When China last took the reins of the Security Council, in March 2020, the country was just starting to control the pandemic at home, while the virus was spreading rapidly abroad, all the way to United Nations headquarters in New York City. Yet China refused to talk about the pandemic during that stint, and the …
The job of United Nations secretary-general is the “most impossible on earth,” as the first postholder, Trygve Lie, famously told his successor, Dag Hammarskjold. Though Lie spoke partly in jest to amuse the assembled reporters, the remark has stuck with UN observers for its eerie insightfulness. After all, the UN chief is charged with somehow …
Anastasia Dragon Nezeriotis — Anne to her colleagues and friends — died in Clearwater, Fla., 25 years ago last month. A native of Lynn, Mass., she was a teacher at Lynn English High School, her obituary said. She married George Nezeriotis in 1957, but before all that she had a front-row role in the early …
Veronique Vandegans, the United Nations chief of the French Interpretation Section, working at home in Brooklyn, N.Y., with company. The photo is part of a story for the UN Department of Global Communications on remote interpretation. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO The United States ambassador goes honest on racism; an ex-Ecuadorean head of state aims to be the …
Rosalía Arteaga, a former Ecuadorean president, is planning to enter the race to be the first woman to lead the United Nations and beat the incumbent, Secretary-General António Guterres, through a “people-backed” campaign. The announcement by the Forward campaign, a new movement based in London that is holding open, digital global primaries to find a …
Maj. Gen. Kristin Lund of Norway double-billed her government and the United Nations for moving expenses, according to a new report from The Norwegian Business Daily (Dagens Naeringsliv/DN). Lund was the first woman force commander for the UN, holding the post at its peacekeeping mission in Cyprus. That stint was followed by her heading the …
Should the United States acknowledge and openly lament the fact that white supremacy played a significant role in the country’s founding? Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Joe Biden’s pick as the US ambassador to the United Nations, thinks so. So does Biden himself. Both have spoken openly of their conviction that racism was woven into the fabric of …
This weekend, Asean will be deliberating on possible courses of action regarding Myanmar. Across the country, brave people, many of them children, are being murdered daily; health services are ceasing to function in the middle of a pandemic; the economy is collapsing; and every well-informed analyst predicts only a future of deepening civil war, chaos …
The Joe Biden climate-fest; rape as a weapon of war in Tigray; Burma slides further downhill. You are reading This Week @UN, summarizing the most pressing issues facing the organization. The information is gathered from UN press briefings, PassBlue reporting and other sources. Laura Kirkpatrick, who manages our Facebook page, created an informal poll based on …
As a woman who has worked for the United Nations in emergency and humanitarian operations, I am deeply shaken over what is occurring in the protracted conflict in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, where reports of human suffering, including growing allegations of grievous gender-based violence, keep increasing. These actions are cruel and ruthless, and they will …
A high-powered cast of former senior United Nations mediators from the Middle East and North Africa have founded a conflict-resolution organization, the International Center for Dialogue Initiatives, or ICDI, to mitigate the failures of foreign peace brokers and enable home-grown peacemakers to become more influential in their region, the founders say. Jamal Benomar, a former …
For 60 years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has measured money flows to developing countries. It adopted the benchmark standard for foreign aid, which it coined Official Development Assistance — or ODA — in 1969. In 2020, the OECD Development Assistance Committee, a forum of 30 member states overseeing ODA standards, made a …
For more than a decade, from 2004 to 2017, Vijay Nambiar was a special adviser to United Nations secretaries-general Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, charged with following events in Burma, which the military generals renamed Myanmar in 1989. A former deputy national security adviser to the government of India and Indian ambassador to the UN …
Afghanistan mega-peace talks in Istanbul; Russia the spoiler; could a Latin American woman lead the UN down the road or sooner? You are reading This Week @UN, summarizing the most pressing issues facing the organization. The information is gathered from UN press briefings, PassBlue reporting and other sources. We at PassBlue are deeply saddened by the …
Six Latin American names are being circulated in regional political circles as possible candidates to become the first woman to lead the United Nations, while the current secretary-general, António Guterres, will most likely be re-elected for the upcoming five-year term, starting in 2022. So women appear to be lining up to cast their names for the …
In 2010, Maria Victoria (Mavic) Cabrera-Balleza founded an organization to help and advocate for the rights of women and girls globally, but it was her childhood experiences that first politicized her. Martial law was declared by the dictator President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1972, when she was in fourth grade. Born in Manila, …
Human-rights advocates around the world are assessing how much lasting damage could still be done to universal human rights after the four-year assault from the Trump administration. Although the Trump years ended with the swearing-in of President Joe Biden in January, civil society organizations and governments understand that an American turnaround could be slow and …
While the United Nations focuses fitfully on its own long string of refugee problems, President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to resolve the problems of migration at the United States-Mexico border. There are legitimate reasons for Americans to be concerned about the flood of migrants, mostly coming from Central America. But those …
The Myanmar crisis isn’t going away; global bias against older people; Vietnam leads the Security Council; Chadian peacekeepers killed and wounded in Mali. You are reading This Week @UN, summarizing the most pressing issues facing the organization. The information is gathered from UN press briefings, PassBlue reporting and other sources. A huge thank you to all …
RIO DE JANEIRO — Regional cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean is declining, with intergovernmental organizations, such as the Organization of American States and Mercosur, nearly paralyzed or underperforming because of political divergences among member states, weak commitments and lack of resources. Yet despite these setbacks, a promising initiative is gaining space in the …
During more than a year of tracking the parameters of Covid-19, medical science has made one thing clear: the virus hits the elderly hardest. Yet their vulnerability is often taken as fate. A new international study disagrees. Prejudice, institutional bias and societal discrimination against older people in both rich and poor countries, it says, set …
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