The United Nations has taken a major step in trying to correct a historic wrong. It’s calling for reparations for African nations that were subjected to the transatlantic slave trade, after voting to recognize slavery as a crime against humanity. Though African countries welcome the U.N.’s resolution, other nations, including the U.S., view the vote with skepticism.

What did the UN vote for?

The U.N.’s resolution was spearheaded by Ghana, one of the countries from which an estimated 12.5 million people across the African continent were captured by Europeans during the height of the slave trade. It declares the “trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans” to be the “gravest crime against humanity” due to the “scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.”

Ghana’s president, John Mahama, “called on U.N. members to ‘engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology’ as well as measures of restitution and compensation,” said Bloomberg. The full scope of these reparations remains unclear, and a specific dollar amount wasn’t noted. Some believe reparations “should go beyond direct financial payments to also include developmental aid for countries, the return of colonized resources and the systemic correction of oppressive policies and laws,” said The Associated Press.

Why are some countries against this?

The resolution was largely well-received, passing 123-3. But the three countries to vote “no” were significant: Argentina, Israel and the United States. There were also 52 abstentions, including the United Kingdom and all members of the European Union. The U.S. vote comes as “policy groups, human rights organizations and academics have accused President Donald Trump of minimizing Black history,” said The New York Times.

Critics often point to Trump’s gripe against the Smithsonian, which the president has accused of “focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was’ and not enough on the ‘brightness,’” said the Times. U.S. officials claim the decision to vote “no” on the resolution was not about race. The U.S. “strongly objects to the cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point in an attempt to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea said in a speech to the U.N.

The White House also “strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,” said Negrea. British officials used almost identical language: The U.K. is “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities,” British Ambassador James Kariuki said in his U.N. speech. The U.N. “should approach all historical injustices with the same seriousness, empathy and respect.”

Others felt the move by the United Nations was a necessary one. The resolution was “significant as it represented the furthest the U.N. has ​gone in recognizing transatlantic slavery as a crime against humanity and in calling for reparations,” Justin Hansford, a ⁠law professor at Howard University, said to Reuters. The action “marks the first vote on ​the floor of the U.N. I cannot overemphasize how large of a step that is.” And despite the backlash from some Western nations, the “longstanding calls for reparations,” said Reuters, have “gained momentum in recent years.”

What happened

President Donald Trump Thursday hosted the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, announcing that nine countries had pledged nearly $7 billion to rebuild Gaza and five countries had agreed to contribute thousands of troops to an international stabilization force. Trump also said the U.S. would contribute $10 billion to his board, without disclosing how it would be used or whether Congress had agreed to fund the pledge. Some foreign leaders were among the representatives from the 27 countries that agreed to join the board, while another 21 countries and the European Union sent observers to the meeting.

Who said what

In a 47-minute speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Trump declared the Board of Peace the “most prestigious board ever put together” and said it would “strengthen up the United Nations” and also “almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.” Other speakers laid out some plans for rebuilding Gaza and implementing the teetering Trump-brokered peace plan.

The meeting “was like the United Nations General Assembly, if everything about the United Nations revolved around Donald Trump,” Shawn McCreesh said at The New York Times. Trump “cracked old jokes. Got people to pay money into something he’s named after himself. Hyped up his wife’s movie. Trashed his enemies. Aired familiar grievances. Congratulated himself.” It had the “trappings of another Trump vanity project,” Politico said, but the financial commitments “were concrete,” and despite the “skepticism from Democrats, Europeans, the United Nations and Palestinians,” the Board of Peace “won considerable momentum this week.”

What next?

Among the “major questions likely to test the effectiveness of the board in the months ahead” are how Hamas will disarm and whether Israel will withdraw its troops from the Palestinian enclave, Reuters said.

After several days of bombast and speculation, President Donald Trump debuted his “Board of Peace” to a global audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. Flanked by nearly two dozen heads of state, Trump said that, once fully operational, his board will be able to do “pretty much whatever we want to do” — although, he promised, “we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations.” But as a fuller picture of this multinational body comes into focus, so too do questions about the board’s governance, structure and its potentially world-disrupting aims.

‘Board of action’

While “initially envisioned to shepherd” Trump’s plans for post-war Gaza, senior Trump administration officials framed the board during its Thursday signing ceremony as a “vehicle for broader ambitions,” said The Washington Post. While officials have advertised the board as a “tool to resolve global conflicts” with a scope “rivaling the U.N.,” it is “unclear” if Trump’s pledge to work alongside the U.N. will “ease concerns among some leaders” that he is trying to “sideline the international body.”

“This isn’t the United States,” Trump said Thursday, “this is for the world.” The group “can spread it out to other things” as it works in Gaza. “This is not just a board of peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “This is a board of action.”

Since Trump’s board has “morphed into something far more ambitious” than its initial Gaza-centric impetus, international “skepticism about its membership and mandate” has prompted some countries “usually closest to Washington” to “take a pass,” said The Associated Press. Representatives at the body’s signing ceremony in Davos were “mostly from the Middle East, Asia and South America,” said CNN. The 19 nations present were “far fewer than the roughly 35 that a senior administration official predicted,” and European leaders were “visibly absent.”

Despite initially inviting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to join the nascent group, Trump rescinded the offer after Carney delivered a Davos speech “describing a ‘rupture’” with the U.S. “over tariffs and Greenland,” said USA Today. Similarly, by denying invitations to the African Union and sub-Saharan nations on the continent, Trump has “shown his disdain for Africa yet again,” said Bloomberg.

Simmering tensions between some of the body’s newly signed member-states could ultimately taint the enterprise. After initially spurning the board, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed this week to join, despite recent polling showing that 53% of Israelis “view the Turkish-Qatari involvement in the Board of Peace as an ‘Israeli failure,’” said Al Jazeera.

Lifetime leadership and ‘voluntary’ contributions

Unsurprisingly, Trump is “expected to chair the board” and could potentially “hold the position for life,” said ABC News. The group will also feature “senior political, diplomatic and business figures,” including billionaires Jared Kushner and Marc Rowan, said Fox News. At the same time, initial reports of a required $1 billion buy-in have been downplayed by the White House. Participation beyond any “voluntary” donation “does not carry any mandatory funding obligation,” an anonymous administration official said to the Post.

Ultimately, Trump’s board is a “direct assault on the United Nations,” said Marc Weller, an international law professor at University of Cambridge, to The New York Times. The project is "likely to be seen as a takeover of the world order" by “one individual in his own image.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. participation in dozens of international organizations, including the landmark United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The White House said Trump determined that the 66 treaties and organizations, 31 of which are U.N. entities, “operate contrary to U.S. national interests.”

Who said what

Many of the organizations Trump is targeting are obscure or narrow in focus, like the International Cotton Advisory Committee, but the 1992 UNFCCC is the “bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change,” The New York Times said. The U.S. withdrawal, “amid the hottest decade ever recorded,” appears to be Trump’s “latest attempt to destabilize global climate cooperation,” Politico said.

Making the U.S. the “only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty” is “shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish,” said former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in a statement. Trump is “forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy.” Other organizations on Trump’s withdrawal list are the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the gender equality–focused UN Women and the U.N.'s Population Fund for family planning and maternal health, International Law Commission and Peacebuilding Commission.

What next?

The U.S. exit from the UNFCCC, unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1992, will take effect a year after Trump files formal notice with the U.N. Trump’s second-term withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, which is undergirded by the UNFCCC, becomes official on Jan. 20. The U.S. is also the only country to pull out of the Paris deal.

The main concern for Zimbabwe’s driving instructors is not teaching the highway code to their students but making sure they “survive some of the world’s deadliest roads”, said The Associated Press.

In 2024, the country recorded more than 2,000 deaths from road traffic accidents and more than 10,000 injuries, according to the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe. Africa as a whole has the “world’s highest fatality rate at 26.6 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with a global average of about 18”, said AP. And Zimbabwe has one of the highest rates – nearly 30 deaths per 100,000 people – within Africa.

‘Pothole-riddled reality’

Zimbabwe was once known for “orderly traffic and well kept roads” but its network has “deteriorated since the 2000s”. A series of economic crises has taken its toll on road infrastructure, while “weakened” enforcement of maintenance has led to “traffic chaos”.

Despite attempts to bolster police presence on the roads, “dangerous driving remains deeply entrenched”. Transport minister Felix Mhona told the country’s Senate that over 90% of road accidents are attributable to human error, said The Herald.

Deaths, injuries and damage from road traffic accidents constitute a “devastating and predictable public health disaster”. Such is the scale of the problem that motorists have been “holding prayers at blackspots”, looking for “divine intervention to tame the carnage” and to ward off “avenging spirits”, said News Day.

When Nigerian newspaper Vanguard recently placed Zimbabwe in the top 10 of the best road networks in Africa, “many Zimbabweans laughed in disbelief”, said Tendai Ruben Mbofana in The Zimbabwean. Road users are used to a “pothole-riddled reality” caused by “years of underfunding, corruption, weak maintenance cultures, and political mismanagement”. In some places, the deterioration has been so marked that roads are left “resembling post-conflict zones”.

‘Strikingly inadequate’ enforcement

To promote road safety, Zimbabwean police have begun using body cameras and breathalysers, and want a “review of the driver licensing system”, said AP. This would include improvements to training programmes, public information campaigns to raise awareness of reckless driving, and tougher enforcement, including deducting points for more driving offences.

The Zimbabwean government is targeting tourist routes for improvement, hoping the investment will “deliver a key economic benefit” for the country and its struggling economy, said Global Highways. One example is the road linking Beitbridge, on the South African border, with Bulawayo and the ever-popular Victoria Falls. The Zimbabwe Transport Ministry has, however, “exceeded its planned budget”, meaning “there are concerns as to how future works will be funded”.

“While road rehabilitation is a positive step, it cannot solve the problem alone,” said The Herald. The government has shown it can take hardline legislative stances – such as its recent strategy to tackle drug trafficking and substance abuse – and it is essential that the same “model of commitment and resource intensity” is “replicated” in the road safety sector.

New road safety policies have been introduced but their enforcement is “strikingly inadequate”. Inconsistent action by the authorities has led to drivers and passengers feeling “empowered to flout safety rules without fear of consequence”.

The Italian parliament has voted unanimously to introduce the crime of femicide – distinct from murder and punished with a life sentence.

Previous attempts to pass a law that specifically criminalised the murder of a woman motivated by her sex had failed to gather enough support. Then the headline-dominating murder of Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend in November 2023 “shocked the country into action”, said the BBC.

Over 90% of the 116 women murdered in Italy last year were killed because of their sex, according to the national statistics agency. After this week’s parliamentary debate, during which many MPs wore red ribbons in memory of the female victims of male violence, Italy becomes one of the few countries in the world – and only the fourth in the EU – to categorise femicide as a distinct crime.

How widespread is femicide?

Every 10 minutes, a woman or girl somewhere in the world is killed because she is female, according to a newly published UN Women report on femicide. Last year, an estimated 83,000 women and girls were killed deliberately – with nearly 60% murdered at the hands of an intimate partner or family member. By contrast, only 11% of male homicides that year were carried out by an intimate partner or family member.

There is no real sign of global progress in addressing the issue, said the UN, with few countries even recording and reporting their femicide statistics. We “need better prevention strategies and criminal justice responses to femicide”, said John Brandolino of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Why has Italy made the change now?

In Italy recently, there has been a series of killings and other violence targeting women. “High-profile cases”, such as Cecchettin’s murder, “have been key in widespread public outcry and debate about the causes of violence against women in Italy’s patriarchal culture”, said The Associated Press.

Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, attracted widespread media attention with her view on Giulia’s murder. She said the perpetrator was not a monster but merely the “healthy son” of a patriarchal society. “They were words that brought crowds out across Italy demanding change,” said the BBC.

What will the new Italian law change?

“In a symbolic move”, the bill was passed on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, said the BBC. The femicide law will apply to murders which are “an act of hatred, discrimination, domination, control, or subjugation of a woman as a woman” or that occur when she breaks off a relationship or to “limit her individual freedoms”.

The law does have its critics, who think the definitions of femicide are too vague and will be hard to prove. And even its backers agree that Italy still needs broader measures to counter sex-based violence and abuse. A separate measure to define sex without consent as rape, also “expected to get final approval” this week, “has been unexpectedly stalled” by the far-right League, said The Guardian. It would leave “room for women and men to use a vague law for personal vendettas without any abuse taking place”, said League leader and deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini. Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, his coalition ally, criticised the delay, saying it is “women paying the price”.

What happened

The United Nations Security Council Monday voted 13-0 to endorse President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for peace in Gaza. Russia and China abstained, saying the U.S. resolution did not adequately pave the way for Palestinian self-determination, but they did not veto the plan. Hamas objected, saying the disarmament mandate of the newly authorized international stabilization force “strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”

Who said what

The U.S. resolution “enshrines” Trump’s “complete plan in international law,” The Washington Post said. Its “vaguely defined Board of Peace, headed by Trump with membership chosen by him,” will “control virtually every aspect from security and governance to reconstruction of Gaza” through at least 2027.

The board will supervise a “technocratic, apolitical committee of competent Palestinians” to run “day-to-day operations” in Gaza, the resolution said. It will also establish an international force to take over security in the half of the enclave not occupied by Israel, and ensure the “process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip” and the “permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups.”

Israel is instructed to withdraw from Gaza in stages, but the plan “is — in short — a hornet’s nest,” Tim Lister and Nic Robertson said at CNN. “The sequencing will be hard to manage” and disarming Hamas will be “complex.” The “Muslim and Arab countries expected to send soldiers to Gaza — Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates” — said they first needed U.N. Security Council authorization to ensure “their troops would not be viewed by their own populations as occupiers in Gaza,” The New York Times said.

What next?

In a social media post, Trump offered his “congratulations to the World on the incredible Vote” and said it “will go down as one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations” and “lead to further Peace all over the World.” It was a “significant diplomatic victory for Trump’s ambitions to bring peace to the Middle East,” The Wall Street Journal said. But the resolution “still leaves questions about the future of Gaza unanswered, including whether there is a credible path to Palestinian statehood.”

The world has failed to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the goal set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the UN secretary general has said.

Speaking ahead of the Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the cap, with “devastating consequences” that include “tipping points” in the Amazon, Greenland, western Antarctica and the coral reefs.

What has happened since Paris?

The Paris Agreement, signed by almost 200 countries, is “at the heart of the international commitment to tackle rising global temperatures”, said the BBC.

Signatories committed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2C above those recorded in pre-industrial times, generally considered to mean the late 19th century. It also aimed to achieve balance between the amount of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere and those that are removed – known as net zero – by the second half of the century.

Progress has undoubtedly been made over the past decade, said Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in The Economist.

Global carbon dioxide emissions that were rising by almost 2% per year in 2015, have since slowed to 0.3%, while fossil-fuel demand has “plateaued and is falling in several large economies, including China”. The world was on course to warm by as much as 4C by 2100. Today, projections hover near 2.6C “still dangerously high, but a profound course correction that must now deepen, and fast”.

The “unprecedented economic transformation” towards a greener global economy, is “now unmistakably under way, despite a global pandemic, war, Brexit and two Trump presidencies”.

Yet despite this, 2024 marked the first year global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5C threshold.

Can humanity do more?

While one year alone of over-shooting the 1.5C target “doesn’t mean that threshold has been irreversibly breached”, said Time, research published by the Yale School of the Environment suggests that it likely means the world will exceed the target over the next 20 years. A separate study found there was a 90% likelihood emissions will peak in 2045, two decades after they were meant to.

Guterres has, however, refused to give up on the target set in Paris. “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible”, he told The Guardian, saying it may still be possible to bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5C by the end of the century.

With the planet’s past 10 years among the hottest on record, this requires countries to meet or exceed their individual climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

Up to now, “while they helped some nations make progress in emissions reduction, it hasn’t been enough to offset high economic growth,” Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington professor emeritus of statistics and sociology, told Time.

Failure to stick to the 1.5C threshold will “challenge fundamental aspects of nationhood and identity”, said the Chatham House think tank. It will also “reshape systems that underpin modern society, including finance”.

The stakes heading into COP30 could not be higher.

Keir Starmer has told his fellow world leaders at Cop30 that the “consensus is gone” when it comes to tackling climate change as the lack of any high-level US representatives at the talks has led to accusations that the event will have little effect.

Starmer insisted the UK was “all-in” when it comes to the fight against climate change and described green policies as a “win-win”, despite the fact that he has faced “pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticised Britain’s net zero agenda”, said ITV News science correspondent Martin Stew.

The Brazilian city of Belém, the gateway to the Amazon, is hosting delegations from more than 190 countries for Cop30. But the absence of the Trump administration is a “watershed moment”, said EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “We’re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world,” Hoekstra told Bloomberg. “It is the second-largest emitter. So if a player of that magnitude basically says, ‘Well, I’m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,’ clearly that does damage.”

What did the commentators say?

“Every year people ask what difference Cop will make, given the thousands of flights that come along with it,” said Sky News. But this year, “those questions have grown louder”, coming at a “particularly precarious time for climate action”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned that the world has failed to hold the average global temperature at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the commitment of the Paris climate agreement a decade ago. Yet “fewer than 60” world leaders have registered to attend Cop30, compared with more than 80 at 2024’s Cop29 in Baku, and more than 150 in Dubai the year before. There is a “serious lack of accommodation” in the impoverished city of Belém; what’s left is prohibitively expensive. Some “furious countries even lobbied Brazil to switch cities”.

The US has sent delegations to climate summits over the past three decades, even when they had “scant desire” to address global warming, said The Guardian’s environment reporter Oliver Milman. But this is a “much more aggressive administration”, said Todd Stern, lead climate negotiator for the US under Barack Obama. In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Trump called climate change the world’s “greatest con job”. One former state department official said Cop30 could actually stand a better chance of a stronger climate agreement if the US does not attend. “If the choice is no US or a US that is there as a spoiler, to wreck and disrupt things, then I think most countries would prefer there to be no US.”

Indeed, the decision is “alleviating some concern” that “Washington would send a team to scupper the talks”, said Reuters. Last month, the administration threatened to “retaliate against nations” if they voted for a proposal put forward by the UN’s shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping. That “led a majority of countries” at the agency to vote to postpone the decision. The US also “pressured countries” negotiating the first global plastics treaty not to back an agreement to cap plastic production.

It’s not just the US that’s undermining the summit, said Politico. Around 100 of the 195 nations that signed the Paris Agreement missed the September deadline to submit their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), or plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, to the UN. That includes the EU.

China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, set a target to cut economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7% – an NDC “largely seen as modest”, said Bloomberg. “Most experts were hoping for an NDC north of 30%,” said Hoekstra. Even with “all the diplomatic language I would love to wrap around that, it’s hard to see how that is enough”.

What next?

Cop30 organisers have not laid out a main goal or deal going into the talks. The summit will instead “focus on implementation, or turning policies into tangible outcomes”, said Bloomberg.

Of the countries that did submit their NDCs by the deadline, the new plans are of a “much higher quality than the previous ones”, said Sky News. They mean that a “clear” fall in global greenhouse gas emissions is on the horizon for the first time, according to the UN. They are aided by the “dramatic and rapid roll-out of solar and wind power”. “More plans are expected to be published during Cop30, bringing some hope to the summit.”

China’s “remarkable progress on clean energy”, which has “soared beyond expectations”, leads some to hope that China will “take on a more proactive role in the talks”. It’s not clear whether there will be “major takeaways from this year’s summit”, but “pulling off an international meeting at a time of strained global relations will be a success in and of itself”.

The UN has designated the civil war in Sudan the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with 13 million people forced to flee their homes and widespread reports of war crimes targeting civilians.

As the bloody power struggle intensifies, the United Arab Emirates has been accused of stalling peace efforts in the region. Abu Dhabi is the “main backer” of the Rapid Support Forces, an unnamed intelligence officer in the militia told Sky News. “In the beginning, it was the Russians – Wagner and the state. Now, they tell me it is the UAE supporting the RSF.”

Weapons from the UAE are reportedly arriving by plane via Darfur and Chad.

What did the commentators say?

“The slaughter in Sudan is the horror the world swore would not happen again,” said The Sunday Times. But as the UAE allegedly “funnels” weapons and funds to the RSF, it “feels as though history’s nightmare is returning”.

Following the “bloody aftermath” of the takeover of El Fasher by the RSF, Abu Dhabi has been dragged into the “spotlight”, accused of having a central role in the “metastasising civil war”, said the Financial Times.

During the Biden and Trump administrations – the UAE has been an “important ally” to both – there has been a noticeable silence. But “the latest atrocities have raised hackles in Washington”. Two Democratic representatives have reintroduced an act to Congress that would “halt US weapons exports to the UAE until it provided evidence it has ceased support for the militia”. The Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee has called on Donald Trump to designate the RSF a terrorist organisation.

Disentangling the UAE from the RSF may be difficult, given Abu Dhabi’s vested interest in the region, said Middle East Eye. Sudan presents the UAE with an “arena” in which to “project its power” across the Red Sea and also a potential gateway to east Africa. Its “untapped gold resources” are also appealing to the UAE, which has emerged as a “global trading hub in gold”, as it attempts to diversify its financial portfolio away from oil.

The RSF leader – Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti – and his family reportedly own a gold company that “operates on lands seized by the RSF in Darfur in 2017”. One of his brothers, Algoney Dagalo, is a “businessman based in the UAE”.

What next?

Although it continues to deny directly funding and supplying the RSF, the UAE’s “diplomatic machine is for the first time admitting to mistakes in its Sudan policy”, a sign that the “reputational damage” is beginning to bite, said The Guardian.

On Sunday, a UAE representative said that the emirate and others, in hindsight, should have imposed sanctions on Sudan following the 2021 military coup partially led by the RSF. The admission indicates that the Gulf state believes “it must distance itself from the RSF, the force it so nurtured”.

“The fall of El Fasher marks a turning point,” said The Sunday Times. If no resolution can be reached “Sudan risks partition”, a scenario that “does not suggest any imminent end to the killing. On the contrary, in fact.”

The United Nations has 193 members and an annual general budget of $3.72 billion. Its peacekeeping forces have 60,000 military personnel stationed around the globe. However, as it marks its 80th birthday, the organisation increasingly seems like a spectator in a might-is-right world.

How was the UN created?

Initial planning began in 1939, when it became clear that the League of Nations had failed in its job of preventing another world war. The term “united nations” was first used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a 1942 declaration by 26 nations that pledged to fight against the Axis powers.

The UN’s basic shape was hammered out by “the Big Four” – the US, the USSR, Britain and China – at a conference in Washington DC in late 1944 – and agreed by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference a few months later. In April 1945, representatives of 50 nations (and 80% of the world’s population), met at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation in San Francisco to draft and ratify the Charter. Pledging to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, it came into force on 24 October 1945.

What does it look like today?

The UN asserts that it is “neither a supra-state nor a government of governments”. Rather, it sees itself as a forum for international dialogue and cooperation. Its Charter sets out four main purposes, from maintaining peace and security to promoting social and cultural cooperation.

It retains the basic structure agreed at Yalta. The General Assembly is “the world’s parliament”, where each nation can discuss important issues and vote on equal terms. But the real power lies with the Security Council, which is designed to take “prompt and effective action” in response to any emergency; it can order sanctions, blockades and military action to uphold decisions. It is comprised of the “Big Five” permanent members (the “Big Four” plus France), each of which has the power of veto, and ten temporary members (which do not).

What has the UN achieved?

It has codified a body of international laws and forged the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It played an important part in decolonisation – Article 1 of the Charter recognised the right of self-determination – and is credited with brokering more than 170 peace settlements; its peacekeeping forces have helped end conflicts from Colombia to Sierra Leone, Burundi to Cambodia.

The WHO, a UN agency, played a leading role in the eradication of smallpox in 1980, a disease that had killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. It has helped broker international deals, such as the 1970 Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty and the Paris Climate Accords. No nation has used a nuclear bomb since 1945; to its supporters, the UN is still the best defence against world war.

Have there been failures, too?

Certainly. The UN’s nadir arguably came in 1994, when peacekeepers in Rwanda failed to prevent the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. A year later, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs while Dutch peacekeeping troops stood by helplessly. The UN has also been plagued by allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers, known as “Blue Berets”. More fundamentally, though, the UN’s own structures – primarily the Security Council veto – often prevent action.

How does the veto cause problems?

The veto ensured the participation of the major powers in the UN (the US had never joined the League of Nations). But the flipside is that the Security Council has been paralysed by vetoes. In total, more than 320 resolutions have been vetoed – most often by Russia (or the USSR) and the US, though China is now a frequent blocker. The USSR, for instance, vetoed objections to its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan; the US has vetoed nearly 50 resolutions on Israel alone. British, French and US vetoes stopped the UN condemning Apartheid in South Africa.

Indeed, arguably the Security Council has worked only as originally intended twice. Once was when South Korea was invaded by the North in 1950 – and then only because the USSR was boycotting the UN, and China had yet to take the Security Council seat from the Republic of China (Taiwan). The second was after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990, at a brief high-point in East-West relations. But though the UN has always wrestled with such structural flaws, it is now facing difficulties of potentially even greater magnitude.

Why is it in difficulties now?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made a mockery of the principle of respect for national borders. Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza proceeded despite resolutions demanding a ceasefire from the General Assembly, and thunderous condemnations from the UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The UN has seemed unable even to intervene in wars in which great powers are not involved, such as Sudan’s civil war.

Developing countries regard it as being biased in favour of the West, while Brazil, Russia, India and China are promoting the Brics economic club as a potential rival. And perhaps most damagingly, US conservatives regard the UN as both irrelevant and too partial to progressive causes.

Why is that so damaging?

Because the UN has always relied so heavily on American power and money (it funds over 20% of the UN’s regular budget). The Trump administration is now planning a more than 80% reduction in UN funding next year. The US is already withdrawing from the Paris climate deal, the WHO and Unesco, among other organisations. Republican lawmakers have introduced more than 20 pieces of legislation targeting the UN, and US participation in it.

Though it retains considerable global legitimacy, and its programmes still perform crucial roles around the world, the UN is – financially and operationally – in deep crisis.

“A battle is brewing over who will run the wasteland” of Gaza, as we approach the two-year anniversary of the 7 October attacks, said The Economist. “By rights, no one should want” Gaza, nor the task of running it after being reduced to a “hellscape”, where “half a million” people were forced out of Gaza City last week.

But the figure who has emerged as a serious, if controversial, candidate for post-war leadership is the 72-year-old former British prime minister Tony Blair. Under plans reportedly backed by the US, Blair would take charge of a “supervisory body” called the Gaza International Transitional Authority, to serve as the “supreme political and legal authority” for up to five years, said The Independent.

The former PM has been drafting a “plan for the days after a ceasefire in Gaza with Jared Kushner”, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Blair met Kushner, along with the US president and his special envoy Steve Witkoff at the White House in August to discuss matters, said The Times. According to reports, this plan involved Blair heading a secretariat of up to 25 people “running the territory”.

What did the commentators say?

With years of experience in the region, acting as a Middle East peace envoy for the “Quartet” (the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia), Blair and his plan “may be Gaza’s best hope”, said The Telegraph.

His position is unique. Critics believe his involvement in the Iraq invasion means he “may not be the obvious name to turn to”, but he is “one of the few international figures to be respected by both sides”. This could be a “fitting final chapter” for Blair, who has long been searching for a “meaningful role” since his time in office ended in 2007.

However, Blair’s impact in the region is far from untainted. His decision to commit British forces to Iraq in 2003 was “heavily criticised” in the official inquiry, revealing that he acted on “flawed intelligence”, carrying out offensives “without certainty about the production of weapons of mass destruction” in the region, said the BBC.

The plan is not without opposition and it will “face an uphill battle getting the extreme-right members of Israel’s cabinet on board”, said The Independent.

Reports suggest the “Blair plan” is “anchored on the dismantling of Hamas”. The Palestinian Authority (PA) would “have a role” in the transitional administration, “albeit a diminished one at the start”.

However, both European and Arab states are against “international trusteeship” in Gaza, fearing it could “marginalise the Palestinians and lack legitimacy in the eyes of Gazans”, said the Financial Times. Instead, Gazans seek a committee run by “Palestinian technocrats”.

What next?

Echoes of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 still ring, said The Economist. Then, British forces “conquered Gaza, quickly… and stayed there for 30 years”. Some Palestinians fear “Britain is repeating the exercise”.

With a reputation that “hardly endears” Blair in the region, gaining approval from PA President Mahmoud Abbas “will be hard”, as authorities anticipate that “another occupation beckons”.

The Blair plan is based on the presumption that there will “be no further Israeli annexations in the West Bank”, said The Guardian. To complicate matters further, “much might rest on the definition of annexation”: unless this can be achieved, we may be left with a “diplomatic mirage” instead of an international “breakthrough”.

What happened

President Donald Trump Tuesday sharply criticized the United Nations, renewable energy and global migration in an extended speech before the U.N. General Assembly in New York, then held more cordial meetings with world leaders. After huddling with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump called Russia a “paper tiger” and said with U.S. weapons and European support, Kyiv could “fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” He also said NATO countries should shoot down any Russian aircraft that crosses into their airspace.

Who said what

Trump’s 56-minute speech to the General Assembly — almost four times his allotted 15 minutes — “shifted from subject to subject” as he “often made unsubstantiated or contradictory claims,” The Wall Street Journal said. His lecture was “filled with grievances about ongoing wars, windmills and malfunctioning escalators,” but it was his “attacks against what he called a ‘double-tailed monster’” of immigration and “so-called green, renewable energy” that “rang loudest” as he berated fellow leaders. “I’m really good at this stuff,” Trump said. “Your countries are going to hell.”

His “head-spinning pivot” on Ukraine and Russia was what really caught everyone by surprise, though, The New York Times said. “After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation,” Trump said on social media, Ukraine’s recovery of its “original borders” is “very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.” The U.S. “will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them,” he added. “Good luck to all!”

What next?

The “strengthened support from Trump, if it sticks, is a huge win for Zelenskyy,” The Associated Press said. And Trump’s “dismissal” of Russia’s military and economic might “will hurt” President Vladimir Putin, who craves being seen as a “global player,” the BBC said. “But one should always treat Trump’s words with a pinch of salt.” This is Trump’s “hardest” stance against Moscow yet, a European Union official told Politico. “But he’s always one Putin call away from doing something not great.”

What happened

Israel’s assault on Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council said yesterday. The panel’s 72-page report was released as Israeli forces launched a major ground assault on Gaza City, forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee south. 

Who said what

The three-member commission’s “deeply documented” and “painstaking legal analysis” found that Israeli leaders had committed “four of the five ‘genocidal acts’” prohibited under the U.N. Genocide Convention, The Associated Press said. “Genocide accusations are especially sensitive in Israel,” where “memories of the Holocaust” — the Nazi genocide against the Jews that prompted the 1948 convention — “are important in the country’s national identity.”

Israel’s government vehemently rejected the genocide accusation, calling the report “fake” and “libelous.” The panel “does not speak for the U.N.,” The Washington Post said, but its finding “echoes assessments by a growing group of governments and Israeli and international human rights organizations,” including the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

What next?

The international community’s “obligation to prevent genocide wherever it occurs” is “not optional,” commission chair Navi Pillay, a former judge on the Rwanda genocide tribunals, said at The New York Times. It “requires action,” including “halting the transfer of weapons” used in genocidal acts and “using all available diplomatic and legal means to stop the killing.” Pillay’s panel has no power to act, the AP said, but its findings “could be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court or the U.N.’s International Court of Justice,” which is currently “hearing a genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel.”

A United Nations commission of inquiry’s finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza has been described as a landmark moment, after at least 64,964 people have been killed in the occupied Palestinian territories in almost two years of war.

The commission cited statements by Israeli leaders, and the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces, as evidence of genocidal intent, and said its latest report on the war was “the strongest and most authoritative UN finding to date”.

Israel firmly denies accusations of genocide and insists it’s conducting the war in Gaza in self-defence and in accordance with international law.

What did the commentators say?

The findings will have a “profound impact”, said Paul Nuki in The Telegraph, because they will “make it harder” for governments to argue that sanctions are not needed when lawyers can point to the report of an independent UN commission.

The British government has previously said it hasn’t concluded that Israel is acting with genocidal intent, but that position will now “almost certainly be challenged” in the UK courts.

Although the reports are “not formally binding” for the work of international courts, they have a “strong persuasive value”, Professor Triestino Mariniello, an international law expert, told the Palestine Chronicle.

The International Court of Justice, which is currently hearing a case of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa, “cannot ignore” what the commissioners have said. And the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court “should expand the scope” of its investigations and “finally cover the crime of genocide”. This gives “unprecedented legal and political weight to the charge of genocide in Gaza”.

The findings will “feed into the growing international condemnation” of Israel’s conduct, said Jeremy Bowen on the BBC, as it also comes from Israel’s “traditional Western allies” and the “Gulf Arab monarchies which normalised relations with Israel in the Abraham Accords”.

“Legally, it is hard to prove the crime of genocide,” but as the war in Gaza is “continuing and perhaps escalating further”, the report is “going to deepen international divisions”.

Many Western countries, including the UK, have said that only a court can rule on whether genocide has been committed, said Bel Trew in The Independent, but it may “take a decade” for the International Court of Justice to rule. By then, there “won’t be much of Gaza – or its residents – left”.

What next?

As Israel launches its ground offensive in Gaza City, the report is “validation” for Palestinians, said Malak Benslama-Dabdoub, a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway University of London, on The Conversation. “For international law, it is a test.”

The verdict will either trigger “real accountability”, including sanctions, embargoes and prosecutions, “or it exposes the gap between lofty promises and political reality”.

Members of an anti-Islamic US biker gang are helping run the security operations at controversial humanitarian aid sites in Gaza.

At least seven members of the Infidels MC gang are in leading roles overseeing the sites backed by Israel and the Trump administration, at which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.

‘Patriotic Americans’

Set up in 2006 by US military veterans of the Iraq war, Infidels MC members regard themselves as modern Crusaders, using the Crusader cross as their symbol.

