United Nations

Eugene Cho 2-22-2024

A Palestinian woman bakes bread as children sit next to her on Jan. 24, 2024 in the southern Gaza Strip. REUTERS/Arafat Barbakh/File Photo

In Gaza, millions are being “overlooked or ignored.” Right now, people are starving and clinging to the fading hope that somehow territorial, historical, religious, and political crisis can yield to compassionate humanity. This, friends, represents our highest and most crucial calling. We are compelled by the teachings of Jesus to offer help — and we must act.

Men walk through an almost dry river bed of Yamuna after searching for recyclable material on a hot summer day in New Delhi, India, April 30, 2022. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi 

Christian, Muslim, and Jewish leaders joined United Nations officials on Monday in urging financial institutions to stop bankrolling activities that are driving climate change, including ending support for new fossil fuel projects.

A person walks along cracks at the partly dried up Devegecidi Dam, northwest of drought-stricken Diyarbakir, Turkey,

A person walks along cracks at the partly dried up Devegecidi Dam, northwest of drought-stricken Diyarbakir, Turkey, on Oct. 29, 2021. REUTERS/Sertac Kayar

The climate is changing! Creation cries out!
Your people face flooding and fire and drought.
We see the great heat waves and storms at their worst.
We pray for the poor, Lord — for they suffer first.

Hassan El-Tayyab 1-26-2021
Illustration of a bomb next to hands holding out an empty bowl.

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

MARCH 25 marks the sixth anniversary of the start of the brutal and tragic war in Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition’s offensive operations, code-named Operation Decisive Storm, began with airstrikes and a naval blockade against Houthi rebels with the goal of restoring Yemen’s ousted government. With early and extensive U.S. military support, this war has created what many consider the most severe humanitarian crisis on the planet.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised a policy reset on Yemen. “I would end U.S. support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and order a reassessment of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Biden said. “It is past time to restore a sense of balance, perspective, and fidelity to our values in our relationships in the Middle East. President Trump has issued Saudi Arabia a dangerous blank check. Saudi Arabia has used it to extend a war in Yemen that has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, pursue reckless foreign policy fights, and repress its own people.”

Biden’s promise offers hope to those committed to peace, but his administration must do much more than help pick up the pieces. Yemen needs humanitarian aid, an end to the blockade, and good faith diplomacy.

Chloe Noël 10-22-2020
Illustration by Michael George Haddad

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

In 1994, Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), establishing a template for free trade deals that was neither free nor fair. While North American trade tripled and corporations profited under NAFTA, the costs were borne by manufacturing workers across the U.S. and Mexico, smallholder corn farmers, and our environmental commonwealth. These trade consequences contributed to migration to the U.S.

The dirty secret about free trade agreements is that much of the content has little to do with trade. They serve to maximize corporate profits by pressuring countries to weaken or jettison domestic laws that serve the common good—such as public health, financial, and environmental regulations—to make room for policies that serve corporate interests and economic superpowers. Corporations and other nations can sue for perceived “unfair treatment,” which often costs taxpayers millions or billions of dollars and results in a regulatory chilling effect. With hundreds of U.S. government-approved industry trade advisers at the negotiating table—and few civil society representatives—is this any surprise?

Adam Russell Taylor 12-19-2018

THE WORLD RECEIVED some very good news in September. The percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty has dropped from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015, the lowest in recorded history. Over this period more than 1 billion people lifted themselves out of the quicksand of extreme poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals, agreed to through the United Nations in 2000, helped galvanize global leadership to cut extreme poverty in half in 15 years, a goal that was achieved a few years early due to remarkable progress in China and India. About half of the world’s countries have reduced extreme poverty below 3 percent.

In 2016, the MDGs were replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs represent a more integrated and comprehensive global agenda centered around 17 goals and 169 targets that now apply to every country in the world, not only to developing countries. They combine a commitment to end extreme poverty by the year 2030—especially in countries across sub-Saharan Africa and fragile conflict-affected states where progress has been uneven—with commitments to protect the environment, address climate change, combat inequality, promote peace, and improve governance.

A child traveling with a caravan of migrants from Central America sits at a camp near the San Ysidro checkpoint, after U.S. border authorities allowed the first small group of women and children entry from Mexico overnight, in Tijuana, Mexico May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

"The fact that you have people coming from countries experiencing violence and might be subject to persecution by gangs and other criminal violence, would certainly ... give them the right to receive international protection," Spindler said.

Image via United Nations Photo / Flickr

A crowd of thousands of angry, shouting protesters gathered as his body, covered by a sheet, was carried on a makeshift stretcher along dirt streets to the presidential palace, a Reuters witness said.

