Written by An unprecedented year of elections around the world has underscored a sobering trend – in many countries the commitment to act on the climate crisis has either stalled or is eroding, even as disasters and record temperatures continue to mount. So far 2024, called the “biggest election year in human history” by the United Nations […]
“Failure is not an option.” These were the foreboding words shared by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Baku, Azerbaijan, to set the stage for COP29, the UN’s annual climate conference. (Whether Guterres knew he was quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger is anyone’s guess.) The climate summit’s last day is today, and for many people, it couldn’t come […]
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the leading institution dedicated to the humanitarian needs of the besieged people in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s devastating war, which has left more than 43,000 people dead, nearly half that number orphaned, and more than 100,000 wounded. And […]
The U.S. veto at the U.N. came as the Biden administration’s envoy in Lebanon reported “additional progress” on cease-fire talks in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Source link
Continuing last year’s tradition, the COP29 summit was less about saving the planet and more of an opportunity for the fossil fuel industry to prosper, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark. COP29 WAS ALWAYS going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and […]
Will the whiny socialist kids please stop throwing tantrums about a global system that’s functioning just fine, thank you? That’s essentially the gist of Kevin Bloom’s article in The Daily Maverick, where he dismisses the critiques of the upcoming World Movement for Democracy conference as nothing more than a fit of “incandescent rage”. His piece, […]
This continues the JAPAN Forward history series focusing on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The world was undergoing major political transformations as its three universal conferences of 1958, 1960, and 1973-82 took place. With 169 parties to the convention, achieving an equitable compromise on its terms was not […]
For the New York Times, Mira Rojanasakul visualized annual participation in the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which has been running every year since 1995. If you think of the numbers as a proxy for the nations that care about climate change, things don’t look great for North America, but the shifts also provide a […]
The United Nations warned Friday that renewed Russian strikes on Ukraine’s battered energy infrastructure could bring severe hardship and trigger further mass displacement. “If they were to target the energy sector again, this could be a tipping point,” said Matthias Schmale, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine. Such attacks, he added, could “tip the scale […]
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s emerging foreign-policy and national security team, China’s megaport project in Peru, and Israel’s strike on a humanitarian zone in Gaza. Trump’s New Team As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump swiftly assembles his next team, some of his picks for top posts have stunned […]