The group once held a pig roast in what it called “defiance” of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and rejects the “radical jihadist movement”, according to its mission statement. Its members vow that it “will support the fight against terrorism as military members, contractors in support of the military, and as patriotic Americans supporting our fighting forces from the homeland”. It calls for new members who want to fight “against Islamic extremism”.

The group’s connection with UG Solutions, a private contractor providing security at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites, was first reported last month by Zeteo. It revealed that Johnny Mulford, an alleged Infidels member also known as “Taz”, was the lead contact for UG Solutions.

When BBC investigative reporters emailed Mulford to ask about the link between UG Solutions and Infidels MC, he hit “reply all” and told members not to respond to the broadcaster, accidentally revealing the identities of 10 Infidels working in Gaza.

According to a former contractor, at least 40 of about 320 people hired to work for UG Solutions in Gaza were recruited from Infidels MC, seven of them in senior positions. The firm confirmed that it doesn’t screen people out for what it called “personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance”.

‘Controversial’ linchpin

In response to a BBC enquiry about the presence of Infidels MC at the site, the GHF said it has “a zero-tolerance policy for any hateful, discriminatory biases or conduct”.

The foundation has become the controversial “linchpin” of an aid system designed to “wrest distribution away” from the UN organisations that have done most of the aid work in the region since the war began in 2023, said The Associated Press.

It’s not clear who is funding the GHF, which is backed by Israel and the US. It gained control of aid distribution operations after Israel demanded an alternative plan for delivering aid, accusing Hamas of siphoning off a significant portion of the aid entering Gaza, but the UN has denied that there has been any significant diversion of aid to Hamas. It says the GHF allows Israel to use food as a weapon, violates humanitarian principles and is ineffective at delivering aid.

US senators have raised concerns over rising death tolls near aid sites, and the foundation’s “apparent coordination” with the Israeli army and its “reported use” of private military contractors linked to intelligence operations, said The Guardian.

What happened

The United Nations Security Council Thursday voted unanimously to wind down its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon by the end of 2026, after nearly five decades of operation. The mandate for the U.N.'s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), renewed annually since 1978, had been set to expire on Sunday.

Who said what

UNIFIL, "initially created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops" after Israel's 1978 invasion, has "played a significant role in monitoring the security situation" in southern Lebanon for decades, said The Associated Press. It has also "drawn criticism from both sides" and from the Trump administration, which views UNIFIL as a "waste of money." Israel considers the U.N. force "toothless," The New York Times said, while Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that has "long dominated" southern Lebanon, sees UNIFIL "as sympathetic to Israel."

The Trump administration had "pushed for an end to UNIFIL since taking office in January and has already overseen cuts in U.S. funding to the force," Al Jazeera said. But Lebanon and European governments pushed back against a quick dissolution, arguing that Lebanon's military is not yet ready to take over the area, giving Hezbollah a window to regroup from last year's drubbing by Israel.

What next?

In January 2027, UNIFIL will begin a yearlong "orderly and safe drawdown and withdrawal" of its 10,800 personnel and equipment from Lebanon, the U.N. said. The goal is to leave "Lebanon fully in charge of southern security."

In 2022, with annual plastic production reaching nearly half a million tonnes, many countries came to an agreement that only a global effort could tackle the problem.

Those 175 nations committed to creating the first legally binding treaty on plastics pollution by the end of 2024. But the fifth round of UN-led talks, held in South Korea last year, "fell apart" when fossil fuel producing nations "blocked" an attempt to limit production, said the Financial Times.

Today, delegates are gathering in Geneva for another shot at the fifth meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Plastics (INC-5.2), to try to "get a deal over the line", said the BBC. But resistance from powerful petrostates and fossil fuel companies casts doubt over the chance of reaching a consensus.

What did the commentators say?

"Plastics are a grave, growing and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health," a team of experts warned ahead of the conference. Just three chemicals widely used in plastics cause more than $1.5 trillion (£1.1 trillion) in health-related damages every year, said the review in The Lancet. The key culprit: the explosion in plastic production.

This week, the so-called "High Ambition Coalition" of more than 100 countries (including the UK) is arguing for "a full lifecycle approach" with legal global limits on plastic production and "phasing out toxic chemicals", said Euronews.

But there is strong opposition from oil-producing nations as 99% of plastic is made from fossil fuels. The "like-minded countries", led by Saudi Arabia and including Russia, China, Iran and the US, want a voluntary treaty focused on waste management, especially recycling – although, according to a 2022 report by the OECD, less than 10% of plastic is recycled, thanks to costs and lack of infrastructure.

But the "major petrostates" argue that there is no need to limit production if the end product is tackled. That might be because global oil demand is "expected to peak in the next few years", said the BBC, amid the push towards renewable energy. That could "leave plastic as one of the few growth markets for the oil industry", which means any efforts to limit production could "pose short-term economic damage to the petrostates".

Insiders have also described a "total infiltration" of the negotiations by "vested industrial interests and corporate lobbyists", said The Guardian. They say polluters are "exerting too much power, not just within the negotiations but also within the UN Environment Programme (Unep), which oversees the negotiations". One source said they were "horrified" by the industry's influence, calling it "corporate capture".

A "flood" of lobbyists are attending this week's talks, "far outnumbering" delegations and scientists, to assist petrostates in "blocking" the cap on plastic production. The problem is that industry players have "deep pockets and clear financial interests", while smaller countries and NGOs cannot afford to send delegates.

Saudi Arabia, the world's second biggest oil producer behind the US and – via its state-owned oil company Aramco – owner of Sabic, one of the world's biggest producers of plastic, "stands out as a block" to an effective treaty. It has a "close relationship" with Unep and is a massive donor.

A new report by Greenpeace UK argued that the world's largest fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are also working to "derail" the treaty. Corporations like ExxonMobil, Shell, INEOS and Dow are "lobbying heavily to weaken" it, while simultaneously expanding production and making "staggering profits".

"There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the global plastics treaty negotiations: the same fossil fuel and petrochemical companies that profit from plastic pollution are being allowed to shape the treaty designed to end it."

What next?

With plastic production possibly tripling by 2060, a global treaty represents "our best – and possibly only – chance to change course", said Greenpeace.

Most UN agreements are reached by consensus – but that "no longer seems likely" in this case, said Mongabay. The summit's outcome "remains highly uncertain", especially as the oil- and plastic-producing countries have effectively vetoed majority agreements.

There is little hope of winning over petrostates, even "moderate" ones like Brazil, on a "virgin plastic production cap" – especially as the Trump administration is "generally opposed to global environmental agreements", said the FT. But there is "more widespread support" for phasing out chemicals harmful to humans. The health angle is "expected to play a large role" in the talks.

What happened

The chief United Nations nuclear inspector, Rafael Grossi, told CBS News Sunday that Iran could be enriching uranium again in a "matter of months." President Donald Trump, meanwhile, repeated on Fox News his initial assertion that Tehran's nuclear program was "obliterated like nobody's ever seen before," arguing that the bunker-buster bomb strikes he had ordered a week earlier "meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time."

Who said what

Trump has been "furious about news coverage that has deviated from his claims about the bombing mission," especially reporting on a Defense Intelligence Agency initial damage verdict similar to Grossi's, The Washington Post said. In a new piece of "preliminary information" undercutting Trump's narrative, an intercepted communication recorded Iranian officials privately wondering why the U.S. attack was "not as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated," four U.S. officials familiar with the classified intelligence told the Post.

Former U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who helped negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal Trump scrapped, said Sunday that a new deal was critical. He said it was likely Iran still retained "some stockpiles of enriched uranium" and centrifuges and called for a "full battle-damage" assessment "unfiltered from political interference."

What next?

Western governments are "scrambling to determine what's become" of Iran's supply of enriched uranium, Reuters said. Trump told Fox News he believed it was destroyed in the strike, while Grossi confirmed that Iran told his International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors it had planned to safeguard some of its nuclear materials, presumably including highly enriched uranium, before the U.S. attack.

Israel has for decades vocally identified Iran's nuclear ambitions as the greatest threat to the existence of the Jewish state. And for their part, since the creation of the Islamic Republic in the late 1970s, Iran's rulers have repeatedly pledged to destroy Israel.

After nearly half a century of tensions, last night's Israeli air strikes on Iran have left the two nations teetering on the brink of all-out war. So why has Israel chosen this moment to attack its historical nemesis?

Netanyahu's long march

The attacks have been a long time coming. Benjamin Netanyahu "has built a career on the popular fears of Iran's nuclear programme and ambitions", said The New Arab in 2015.

As a parliamentarian in 1992, Netanyahu warned the Knesset that Iran could reach nuclear weapons capability in "three to five years". Three years later, he repeated the claim that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in "three to five years".

In 2009, a US State Department diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks revealed that Netanyahu was telling Washington that Iran was "probably one or two years away" from developing functioning nuclear weapons. In 2012 he told the United Nations General Assembly that Iran was just one year away from having a nuclear bomb.

Speaking to The Atlantic in 2010, Netanyahu "framed the Iranian [nuclear] programme as a threat not only to Israel but to all of Western civilisation", telling the magazine: "You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs."

Iran's weakness

Previously, Israel had feared that Hamas and Hezbollah, militant proxies for the Iranian regime with a large ground presence in Gaza and Lebanon, would form part of any military response to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

That picture has changed since the 7 October attacks; Iran has been "weakened" by the war in Gaza and by violence in Lebanon where the once-powerful militias have been "decimated", said The New York Times. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria, also an ally of Tehran, has further reduced the reach of what Netanyahu has called the Iranian "octopus".

Israeli strikes against Iran's air defences last October "weakened their capabilities, allowing Israeli fighter jets to more safely launch a new mass attack".

Iran's nuclear violations

The new attack came 24 hours after the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in almost 20 years because of its refusal to disclose information about its nuclear plans.

Tehran responded by announcing it would ramp up its nuclear activities, warning it had "no option but to respond". Netanyahu claimed an intelligence assessment had found that Iran would be able to produce nuclear weapons "within months if not weeks", said Amin Saikal on The Conversation. Talks between the US and Iran aimed at limiting the latter's nuclear capability have been "inconclusive", which has only reinforced Netanyahu's conviction that military action is "the best option to halt Iran's nuclear programme".

Trump distracted

Just this week, Trump warned Netanyahu not to do anything that could undermine his administration's nuclear talks with Iran. The US president was "keen to secure a deal to boost his self-declared reputation as a peace broker", said Saikal.

But Trump is distracted by the unrest in Los Angeles and the ongoing impact of his tariff war, as well as the stalled efforts to secure peace in Ukraine. So "Netanyahu felt that now was the time" to strike, "even if the Americans don't like it", said the BBC.

The "unilateral" strikes have indicated a "collapse" of Trump's efforts to restrain Netanyahu, said The Guardian. The part the White House plays now could significantly influence what comes next, in the region and potentially far beyond.

'The US is dooming the UN — whether it leaves or not'

Andreas Kluth at Bloomberg

President Donald Trump "began his second term by announcing that he'll pull the country out of parts of the U.N.," but the U.S. "could also nominally remain a member of an institution while ignoring, undermining or sabotaging it," says Andreas Kluth. America is the "backbone of NATO, although Trump has undermined its credibility," and "something similar is happening at the U.N." This "trend away from multilateralism, which Trump didn't start but is turbo-boosting, is already changing the world, and for the worse."

