures were pronounced in 2018, with a record number of women elected in America, for example. Such radical shifts in national lawmaking bodies could endure in 2019,...
Heather Nauert, center, in Helsinki, July 16, 2018. In December, Trump said he was nominating Nauert to succeed Nikki Haley as US ambassador to the UN, but the White House hasn’t sent the formal nomination to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which holds the confirmation hearing. STATE...
In 2018, 55 percent of the world’s population lived in urban settings, and a UN report projects that by 2030, Delhi will overtake Tokyo as the largest city. In the New York-Newark metro area, above, the population of 18.8 million in 2018 is projected to hit 19.9 million by 2030. Paradoxically,...
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, in the Security Council chamber, Oct. 18, 2018. She left a bruising mark on the UN, having criticized it constantly and lectured other countries, yet some of her peers admired her. RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO
After two years as the American ambassador...
At a Teatime for Peace gathering, a program of the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, people of various faiths talk about their religion openly to help overcome differences and dispel myths.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — In this city of immigrants, as one Moroccan-...
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile...
José Singer Weisinger, a businessman, is representing the Dominican Republic as a new special envoy during the country’s two-year term on the UN Security Council, starting in January. The country is also holding the rotating presidency this month.
Although the Dominican Republic has been...
On Dec. 10, the Twitter account for the Yemen embassy in Washington showed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen, right, leaving the US for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he lives in exile. It said he was in “very good health.”
CLEVELAND, Ohio — On the main drag of Euclid Avenue in this...
In Quang Tri Province in Vietnam, above, hundreds of people have been killed or maimed from unexploded ordnances like cluster munitions, weapons leftover from the US war there. The US is reversing its policy on using older cluster munitions while it tests new ones with an Israeli company. WERNER...
Protesters demanding freedom of the press, Nicaragua, Dec. 26, 2016. As the nation succumbs to full tyranny, 14 countries, including the US, recently condemned President Daniel Ortega’s treatment of civil society in his country. CREATIVE COMMONS
In a rebuke to President Daniel Ortega of...
Children in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rates of child deaths in the world, a new Unicef report documents, yet much progress has been made globally to reduce child mortality since 1990. Here, a boy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. FRANCISCO MAGALLON
By one measure — the...
Wendi Winters, a reporter and editor with the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Md., was one of three female journalists murdered this year worldwide, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Gazette was attacked on June 28 by a gunman who also killed four others in the ambush....
A cookstove factory in Africa, supported by the Clean Cooking Alliance, an American-based global network that promotes the production and use of the devices to reduce pollution from small fires for cooking in developing nations. At the recent climate conference in Katowice, talks on carbon...
Nigerien troops patrolling outside Dirkou, Niger, Aug. 6, 2018, a key transit hub near the border of Libya. The author describes how the G5 Sahel force, a French initiative to combat jihadists in the Sahel region, is struggling to be useful as violence in the area soars. JOE PENNEY
...Heather Nauert, the spokesperson for the US State Department, holding a media briefing, June 6, 2017. Her nomination as America’s envoy to the UN has been harshly criticized by some human-rights groups and the country’s largest Islamic advocacy organization.
The nomination of Heather...
A project of the UN Development Program has enabled the Aatral Arasi Palmyrah Crafts, a group in Sri Lanka, to grow. The author of this essay says, however, that in postwar societies, the private sector must play a major role in rebuilding societies to ensure lasting economic recovery.
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Nikki Haley, the US ambassador, flanked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, addressing the press at UN headquarters in New York, July 20, 2018, after a private meeting with the Security Council on North Korea. Haley is leaving the post by the end of the year and Donald Trump has nominated Heather...
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, standing told a gathering at the German Marshall Fund, on Dec. 4, 2018, that the liberal world order has been allowed to “corrode.” He also criticized UN peacekeeping work and UN climate-change mitigation efforts. SERGE VANDENDRIESSCHE/GERMAN MARSHALL...
Marillyn Hewson, head of Lockheed Martin.
Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin Corporation, is the latest name to surface as a potential successor to Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, according to a diplomat there.
Hewson has been the chief...
Ambassador Kacou Houadja Léon Adom of the Ivory Coast, Dec. 3, 2018. He said that his country, recovering from a civil war, had lessons to offer the UN Security Council on how to maintain peace.
The Ivory Coast holds the rotating presidency in December in the United Nations Security...
A Sahrawi refugee at a camp near Tindouf, Algeria, 2016. A new UN envoy is taking a stab at ending the frozen conflict over the status of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara territory of the indigenous Sahrawi people, prodded by the United States. EVAN SCHNEIDER/UN PHOTO
Horst Koehler, a...
A trip by the members of the UN Security Council, above background, to the Congo in October 2018 included meeting with female political candidates (front rows) who are competing in the country’s Dec. 23 elections. Recent murders of UN peacekeepers in the Congo raise the question as to whether...
A memorial service was held for the six peacekeepers from Malawi and one from Tanzania who died during clashes with the ADF militia in the Congo on Nov. 15, 2018. Seventeen members of the same UN force intervention brigade were killed nearly a year ago battling the ADF. MIRIAM ASMANI/MONUSCO ...
Police on horses escorting migrants after they crossed from Croatia in Dobova, Slovenia, Oct. 20, 2015. A new UN global compact on migrants is to be formalized at a conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, in early December, before the UN General Assembly adopts it through a resolution. The United...
Fathiah Zakham studied tuberculosis in Yemen until a bomb destroyed the university where she was working. Through the Scholar Rescue Fund, she received safe haven in Helsinki to study.
Ahmad Sadiddin was an agronomist in a region that history books call the Fertile Crescent, an arc around...
Fred Eckhard, who was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s spokesman, in Koudougou, Burkina Faso, with girls helped by a charity he runs, Chance for Change, in their last year of secondary school. Half of them made it to higher education through the charity. Its treasurer, Noëlie, is at Eckhard’s...
The inaugural Paris Peace Forum brought in a range of attendees, who concentrated on “people-centered multilateralism,” the author writes. Here, among the VIPs: President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania, second from left; President Paul Kagame of Rwanda; Defense Minister Hamed Bakayoko of...
Mariam Jalabi, a co-founder of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, left, with Jamille Bigio, senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. In a conversation between the two, Jalabi said that unequal participation by women in peace talks and the political scene is not only a Syrian...
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, with Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, Nov. 19, 2018, during the UN Alliance of Civilizations forum. The country has called for an independent investigation into the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but the UN says it hasn’t...
President Trump with, from left, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, at the G7 lunch in Canada, June 9, 2018. The author suggests Japan should work closely with Europe to...
At least 100 women will hold nearly one-quarter of the seats in the US House of Representatives as of January 2019. That could mean more support for women’s rights, including from a New York Democrat, Eliot Engel. Here, protesters in Seattle, 2018.
The results of the recent United States...