The role of the media is to inform, report and humanize the facts and figures that are more easily assigned to cells in a spreadsheet. Not to rewrite what is into what they feel will please their masters. Most “news” hours are spent rehashing ever-repeated rhetoric, “language that is intended to influence people and that […]
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Many westerners trying to make sense of the events in the “dark continent” of Africa have many barriers standing in the way of their minds and reality. This must be the case, for without such filters of spin proclaiming Africa’s problems to be self-induced (or the consequence of Chinese debt slavery), we in the west, […]
Kelly Craft, US envoy to the UN, saying farewell to Karen Pierce, her British counterpart and now the UK ambassador to the US, March 12, 2020. It was the last day the Security Council met physically as the UN shut down days later. LOEY FELIPE/UN PHOTO
The UN’s main lobby in New York, March 11, 2020. By Friday evening, March 13, the UN announced that virtually all personnel working at New York headquarters were being ordered to telecommute for four weeks, after a Filipino diplomat confirmed that a colleague had Covid-19. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
Despite the fact that slavery has long been abolished it continues to blight our world, destroying the lives of tens of millions of people. The Global Slavery Index (GSI) 2018 estimates there to be 40.3 million slaves in the world; however, given the difficulty of collecting data, the areas that are not included – organ trafficking, child soldiers, or child marriage – and the fact that, as GSI says, there are ‘substantial gaps’ from the Arabs States, where 17.5 million migrants workers live, the actual number will no doubt be a great deal higher.
SADAA, NORTHERN YEMEN — Third-grader Farah Abbas al-Halimi didn’t get the UNICEF backpack or textbook she was hoping for this year. Instead, she was given an advanced U.S bomb delivered on an F-16 courtesy of the Saudi Air Force. That bomb fell on Farah’s school on September 24 and killed Farah, two of her sisters, and her father who was working at the school. It will undoubtedly have an irrevocable effect on the safety and psyche of schoolchildren across the region.
Joanna Wronecka, Poland’s ambassador to the UN, is president of the Security Council in August. She is known in the UN for speaking Arabic fluently, drawing admiration from that community of diplomats and reporters. Besides Polish, she also speaks English, French and German. DULCIE LEIMBACH
Even though many people think of August as vacation time, Joanna Wronecka, Poland’s ambassador to the United Nations, is not taking off anytime soon, as she is presiding over the Security Council for the month.
Members of the child-protection team from the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, participating in a soccer match. The player’s shirt, translated from French, says “child recruitment is a crime.”
Every time the budget committee of the United Nations meets, as it did in June, child-protection advocates enter a familiar existential crisis: will the United States and China cut UN budgets specifically allocated to specialists on child protection in peacekeeping missions?
I would like to tell you something about human depravity and illustrate just how widespread it is among those we often regard as ‘responsible’. I am going to use the Democratic Republic of the Congo as my example.
SADAA, YEMEN — September is the month when students around the world head back to school and, despite enduring years of brutal war, Yemen’s children are no exception. In the Khulah School in the northern city of Sadaa, fifth-grader Saleem Ahmed Mutaher sits on the floor with about 70 other students, his mind distracted by the pain of sitting on a hard, dusty floor as well as the strong winds that enter from the classroom’s broken windows.