Read more

'To bridge generational divides, corporate America needs to invest in soft skills'

Ginneh Baugh at Newsweek

We are "living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution," says Ginneh Baugh. The "soft, or 'durable' skills employees need to succeed are no longer optional — they're essential." This "moment will require upskilling in more than tech." In an "effort to build tech-savvy teams, much of today's new talent has been hired for very specific expertise, not for their people skills." In an "era where AI is expected to automate countless tasks, human skills" are "becoming even more essential."

Read more

'Sly Stone was a whole new thing'

Jack Hamilton at Slate

Sly Stone "commandeered the direction of popular music in a way that few artists had before him and maybe even fewer have since," says Jack Hamilton. The Beatles are "often credited with shifting modern pop" from a "music conceptually rooted in live performance to a music conceptually rooted in the recording studio." But Stone's music "sounds to me like the moment this future irreversibly begins to take shape," and "helped redefine our understanding of musical organicism."

Read more

'The Buchananite moment in LA'

W. James Antle III at The American Conservative

The Los Angeles "riots are even less defensible than those of more than three decades ago," says W. James Antle III. At a "purely naked political level, each party is heeding its base." But there is "still more reason to believe that for now the Trump-era Republican stance on immigration has more crossover appeal than a Democratic alliance." For "now, it looks like it will take massive overreach — or another recession — to turn the tide."

Read more

'Centering the voiceless: Pope Francis' enduring global impact'

Stan Chu Ilo at Al Jazeera

Pope Francis "believes that those who suffer and who inhabit the existential peripheries of life reflect the true face of God," says Stan Chu Ilo. Our "world can only overcome the polycrisis it is facing today under the guidance of leaders like him." Francis has "demonstrated his unyielding commitment to promoting coexistence and confronting global injustice many times over in the past decade." The world "needs Francis' leadership and message of peace, fraternity and solidarity more than ever."

Read more

'America's most shameful vote ever at the UN'

Bret Stephens at The New York Times

Vladimir Putin has "never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump," says Bret Stephens. By "participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn't setting itself up as some sort of evenhanded broker to end the war." It is "turning the United States into an accessory to Russia's crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated."

Read more

'America's enemies are rooting for the death of the National Endowment for Democracy'

Peter Roskam at the National Review

America's "most dangerous adversaries have been celebrating what they see as a major victory: a funding freeze that has effectively halted the work of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The "authoritarian regimes in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Havana, the Taliban in Kabul, and terrorist networks are crowing." A "weakened NED means local citizen groups will be less effective in challenging authoritarian crimes." The "loudest voices applauding NED's struggles are those who wish to see freedom fail."

Read more

'Statewide cellphone ban in schools is a lesson in common sense'

The Boston Globe editorial board

Few "distractions in schools today are as pervasive and damaging as cellphones," says The Boston Globe editorial board. State "legislatures and education officials across the country are taking action." The "evidence is clear that classrooms function better without smartphones," and "public opinion largely aligns with educators." That's "why a standardized policy across districts banning devices — including cellphones and tablets — for the duration of the school day" is the "right approach." Schools are for "learning, not scrolling."

Read more

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's play Kyoto – first seen at the RSC in Stratford – is set at the UN Climate Change Conference in 1997, when countries around the world agreed the first international treaty on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Let's face it, this set-up sounds painfully worthy and dull, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out; yet the play turns out to be almost "indecently entertaining".

Wittily staged by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Kyoto features "globe-hopping storytelling", a "dizzying array" of compelling characters, and is a "total thrill ride". Any drama about such a complex event – the play covers ten years of negotiation leading up to Kyoto – will likely rely on a narrator to guide the audience through, said David Benedict in Variety.

In a "wearyingly earnest" play about the Kyoto Protocol, that role would be taken by a heroic figure, "preaching to the choir" about the wickedness of Big Oil; Murphy and Robertson's "masterstroke" is to "banish" that expectation, and instead have the story told by a villain. Don Pearlman was a real-life American lawyer and lobbyist who was in the pay of the "seven sisters" group of major oil companies, and who sought to frustrate the deal. The upshot is a pacey, "race-to-the-finish thriller", in which the real subject is not the environment, but "cut-throat diplomacy".

Like a "leaner, more venal Richard III, Stephen Kunken's Pearlman casts the audience almost as co-conspirators" in his Machiavellian dealings, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph. Yet he comes across more as an "outsized figure of disruptive fun" than as the dangerous player he was; and in its broad-brush approach, the play ducks some of the questions it raises about the American "freedom" Pearlman seems to want to protect, and the hypocrisy of the liberal West, when it comes to air travel, aircon and so on.

The play doesn't even have much to say about climate change and its impacts. Still, that it is so consistently gripping is "a triumph against the odds to match the Protocol itself".

The long-awaited ceasefire between Israel and Hamas sparked jubilant scenes in Gaza on Sunday, but joy has quickly turned to dismay as the true extent of the devastation becomes clear.

More than a year of Israeli bombardment and ground operations have reduced much of the territory to "a rubble-strewn wasteland, with blackened shells of buildings and mounds of debris stretching in all directions", said Euronews.

Alongside the more than 46,600 Palestinians the Hamas-run health ministry claims have been killed in the war, the UN estimates 69% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including more than 90% of homes.

With the majority of the 2.2 million population currently displaced, and large parts of the enclave "uninhabitable", the BBC said it could take "years or even decades for the territory to recover".

What dangers do those returning face?

Of primary concern is Gaza's healthcare system, which a House of Lords Library report said is in "crisis". Deliberately targeted by Israeli forces, who claimed healthcare facilities have been used for military purposes by Hamas, most hospitals and clinics are "damaged beyond use, and those remaining open face shortages of water, fuel and medical supplies".

The UN Environment Programme has described water, sanitation and hygiene systems as "almost entirely defunct", while an acute food shortage has left Gaza’s 1.9 million displaced people at risk of malnutrition and starvation.

Israel's bombardment of Gaza has also "unleashed yet another deadly, but silent enemy on the people there – asbestos", said Al Jazeera. "Present throughout much of Gaza's structures", the destruction has caused vast amounts to be broken into tiny airborne particles that could potentially lead to a spike in cancer cases "for decades".

What about the economy?

The conflict has also had a "devastating impact" on Gaza's economy, said the BBC. The World Bank estimates almost 100% of the population are now living in poverty, while the cost of basic supplies has risen by almost 250% on average since the start of the war.

"Major roads have been ploughed up and critical water and electricity infrastructure lies in ruins," said Euronews, affecting not just everyday life but the prospect of economic recovery.

By September 2024, more than two-thirds of agricultural land in of Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, according to an analysis by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. In North Gaza, the epicentre of Israel's military operations in the strip, that figure rose to 78%.

The ceasefire agreement dodges crucial questions of who will govern Gaza going forward or whether Israel and Egypt will lift a blockade limiting the movement of people and goods that they imposed when Hamas seized power in 2007.

If the blockade remains in force, the UN estimates it could take 350 years for Gaza's economy to return to pre-war levels.

What are the long-term challenges?

With Gaza's housing and critical infrastructure in "ruins" it is "unclear when – or even if – much will be rebuilt", said the Los Angeles Times.

Removing the estimated 50 million tonnes of rubble alone is expected to take years, made even more complicated by the fact that much of the debris contains unexploded munitions as well as human remains.

The key task of rebuilding homes will require "billions of dollars and the ability to bring construction materials and heavy equipment into the territory – neither of which are assured". And meanwhile, "major questions about Gaza's future, political and otherwise, remain unresolved", said Euronews.

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations is a combative, five-term Republican congresswoman and a rising star in the MAGA movement. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) denounced the U.N. in November 2024 as a corrupt "den of antisemitism" and is expected to be a vocal defender of Israel, while staking out an adversarial position for the United States in line with longstanding GOP policy critiques of the organization.

A moderate goes MAGA

After graduating from Harvard, Stefanik worked first on the Domestic Policy Council for President George W. Bush and later in the office of White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. After joining Paul Ryan's unsuccessful vice presidential run in 2012, she returned to New York to run for the state's 21st congressional district in 2014. During her successful campaign, Stefanik received "considerable support from the GOP establishment," which saw her as "an appealing figure for the party," said CBS News. Her victory made her, at the time, the youngest woman elected to Congress in U.S. history.

Early on in her career, Stefanik, now 40, was publicly known as a moderate. That changed when she played a leading role in the House proceedings for Trump's first impeachment in the fall of 2019. Her fiery performances defending Trump and attacking witnesses "quickly elevated her profile." As a result, "her own Twitter following exploded," said NPR. Her embrace of Trump, especially as he continued to promote baseless conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, "puzzled former allies and mentors who envisioned a different future for her," said Time. Eventually, stories about her transformation into a Trump ally and what she perceived as sexist coverage created "a tight knot of resentment" against Democrats and the media, said The Washington Post.

In 2021, Stefanik was elected as the House GOP conference chair, and she is now the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. A frequent critic of President Biden, Stefanik also "played a high-profile role in the congressional investigations into antisemitism on college campuses" in 2024, said The New York Times. Stefanik "spent years ingratiating herself with Trump and positioning herself as one of his most trusted allies," which landed her on a shortlist of potential running mates for Trump in 2024, said The Associated Press.

A reform agenda at the UN

While she serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Stefanik "would bring relatively little diplomatic or foreign policy experience to the role," said The New York Times. Nevertheless, Stefanik appears to have support from some Senate Democrats for her new role. "I look forward to working with her," said Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) in a post on X. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) also enthusiastically met with and endorsed her.

Stefanik is expected to pursue cuts to U.S. funding of the UN, as well as "defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency," the refugee agency that Stefanik and others have accused of exploitation by Hamas, said The Wall Street Journal. Although negotiators are reportedly closing in on a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Stefanik could push for a "vote on the UN designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization," said the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Stefanik also voted against the April 2024 funding package for Ukraine in the House, and "called for pushing, quote, a maximum pressure campaign with Iran,' said NPR.

Ultimately, Stefanik's nomination could "redefine America's relationship with some of its longest allies," said The New Republic. The selection of someone who shares Trump's hardline stances in backing Israel and opposing Iran "appears to be a clear win for hardline hawks," as "factions in the Republican Party have been competing over the direction of Trump's foreign policy," said the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The U.N. is "currently bracing for a shake-up" after Trump's victory in November, and Stefanik "does not shy away from sparring with liberals or railing against what she views as corruption or mismanagement," said Fox News. If Stefanik is confirmed — as expected — by the Senate, a special election will be held to fill her seat in the House.

As the new year begins, we could be one step closer to peak population.

According to the UN's latest projections, the global population is expected to peak at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, earlier than previously predicted. It is then expected to plateau at about 10.2 million by 2100. Experts say lower birth rates and falling fertility levels – especially in "ultra-low" fertility countries like China, Italy and Spain – are to blame for the more imminent peak.

The "earlier and lower peak is a hopeful sign", said Li Junhua, UN undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs, as the levelling could reduce environmental damage.

A greying global population

Fertility rates are falling worldwide and governments' pronatalist policies have "almost totally failed to alter that fact", said Vox. As a consequence, UN predictions might miss by a fair amount, but "the changes are generally baked in".

Although discussing population policy often leads to "culture wars" and heated debates, a phenomenon called population momentum – when populations continue to decline for a time, even if birth rates increase – means these battles "are largely beyond the point".

Regardless, the overall population, before it peaks, will continue to get older. And because of a pandemic-induced dip in global life expectancy, "that’s in part a success story". The end result, though, is "global greying" with more elderly people than children by the 2070s. And, "we’re only beginning to grapple with what an older, shrinking world will feel like. All we can do is adapt."

'Projections keep missing'

There are some analysts who think the peak is coming much quicker. The population will eventually peak, but "one after another, the projections keep missing", said John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. Forecasts from the UN and others tend to underestimate how quickly birth rates are falling. And often, they do not account for minor fluctuations in global trends.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, a researcher and economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the FT that the overall impact of these misses means the global population is on the UN's "low fertility" path. That means we could potentially see a peak as soon as 2054, 30 years ahead of schedule, with a global population of about nine billion.

Predicting the global population’s trajectory is no easy task, and "even tiny perturbations today can compound into yawning gulfs", said Burn-Murdoch. But maybe the next round of projections "should come with a health warning: these estimates are extremely fuzzy and based on frameworks that were true in the past but may not be today.

"Use them with caution, and probably err on the low side."

'Am I my Spotify Wrapped? Spotify's algorithm makes me question its validity.'

Kofi Mframa at USA Today

Spotify Wrapped has seen "major success mainly because of our cultural obsession with self-discovery," says Kofi Mframa. But Spotify's "user-specific algorithm can create echo chambers that feed and refeed the same artists, songs, genres and overall 'vibes.'" When "our listening patterns are largely determined by algorithms" and the "echo chambers they create," Spotify Wrapped can "become less of a reflection of our own personal taste and more of a reflection of whatever Spotify allows in ear's reach."

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'Want to save your friendships? Take a page from the Founding Fathers.'

Alexandra Hudson at The Washington Post

The story of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams "illustrates the perils of allowing politics to supplant friendship and provides an important solution: taking political conversation off the table," says Alexandra Hudson. A "reasoned, spirited debate is central to a free and flourishing democracy," but "Jefferson and Adams learned the hard way that politics is not worth ending relationships over." So "this holiday season — and beyond — let's remember the secret to talking politics: Don't."

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'Trump should make Putin wince before they sit down to talk'

Mark Montgomery at Foreign Policy

Donald Trump "must change Putin's perspective that he has the upper hand, or Trump's diplomacy will backfire," says Mark Montgomery. Trump "should therefore formulate a maximum pressure campaign to convince Moscow to accept a good and lasting peace deal." By "keeping his promise to restore 'peace through strength,' Trump can give himself the best possible chance of stopping the bloodshed for good." But "any diplomatic effort will have to confront some unfortunate facts."

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'The UN has generations of Palestinian blood on its hands'

Zena Tahhan at The Nation

In the "case of Palestine, the U.N.'s role, contrary to what many believe, has been catastrophic," says Zena Tahhan. The U.N. has "historically operated as a tool for the imperial and colonial ambitions of the global powers that invented it." Palestinians are "fighting for their survival against an entire postwar global political order." The U.N.'s partition plan "served as the catalyst that set in motion the organized and systematic violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine."

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'I ran Operation Warp Speed. I'm concerned about bird flu.'

David A. Kessler at The New York Times

The incoming administration "must be prepared to tackle one issue immediately: the possibility that the spreading avian flu might mutate to enable human-to-human transmission," says David A. Kessler. What is "worrisome is that our arsenal to fight back might not be up to the task," so "bulk milk testing should be mandatory in all states with dairy farms." If the "virus begins to transmit efficiently among humans, it will be very difficult to contain."

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'The UN has failed us on Gaza. We need to decolonize and radically reform it.'

Omar Barghouti at The Guardian

Of the "many things that need fixing in this world to stop the genocide in Gaza and prevent any power from ever again doing 'a Gaza' on any vulnerable community, decolonizing the U.N. may be of utmost priority," says Omar Barghouti. This is a "transformative process that integrates the perspectives of marginalized and most affected communities and nations." This "radical yet incremental process aims at reclaiming the U.N. as the heritage of humanity at large."

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'Resolving India's population woes requires political maturity'

Sitaraman Shankar at Al Jazeera

There is "already an obvious, short-term solution" to India's "diminishing demographic dividend problem: moving people from where they are in excess to where they are actually needed," says Sitaraman Shankar. This "would keep real wages down, and push locals of rich states into higher-paying jobs, while providing some relief to states that are struggling to provide a decent standard of living for their massive populations." But this "would require a lot of political maturity."

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'What the US can learn from "Wicked"'

Patti Waldmeir at the Financial Times

It is "hard not to see 'Wicked' as a parable for our fractured times," says Patti Waldmeir. People "have to find the humility to listen — no matter how convinced I am that extreme views like that helped defeat the Democrats." The film "can do its little bit to help America find its way: to the bursting of bubbles and the making of friends, even between America's new politically popular class, the Republicans, and its new outcasts, the Democrats."

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What happened

The United Nations–sponsored COP29 climate talks ended in Baku, Azerbaijan, Sunday with approval of a deal to provide $300 billion a year to fight climate change, focused on helping poorer countries manage the rise in global temperatures. Negotiators gather Monday in Busan, South Korea, to work on hammering out a landmark deal to manage the world's plastics crisis.

Who said what

Delegates from 175 countries are in Busan for the "fifth and ostensibly final" meeting to curb plastic pollution, but "lingering divisions cast doubts on whether a final agreement is in sight," Reuters said. The European Union and 66 countries are looking for a treaty to cap and reduce the amount of plastic produced, and the U.S. "raised eyebrows in August" when it agreed to back those caps."

"Then came the election of Donald J. Trump," The New York Times said. Now "few expect the United States to sign on to an eventual treaty at all," with Trump siding with the petrochemical companies and other plastic-producing nations that oppose reducing output. Microplastics are already in drinking water, fish and animals, and even human organs, but plastics companies at the summit argue that the goal should be reducing waste through reuse and recycling.

COP29's final deal "rescued the summit from near collapse," but it left "just about everyone frustrated," Semafor said. Even the "disappointing" $300 billion number will be hard to turn from dollars in a ledger into "hard cash in the hands of the most climate-vulnerable countries."

What next?

Many developing countries, already "angered by the modest deal on climate crisis financing," argued that an "ambitious" plastics treaty with holdouts is "better than a watered-down one signed by all," the Times said. The Busan summit ends Saturday.

What happened

Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed two laws last night banning the United Nations agency that provides the bulk of aid to Palestinians and labeling it a terrorist organization. The laws, which could end or sharply curtail U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) operations in Gaza and the West Bank, faced immediate criticism from the U.N. and Israel's Western allies.

Who said what

UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said Israel's "unprecedented” move "will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians, especially in Gaza where people have been going through more than a year of sheer hell." Along with providing critical food, medical care and other humanitarian assistance, the agency also runs schools.

Israel's legislation is the "culmination of a long-running campaign against the agency, which Israel contends has been infiltrated by Hamas," The Associated Press said. "But supporters say Israel's real aim is to sideline the issue of Palestinian refugees," whom the UNRWA has been aiding since they "fled or were driven out" of their homes during "the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation." Israel's enmity toward the agency snowballed after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its subsequent allegations that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the terrorist assault. Israel has "offered little evidence to support this allegation," The New York Times said.

UNRWA workers "play an irreplaceable role right now in Gaza," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, and "passage of this legislation could have implications under U.S. law," especially if Israel doesn't allow more aid to Gaza soon. The U.S. and seven Western allies had urged Israel to scrap the bills.

What next?

Most of the legislation is set to take effect in 90 days, but it is "unclear how or whether the law would ultimately be implemented," the Times said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said after the vote that "UNRWA workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable," but "sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza now and in the future," administered "in a way that does not threaten Israel's security."

What happened

Israeli forces have fired at three United Nations positions in Lebanon since Wednesday, injuring two Indonesian peacekeepers, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday. Tensions between the Israeli Defense Forces and UNIFIL have increased since Israel launched a ground invasion last week, escalating the country's fight against Hezbollah. Israeli airstrikes hit a crowded neighborhood in central Beirut yesterday, leveling an eight-story residential building and leaving 22 people dead and 117 wounded, said Lebanon's Health Ministry. Lebanese media said the strike was an unsuccessful attempt to kill another high-ranking Hezbollah official, Wafiq Safa.

Who said what

The IDF has "repeatedly hit" UNIFIL positions, including an observation tower at peacekeeper headquarters in Naqoura, striking the "entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering" and "deliberately" disabling perimeter cameras, UNIFIL said in a statement. "Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law."

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said Israel's "hostile acts" toward UNIFIL "could constitute war crimes." The Israeli military said last night that its troops were operating near UNIFIL positions but had "instructed the U.N. forces in the area to remain in protected spaces." The IDF last week directed the U.N. peacekeepers to evacuate positions within 3 miles of the Israeli border, but they declined. The 50 countries with peacekeepers in Lebanon "decided we need to continue to fly the U.N. flag," UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said to The Washington Post. The U.N. force, established in 1978, was given a broader mandate to keep the peace in 2006.

What next?

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the head of U.N. peacekeeping forces, told an emergency Security Council meeting Thursday night that UNIFIL has temporarily moved 300 peacekeepers to larger bases and would transfer 200 more if security conditions deteriorated further. He said UNIFIL forces, "increasingly in jeopardy," have been confined to bunkers, unable to go on patrol or carry out their other tasks. "We are staying until the situation becomes impossible for us to operate," Tenenti said to Reuters.

What happened

Israel took steps to prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon Wednesday as the U.S., France and other European and Arab nations scrambled to prevent a full-scale war, proposing an "immediate 21-day cease-fire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy."

Who said what

The cease-fire deal was worked out in 48 hours on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Its dozen signatories said the recent intensification of fighting is "intolerable and presents an unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation." U.S. officials said they were optimistic Lebanon and Israel would accept the proposal, with Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah's compliance. 

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, told soldiers near the Lebanon border yesterday that ongoing Israeli airstrikes are "both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah." Israel has killed about 600 people in Lebanon since Monday, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Hezbollah has continued sending missiles into Israel, including its first aimed at Tel Aviv. Israeli air defenses shot down that ballistic missile, but Hezbollah faces the "consequential" choice to either "unleash more of its advanced weapons, striking deeper into Israel and potentially triggering a full-scale war," The Wall Street Journal said, "or hold back and risk diminishing its reputation as one of the fiercest fighting forces in the Middle East."

What next?

"Hell is breaking loose in Lebanon," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at an emergency Security Council meeting Wednesday night. "War is not inevitable," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told the Security Council. "We are counting on both parties" to accept the 21-day cease-fire "without delay." Barrot is set to travel to Lebanon to try to persuade officials in Beirut.

'No, Senator Manchin, the filibuster is not the 'holy grail of democracy'

Jonathan Chait at New York

There have been "some strained and ahistorical defenses of the filibuster," but Joe Manchin's "holy grail of democracy is a new level," says Jonathan Chait. There is "no serious definition of the term that would define it as an essential feature of democracy." Some senators "have convinced themselves that the modern version of the filibuster was decreed by the Founders and etched into the foundations of the Republic." It is a "totally irrational form of government."

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'Why Janet Jackson's comments about Kamala Harris are especially disappointing'

Robyn Autry at MSNBC

Janet Jackson is "rightly receiving backlash for mischaracterizing Vice President Kamala Harris' race," says Robin Autry. Jackson "seemed disturbingly unaware that she was spouting misinformation." It is a "moment that should cause us to rethink what it means to have celebrities expressing their political views" when they "live radically different lives than the rest of us." It is "difficult to view any questioning of Harris' race as anything other than an unwarranted personal attack."

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'Who cares about RFK Jr. and New York magazine's Olivia Nuzzi? You should.'

Bill Goodykoontz at USA Today

RFK Jr. and Olivia Nuzzi are "consenting adults, if relatively high-profile ones," says Bill Goodykoontz. Does their alleged relationship "really matter? Here's a reasonable answer: It does." Journalists "don't need one more thing to be used against them, no matter what the nature of the relationship was." As a result of Nuzzi's "stature in the business and because of Kennedy's high-profile history of bizarre antics," the "story is now everywhere," and "journalism is all the worse for it."

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'The UN charter needs rewriting'

Heba Aly, Brenda Mofya and Andreas Bummel at Al Jazeera

The world "faces a 'moment of historic danger,' with increasingly imminent risks," say Heba Aly, Brenda Mofya and Andreas Bummel. There are "global challenges that cannot be solved purely at the national level: The people of the world need — and deserve — better coordinated global action." A new U.N. charter "could not only redistribute power in a more equitable way and treat threats like climate change and artificial intelligence seriously, it could also make the U.N. more effective."

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What happened

President Joe Biden gave a sort of valedictory address at United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, using his final speech before the international body to sift through his four years in the Oval Office and 50 years in global politics for lessons on moving toward a better future.

Who said what

Biden tried to bring a "message of hope for the future" to a General Assembly where "the vibe was pretty grim" amid climate change, poverty and wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan, The Associated Press said. "Even in the horrors of war, there's a way forward," Biden told the assembled diplomats and world leaders. "Things can get better." His speech "encompassed many of his foreign policy themes throughout his administration," CBS News said, including "rallying the world around Ukraine," managing competition with China and promoting democracy.

Biden urged Israel and Hamas to finally agree to an elusive cease-fire and said a "full-scale war" in Lebanon "is not in anyone's interest." Those seeking "short-term solutions" in the Middle East "were left wanting," CNN said. But Biden earned applause after he pushed an end to the Gaza war and when he used his decision not to seek re-election to encourage a turn from autocracy. "My fellow leaders, let us never forget some things are more important than staying in power," he said. "It's your people that matter the most," and "we are here to serve the people, not the other way around."

What next?

Biden's U.N. speech was the "centerpiece event of a two-day visit to New York" that also includes several one-on-one meetings with other world leaders, Reuters said. The Security Council has scheduled an emergency meeting today to discuss the conflict in Lebanon.

From raging wildfires in Los Angeles to deadly hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina, there are a plethora of recent signs that climate change is ramping up. As temperatures increase, ecosystems and natural phenomena are becoming permanently altered. And once a system hits a threshold, there is no way to reverse the damage.

Such a threshold is known as a tipping point, and scientists have long been tracking climate tipping points as a way of determining the state of the planet. Several organizations use different metrics of determining what the tipping points are; these include the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research's 2024 Planetary Health Check, the UN's 2023 Interconnected Disaster Risks report and the 2023 University of Exeter Global Systems Institute report. Measuring tipping points is more important than ever, as 2024 was declared the hottest year on record. In addition, a second Trump presidency is about to begin and is expected to deal a "body blow" to climate change efforts, said The New York Times.

Cryosphere tipping points

Mountain glaciers melting: The world's glaciers are "melting at double the speed they had in the past two decades," the U.N. report said. Many of those glaciers are in the mountains, including the Andes and Himalayas. As a result, "downstream communities become increasingly vulnerable to disasters like floods," said Yale Environment Review. Plus, "when glaciers eventually shrink, water unavailability presents another problem." Many glacier-fed areas are rapidly approaching or have already reached "peak water," the point of maximum meltwater a glacier produces before its freshwater output steadily declines. Meltwater is crucial to sustaining certain regions during dry seasons with low rainfall.

Ice sheets collapsing: The Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, the two largest in the world, are on the brink of collapsing. According to NASA, Antarctica is losing ice mass of about 50 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year. "Substantial ice loss is likely irreversible on multi-millennial timescales," said the University of Exeter report. In addition, ice sheets collapsing "would result in severe regional impacts, including significant contributions to sea level rise and destabilization of local infrastructure and water supplies," said the Planetary Health Check.

Biosphere tipping points

Accelerating extinctions: The planet is in its sixth mass extinction event. A new study found that more than 3,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates are currently threatened with extinction because of natural disasters, which are worsening due to climate change. In addition, "human activities such as land use change, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and introduction of invasive species," have "put our foot on the extinction accelerator," the University of Exeter report said. The Amazon rainforest and other rainforests are particularly at risk, suffering not only from human influence but also "unprecedented climate-driven disturbances such as increasing dry season length and intensity, more intense and frequent rainfall and temperature extremes," said the report.

Dying coral reefs: Coral reefs are largely in danger due to climate change. Warming oceans are disrupting the delicate aquatic ecosystem causing bleaching, which is when "thermal stress causes corals to expel the symbiotic algae that provides them with food (resulting in a characteristic loss of color)," said the University of Exeter report. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 44% of coral reefs globally are at risk of extinction. "Without relevant decisions from those with the power to change this trajectory, we will see the further loss of reefs, and progressive disappearance of coral species at larger and larger scales," said David Obura, the co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) SSC Coral Specialist Group. Coral reefs also hold a quarter of all marine life on Earth and their collapse could drastically alter the ecosystem.

Uninsurable future: The combination of the aforementioned tipping points means more places on Earth are becoming uninhabitable — and uninsurable. For example, several insurance companies "chose not to renew thousands of home insurance policies in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other fire-prone areas" after the recent wildfires, said the Los Angeles Times. The California wildfires are a premonition of what other regions will experience as natural disasters become worse. Once home insurance becomes too expensive or unavailable, "people are left without an economic safety net when disasters strike," the Interconnected Disaster Risks report said.

Groundwater depletion: Much of the world's drinking water comes from underground reservoirs called aquifers. The bad news is that these aquifers are rapidly emptying, with 21 of the 37 largest aquifers losing water faster than they can be replenished. The water in the aquifers "has accumulated over thousands of years, and would equally take thousands of years to fully recharge," the U.N. report said, so these crucial reservoirs are "essentially a non-renewable resource." Approximately 2 billion people worldwide rely on groundwater as a primary source of drinking water, but most groundwater is used in agriculture. "We can no longer consider groundwater as a boundless source of easily accessible freshwater," the report added. And its increasing inaccessibility has "worrying implications."

Ocean and atmospheric tipping points

Unbearable heat: According to recent data, 2024 was the hottest year on record, "with an average global temperature of 1.6ºC above the pre-industrial average," said Copernicus Climate Change Service. "It was the first calendar year with a global average temperature exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial level." Along with its obvious toll on human beings, heat exacerbates a number of other ecological problems too, including melting glaciers, extreme storms and extinctions. As temperatures rise even higher, the heat's impact will get more extreme and harder to reverse.

Changing ocean currents: The extreme heat has also caused a meteoric rise in ocean temperatures which can lead to a shift in ocean currents. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is at risk of being disrupted as soon as the 2030s, according to one study, because the "surface waters in the northern North Atlantic may become less dense," said the University of Exeter report. Cold water is denser than warm water and the current works through different water temperatures rising and sinking. The current is crucial to maintain the climates of western and northern Europe.

Ocean deoxygenation: A new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution found that "lakes and reservoirs have experienced oxygen losses of 5.5% and 18.6% respectively in the past 45 years, and the oceans have dropped by 2%," said Popular Mechanics. While not previously considered a tipping point, scientists argue that it should be. Deoxygenated water can be detrimental to marine populations, leading to mass extinctions. It stems from warming temperatures, along with human factors like fertilizer runoff. "Failure to address aquatic deoxygenation will, ultimately, not only affect ecosystems but also economic activity, and society at a global level," said the lead author of the study, Kevin Rose, in a press release.

Ocean acidification: The ocean is taking more hits than some other places on Earth. The big blue is also experiencing acidification, which is when the ocean becomes more acidic as a result of absorbing too much carbon dioxide. "Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold … particularly in high-latitude regions like the Arctic and Southern Ocean," said the Planetary Health Check. "These areas are vital for the marine carbon pump and global nutrient cycles, which support marine productivity, biodiversity and global fisheries." However, a larger problem is that "even these current conditions may already be problematic for a variety of marine organisms, suggesting a need [to] re-evaluate which levels can actually be called safe," Levke Caesar, a co-author of the report, said to The Guardian.

Space debris: The tipping points also extend to space, where floating detritus threatens both current satellites and our ability to put new ones into orbit. Satellites are crucial to our daily lives, assisting in everything from weather reporting and tracking natural disasters to navigating and communicating. "Each piece of debris becomes an obstacle in the orbital 'highway,' making it increasingly difficult for functional satellites to avoid collisions," the U.N. report said. In a positive twist, Japanese scientists have created the world's first wooden satellite, which will "test the idea of using biodegradable materials such as wood to see if they can act as environmentally friendly alternatives to the metals from which all satellites are currently constructed," said The Guardian. Wood can also burn up upon reentry to Earth and prevent debris.

While the United Nations typically assists in humanitarian efforts around the world, it was recently revealed that staff members for the organization's Palestinian relief arm may have played a role in something else: Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The revelation came following an investigation into 19 U.N. employees who were alleged to have had ties to the attack. Only nine of the 19 were found to be culpable, though questions remain as to what their actual involvement may have been, and where the United Nations goes from here. 

What did the UN's investigation find? 

The investigation concluded that the nine people in question "may have been involved" in the Oct. 7 attack, according to a statement from the U.N., and the "employment of these individuals will be terminated in the interests of" the U.N. All nine staff members worked for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a branch of the U.N. that works to support Palestinian refugees; UNRWA currently has 14,000 employees in Gaza, according to CNN. 

The U.N.'s investigation came at the behest of Israel; the country alleged earlier this year that UNRWA members were involved in the attack, which left about 1,200 people dead and saw another 251 people taken hostage by Hamas. Specifics about what the nine people may have done were not released, but "for us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people," U.N. deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said in a statement obtained by the BBC.  

UNRWA officials have acknowledged the investigation's findings but have disputed the conclusions made. The UNRWA will "continue lifesaving and critical services for Palestine refugees in Gaza and across the region, especially in the face of the ongoing war, the instability and risk of regional escalation," Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, said in a statement that also denounced the Oct. 7 attack. Lazzarini has "previously charged Israel with an 'insidious' campaign to destroy UNRWA and has repeatedly said that Israel refused to supply evidence of its charges," said The Washington Post. 

Given the lack of many details about the investigation, questions still remain about any overall U.N. link to Oct. 7. The Wall Street Journal was among the first to report on the potential UNRWA links last January but "didn't know — and still doesn't know — whether the allegation, based on Israeli intelligence reports, was true," said Semafor. However, Israel has maintained that none of its evidence against UNRWA was fake. The nine employees "might have participated in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust," Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said on X. This "isn't evidence 'fabricated' by us. This is straight from the @UN itself."

What is the bigger picture?  

This recent revelation is the latest in a slew of Israeli accusations against UNRWA; the country first accused 12 members of the organization in January of participating in the attacks. Israel then "stepped up its accusations in March, saying over 450 UNRWA staff were military operatives in Gaza terrorist groups," said Reuters. But questions remain as to the validity of some of these charges, which UNRWA has continually pushed back against.  

Whether or not the accusations are true, several Western nations have taken action against UNRWA as a result. At least nine countries paused funding to the organization in January after the allegations came to light. These countries "include the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Canada, Finland and the Netherlands," said NBC News. UNRWA officials were angered by the move, which Lazzarini said would "serve to exacerbate the region's humanitarian crisis, fueled by the cutting off of fuel and supplies." 