U.S. ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich and her husband talk with Pope Francis during the traditional exchange of the New Year greetings in the Regal Room at the Vatican January 8, 2018. REUTERS/Andrew Medichini/Pool

"Nuclear weapons must be banned," Francis said, quoting a document issued by Pope John XXIII at the height of the Cold War and adding that there is "no denying that the conflagration could be started by some chance and unforeseen circumstance".

the Web Editors 12-08-2017

Image via Josep Casas / Flickr

Since the U.N. mission in Congo launched in 1999, almost 300 peacekeepers have been killed, with the presence of rebel groups becoming commonplace. 

Anna Ikeda 9-18-2017

“THIS WILL BE A historic moment,” announced Ambassador Elayne Whyte Gómez on July 6, the day before 122 countries adopted the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a legally binding agreement to outlaw nuclear weapons—and a major step toward their complete elimination. (Sixty-nine nations refused to vote, including all the nuclear weapon states and all NATO members except the Netherlands.)
“I have been waiting for this day for seven decades, and I am overjoyed that it has finally arrived,” said Setsu-ko Thurlow, a renowned antinuclear activist and survivor of the U.S. nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Parties to the treaty are prohibited from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, possessing, or stock-piling nuclear weapons. The treaty also creates, for the first time, obligations to support the victims of nuclear weapons use and testing, as well as remediation of environmental damage caused by nuclear weapons.

Image via Reuters/Darren Whiteside

Jakarta's Christian governor has been sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy, a harsher-than-expected ruling critics fear will embolden hardline Islamist forces to challenge secularism in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation. The April 9 guilty verdict for Basuki Tjahaja Purnama comes amid concern about the growing influence of Islamist groups, who organized mass rallies during a tumultuous election campaign that ended with Purnama losing his bid for another term as governor.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Max Rossi

During our nearly 40 years of friendship, I led several interreligious missions with Keeler, including meetings with then-Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. We co-led trips to Israel, including a visit to a civilian bomb shelter, and a poignant painful pilgrimage to the infamous death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Sometimes public figures can seem distant and impersonal, but that was never the case with the always gracious and welcoming Keeler.

Image via RNS/Fredrick Nzwili

The drought in the Sahel — a region that forms a dry belt across northern Africa — has left millions without any water to drink, and is being linked to three deaths in recent days in Kenya, due to consumption of unsafe water.

“There are no drops to reduce, recycle, or reuse,” said professor Jesse Mugambi, of the University of Nairobi, who added that many in the region are spending World Water Day “praying for drops of rain to quench their thirst and that of their livestock.”

Image via Gage Skidmore/flickr.com

A decade ago, a critic accused me of writing a book about a “nonexistent” threat from the religious right. One reviewer called my work a “paranoid rant,” while another detractor wrote my “alarmist” views were “exaggerated and implausible.”

In The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans For The Rest Of Us, published in 2006, I had warned that a well-financed and highly organized group of religious and political leaders was seeking to impose their narrow extremist beliefs and harsh public policies on the United States, even as our nation’s population was increasingly multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Randall Hill

Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will be a rare woman on Donald Trump’s Cabinet-level team, and one of the few persons of color.

Knowing little about her foreign policy positions, given that she has little to no international experience, what should we expect from Haley once she is confirmed to be ambassador to the United Nations?

the Web Editors 1-11-2017

Image via www.GlynLowe.com/flickr.com

On Jan. 11 the Senate confirmation hearing for former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, for the office of Secretary of State, began, reports NPR. In his hearing Tillerson admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he has yet to discuss with President-Elect Trump U.S. foreign policy as it regards to Russia.

He also made a statement that seemed in partial opposition to the use of sanctions against Russia and other countries, stating that they “are going to harm American businesses.” However, he relented to the idea that sanctions have the ability to be a “powerful and important tool.”

the Web Editors 12-19-2016

Image via Osugi/Shutterstock.com

On Dec. 19 the United Nations Security Council unanimously voted to send UN observers to Aleppo to oversee the evacuation of civilians, reports Al Jazeera. UN observers will travel soon to Aleppo as will personnel who can administer aid.

“For the first time in numerous attempts to get unanimity on the situation on Aleppo, all of the 15 UN Security Council members have supported this resolution to send UN monitors in Aleppo,” said journalist Mike Hanna.

Image via RNS/Marcel Antonisse via Creative Commons

Brazilian Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, one of the most important figures in modern Brazil, died on Dec. 14 in Sao Paulo. He was 95.

Known as Dom Paulo, he was appointed bishop in 1966 and served as archbishop of the Sao Paulo Archdiocese from 1970 to 1998. But he was better known as the “people’s bishop,” and embodied the progressive church movement in South America.

the Web Editors 12-14-2016

On Dec. 14 buses that were meant to evacuate citizens and rebel fighters out of Aleppo, Syria, after a raid and massacre by the Syrian government, left — empty, reports the New York Times. Gunfire has been heard by people who are still in the city, and it is believed that a ceasefire established on Dec. 13 — between the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and rebel fighters — has dissolved.