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 crucial assistance to women, but evidence shows that it is increasingly being limited to women who are mothers. India is a vivid case in point.
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
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 family planning aid, violating women’s rights, say the authors. ASHIQUE RUSHDI/USAID
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
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 warming is a multiplier of insecurity and conflict, but holding debates on the topic presents ever-more complex challenges as multilateralism and climate change are increasingly questioned if not dismissed by some of the world’s top leaders and biggest polluting nations.
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 the fall — before the caravan, before the firings, before the shutdown, before the wall — Melania Trump concluded her first solo goodwill tour with a photogenic visit to the Great Pyramid and Sphinx of Egypt, the only surviving complex of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
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-general, the author’s father and others were dead in a mysterious plane crash in the region. UN PHOTO
My clock radio clicked on. The morning news bulletin announced that United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane was missing.
It was Sept. 18, 1961. I was 16.
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
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. Walter Lindner, state secretary of Germany, right; June 8, 2018. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO
