The World of International Organizations Explained
Voters in Switzerland’s national elections on Sunday delivered a major boost to left-leaning Greens who support urgent U.N.-led climate action and other environmental causes in parliament over the next four years.
Amid a storm of bipartisan criticism, U.S. President Donald Trump reacted quickly on Sunday by rescinding his plan to host the G-7 summit at his own resort in 2020 and promising to immediately begin searching for another site.
Governments and businesses around the world including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are doing far too little to prevent violence from online hate speech, the U.N.’s top independent expert in the field reported on Monday.
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund opened their fall meetings on Monday to survey a global development landscape beset by a slowing world economy, U.S.-China trade war and urgent climate threats spotlighted by the plight of small island nations.
Four senior Democrats in the U.S. Congress warned on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration may withdraw from a 2002 treaty that permits mutual unarmed surveillance flights over 34 nations including Russia and the United States.
The United Nations could run out of money by the end of this month in the worst budget crisis that the world body has faced in at least a decade, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned member nations on Tuesday.
The U.N. refugee agency’s chief Filippo Grandi and its goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett, appealed to governments on Monday to set aside nationalism and end statelessness for around 10 million people worldwide.
Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva took over as managing director of the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday, signaling her five-year term will champion issues such as empowering women and fighting climate change.
Up to 100,000 people turned out on Saturday for Switzerland’s largest-ever climate demonstration to insist on fulfilling the United Nations-brokered goals for reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, organizers said.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan took his nation’s bitter dispute over Jammu and Kashmir to the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, accusing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of cruelty towards Muslims and warning of a potential “bloodbath” in the region.
The U.N. Human Rights Council voted to create a yearlong, independent fact-finding mission on Friday that will investigate cases of suspected human rights abuses in Venezuela over the past five years.
The idea that everyone should have affordable, quality health services is backed by international organizations, including the global pharmaceutical industry’s trade group.
After a year of political turmoil, international organizations enter a new year buffeted by populism, trade wars and power struggles as multilateralism faces rising political hostility.
Propelled by an environmental U.N. chief and support from nearly all G-20 nations, global climate talks are launching in a Polish coal mining city and the public health stakes could not be higher.
Amid growing calls on the U.N. secretary-general to order an independent investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s killing, a review by ARÊTE NEWS found just eight previous instances of a secretary-general issuing such an order since 1963. The last was in 2010, in the wake of Sri Lanka’s civil war.
An independent review of whistleblowing at the United Nations found that nearly half its global staff witnessed misconduct or wrongdoing at work in the past five years, but most of those who did were too afraid to report it.
Russians and Americans both have a history of meddling in foreign elections but they are not equivalent, international organizations and democracy proponents say.
The gambit to allow Iran’s economic opening to the West in exchange for curbs on its nuclear ambitions now depends on its European, Russian and Chinese trading partners, as the U.S. reneges on the 2015 nuclear deal and reimposes sanctions.
Half the world’s 7.7 billion population uses the internet, including 1.15 billion children who can learn and benefit from it but only if they can safely navigate “a dangerous environment in which to grow up,” an international commission said on Tuesday.
A special U.N. fact-finding mission wrapped up two years of investigation urging the international community on Monday to hold Myanmar’s military responsible for “genocidal acts” against the Muslim Rohingya minority.
Top U.N. officials in Yemen demanded accountability on Monday after the deadliest Saudi-led attack this year in a four-year war likely killed more than 100 people and injured dozens of others in a Houthi rebel-run prison.
The United Nations leaned on star power to launch a renewed push on Monday for a legally binding global treaty in 2020 that would promote conservation and sustainable uses of high seas covering almost half the planet.
An independent team of U.N.-sponsored human rights investigators reported on Monday that Myanmar relied on its arms trade with seven nations to fund a military-planned campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against its Muslim Rohingya population.
Yukiya Amano, a veteran diplomat who led the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency and worked to prevent more atomic bombings like those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has died, his agency announced on Monday.
The United Nations’ top human rights official said on Monday that she was “appalled” at conditions forced on adults and children held in detention after crossing into the United States from its southern border with Mexico.
An obscure but important agreement to limit black carbon emissions, a particularly strong climate pollutant that accelerates melting of glaciers and sea ice, entered into force on Monday in Europe and North America.
Forty percent of the United Nations’ 193 member nations committed on Monday to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, and nearly the same amount vowed to take greater action to fight global warming by 2020.
The main U.N. body dealing with trade, investment and development issues began a weeklong forum on Monday examining ways to solve the climate crisis, particularly sea level rise and other risks to small island nations.
Leaders of the Group of Seven rich democracies wrapped up a three-day summit on Monday with little progress in resolving tensions over U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policies, a troubled world economy, the climate crisis and fraying Iranian nuclear deal.
International observers marked the 70th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions on Monday examining their relevance and limits — and ways to boost enforcement of their bedrock international humanitarian laws.
Major powers scrambled on Sunday to salvage Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from it and reimpose sanctions on the Mideast regional power.
After years of planning, an international organization faced off against hundreds of protesters as it tried to start building a billion-dollar telescope on Monday atop sacred Hawaii’s sacred Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano.
