In order to achieve a lasting peace in Afghanistan, the United States needs to keep waging its longest-ever war there. That’s the conclusion of a report published Wednesday by the Afghanistan Study Group.
Long-simmering fears of a military-led subversion of Myanmar’s recent steps toward democracy became reality this week as the nation’s armed forces arrested civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and announced a one-year state of emergency that transfers power to Min Aung Hlaing, the Southeast Asian country’s top general.
Many Democrats in the US Congress and others hailed reports that the Biden administration is imposing a temporary freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, pending a review of billions of dollars worth of weapons deals with the repressive regimes approved during the presidency of Donald Trump.
“I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure—and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
Top United Nations officials have called on nearly two hundred member nations—including the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—to help raise tens of billions of dollars in aid for poor countries facing pandemic, ongoing war, and encroaching famine in what will be a “humanitarian crisis year” in 2021.
Human rights defenders this week urged Bangladesh to stop its relocation of Rohingya refugees to a flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, warning of “grave concerns about independent human rights monitoring.”
A first-of-its-kind international report shows how wealthy countries are the primary drivers of tax revenue loss each year—contributing to US$427 billion in losses to public funding annually.
Warning that without a “seismic shift” in how world governments approach the management of wildlife, land conservation, and public health, the planet could be entering an “era of pandemics,” a United Nations-backed report released this week emphasized that the ability to avoid more public health crises like Covid-19 is entirely within human control.
The global movement working to abolish nuclear weapons celebrated a “historic milestone” after Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, pushing the agreement over the threshold required to enter into force.
Disarmament advocates and nuclear experts responded with alarm to reporting that the Trump administration is urging countries that support a United Nations treaty to ban nuclear weapons to ditch the pact before it reaches the fifty ratifications necessary to enter into force.