"If there was any lingering ambiguity about the illegality of Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, it should have been quashed by a landmark ruling from the world’s top court," said the Financial Times.

In an 83-page advisory opinion released last week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) scrutinised Israel's activities in Palestinian lands controlled since 1967. "The result was damning," said the FT. The top UN court found that "virtually every Israeli action in the territory violated international law." It demanded that Israel halt settlement construction immediately, declaring Israel's presence "unlawful" and requiring it to end "as rapidly as possible."

Ruling 'unlikely to temper Netanyahu's government'

The ICJ ruling is non-binding and unlikely to "temper the behaviour of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, which includes ultranationalist settlers who advocate annexing the West Bank", said the FT. Settlement construction has "accelerated under Netanyahu's watch", and Israel "has a history of ignoring UN resolutions and international court judgments critical of its actions, with the quiet acquiescence of its western allies". Nonetheless, the ICJ's findings are "significant" said the paper. "They have put a microscope on the full extent of Israel's illegal practices in the occupied territory at a time when the war triggered by Hamas' horrific October 7 attack has put renewed focus on the need for a two-state solution."

The court's ruling is "more than a legal setback for Israel", said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, in The Guardian. "It is a virtual invitation for Karim Khan, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), to prosecute the officials behind the settlements". The timing is also "significant", said Peter Beaumont, The Guardian's senior international reporter. "With Israel isolated over its conduct of the Gaza war, and under investigation at the ICJ and the international criminal court for alleged war crimes, the stark assessment of the long-term illegality of Israel’s occupation will only reinforce that isolation". 

Israel's 'fortress mentality'

The ruling has sparked widespread "outrage" across the political spectrum in Israel, as Palestinian leaders hailed the ruling a "watershed moment", said Tortoise. Pushing back on the ruling, a defiant Netanyahu declared that "the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], our historical homeland". 

There has "long been a fear that Israel may eventually go ahead and annex the occupied West Bank," as it did with East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, said Al Jazeera. The Israeli government may even be "banking on a new Trump administration giving it the cover to annex the West Bank, intensify its destruction of Gaza and ignore the international pressure to give the Palestinians their rights". Israel's "fortress mentality, and its attempts to discredit the ICJ and other critical international bodies, mean that it will likely continue on its current path, at least in the short term", said the news site. 

However, Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, suggested the ICJ decision could have consequences. "Even some of Israel's closest allies, including the US, have recognised parts of the advisory opinion, particularly on the illegality of the settlement policy", she said. "The majority of countries across the world agree with the ICJ’s advisory opinion", El-Sadany added. As more countries "choose to support the rule of law when it comes to the occupation, that pressure may eventually reach a point where Israel, and its backers, buckle", said Al-Jazeera.

"One rash move – one miscalculation – could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border, and frankly, beyond imagination."

That was the stark assessment of UN Secretary-General António Guterres last Friday, as tensions between Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed militia group Hezbollah threaten to boil over into open war for the first time in nearly two decades.

Since Hamas's 7 October attacks on Israeli citizens, Western officials have been working tirelessly to try to prevent the war in Gaza from spilling over. But despite "strenuous efforts and stern warnings", the risk of an "expanding regional conflict is now rising by the hour", said Politico.

If that happens "it will be nothing short of a game-changer", Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told CNBC. Compared to Hamas, Hezbollah is "a much more formidable fighting force and widely recognised as the most powerful non-state military in the world", he said. Its involvement would have huge consequences "not only for Israel, but also for the entire region".

What did the commentators say?

Founded in 1982 by a group of radical Shia clerics in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah, or the Party of God, has a "well-resourced" medium-sized fighting force "that can defeat most Arab armies", said Time.

With backing from Iran estimated by the US to run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, recent estimates by the Atlantic Council put Hezbollah's manpower at roughly 30,000 fighters and 20,000 reservists. Yet this number "likely does not include the thousands of non-combatant workers and volunteers across the country, including women who are not allowed to be official members of Hezbollah", said the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. The US State Department said that these numbers also fail to account for the thousands of members and non-member supporters worldwide.

ABC News reported that thousands of fighters from other Iran-backed groups in the Middle East are ready to come to Lebanon to join Hezbollah in its battle with Israel "if the simmering conflict escalates into a full-blown war".

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Wednesday that militant leaders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but that the group already has more than 100,000 fighters.

Since the last full-blown war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah has "significantly expanded its arsenal and capabilities", said The Guardian. This includes acquiring suicide drones that Israel has struggled to counter, as well as anti-aircraft missile capability and an array of missiles that experts now believe number between 120,000 and 200,000, making it "the world's best-armed non-state group".

It has also gained vital battlefield experience. Hezbollah played a crucial role supporting the Assad regime during the brutal Syrian civil war, and has spent much of the last decade engaged in fighting in Iraq and Yemen.

What next?

After a short pause for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday, Hezbollah has resumed its daily rocket and drone attacks along Israel's northern border, with its fighters and commanders being targeted by Israeli strikes in response.

Nasrallah has made it clear that Hezbollah is not currently seeking all-out war – and that his forces will continue their current wave of attacks for as long as the fighting in Gaza continues. He also warned that "no place" in Israel would be safe if a fully-fledged conflict breaks out.

As of today, The Spectator said, "the tactical advantage is clearly with Israel". And more than a third (36%) of Israelis believe the country should launch an immediate attack, a poll from the Jewish People Policy Institute found.

The reality is "neither side will fight with kid gloves – both have the capacity to inflict terrible damage on the other", said Politico. "Israel has the ability to flatten Lebanon and has warned it will do so in the event of war – what's happened to Gaza only reinforces that threat. And Hezbollah isn't the Hezbollah of 2006. It's much better armed" and "has made clear it will take the fight right into the heart of Israel."

If war against Hezbollah does begin, the Gaza fighting will have been only an "overture", said journalist and Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator. "And if Tehran's most prized proxy is threatened with destruction, the prospect of the direct entry of Iran and its remaining proxies into the fight will be very real."

What happened

The United Nations Security Council voted 14-0 on Monday to endorse a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal for Gaza, increasing pressure on Israel and Hamas to bring an end to the conflict. Russia abstained. The three-stage plan, approved by Israel's war cabinet, was unveiled 10 days ago by President Joe Biden.

Who said what

The Security Council vote "sent a clear message to Hamas to accept the cease-fire deal on the table," said U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Israel has already approved the plan, and "the fighting could stop today if Hamas would do the same."

But Israel's U.N. representative "did not say that Israel has accepted the terms of the cease-fire plan," and while Hamas welcomed the resolution and indicated it would "engage in indirect negotiations" to implement the deal, it also "did not endorse the plan as a whole," The New York Times said. The "central sticking point," The Washington Post said, is that Hamas wants a "permanent cease-fire" while Israel is vowing to "continue fighting to achieve total military victory, a goal U.S. officials say is unattainable."

What next?

The "unusual show of relative unity by a deeply divided Security Council" puts pressure on Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement, said The Guardian. But both sides have so far shown themselves "far more influenced by local constituencies and the personal interests of leaders" than by "international public opinion."

What happened

The U.S. on Monday declined to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a two-week "immediate cease-fire" in Gaza, "leading to a lasting sustainable cease-fire, and also the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages." After the resolution passed 14-0, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply criticized the Biden administration for abstaining and called off a high-level delegation set to meet with White House officials on U.S. alternatives to a full invasion of Rafah.

Who said what

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said calling for a cease-fire and hostage release is not a "shift in our policy" and the Biden team is "kind of perplexed" that the Israelis are "choosing to create a perception of daylight here when they don't need to do that."

The commentary

The White House views this "public rift with Israel" as an "artificial crisis" Netanyahu "manufactured" for "domestic political reasons," Barak Ravid said at Axios. President Joe Biden "did everything he could for months to avoid a big public fight," even after Netanyahu publicly dismissed his humanitarian concerns, former State Department official Frank Lowenstein said to The Washington Post. Now we have this "very serious shift" in how Biden will "manage the Israelis throughout the rest of the war," and they will either "pay attention now" or watch relations deteriorate.

What next?

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said failure to implement his resolution "would be unforgivable." Israeli officials said they won't cease firing.

What happened?

The U.S. on Tuesday vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. America was the only country to vote against the resolution, though it offered its own draft calling for a temporary cease-fire "as soon as practicable."

Who said what?

"Demanding an immediate unconditional cease-fire without an agreement requiring Hamas to release the hostages will not bring endurable peace," said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. 

Palestinian U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour said "the message given today to Israel with this veto is that it can continue to get away with murder."

The commentary

This was the third U.S. veto of a cease-fire resolution since the start of the current fighting, and it "underlined America's isolation in its continued, forceful backing of Israel," The New York Times said. The alternate U.S. resolution marks "the first time Washington has put forth language using the word 'cease-fire,'" Politico said. 

What next?

The U.S. said its proposed six-week pause, which also warns against Israel attacking Rafah, would support the complex diplomatic talks to secure the release of hostages Hamas took in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Thomas-Greenfield said she hopes the Security Council will approve the draft as soon as it is ready.

'Venezuela's Maduro tricks Biden — again'

The Wall Street Journal editorial board

Venezuela's decision to bar popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado from running for president "was predictable," says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The Biden administration temporarily "lifted Trump-era oil and gas sanctions" after Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro pledged in October to work with the opposition toward free elections. Machado would be "a heavy favorite" in any fair vote, given Maduro's destruction of the economy. The White House was "naive" to think Maduro would keep his word.

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'The audacity of E. Jean Carroll'

Jessica Bennett in The New York Times

E. Jean Carroll once "blazed trails as a gonzo-style journalist," writes Jessica Bennet in The New York Times. Ever since she accused Donald Trump of a 1990s sexual assault, he called her a liar, and she sued for defamation, people see her, at best, as a former advice columnist. At worst, she's "the crazy Trump rape lawsuit lady." Beyond defamation, her case was about a woman, "long past middle age, who dared to claim she indeed still had value." 

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'MAGA has TDS — Taylor Derangement Syndrome'

A.B. Stoddard at The Bulwark

The romance between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has "destabilized MAGA," says A.B. Stoddard at The Bulwark. With the Chiefs advancing to the Super Bowl, "addled Trumpers" insist the game will be fixed to help "brainwash" Swifties into liberalism and prop up the "woke NFL." What really "has MAGA filling up its diapers" is the fear Swift will encourage her 450 million social media followers to vote for Biden.

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'The United Nations doesn't deserve a role in Gaza's future'

Sean Durns in the Washington Examiner

A dozen United Nations workers "allegedly helped carry out the Oct. 7 massacre of Jewish civilians," says Sean Durns in the Washington Examiner. If true, their United Nations Relief and Works Agency deserves no "role in Gaza after the war." The agency already had a "troubled history." Created in 1949 to resettle Palestinian Arabs, it views all Palestinians as refugees until they return to Israel, meaning it thinks the conflict can "only end with the Jewish state's destruction."

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Something extraordinary happened on Thursday. Israel — created as a modern nation in the aftermath of the Holocaust — went on trial in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accused of genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The court "has never judged a country to be responsible for genocide," The Associated Press reported. That could change. Israel's war against Hamas, started after the murderous Oct. 7 attacks by the Palestinian group, has reportedly killed more than 23,000 Gazans. South Africa lodged the formal accusation against Israel, and on Thursday asked for a halt to the war. "Nothing will stop the suffering except an order from this court," said South African lawyer Adila Hassim.

Reuters reported that Israel, of course, denies the allegations. "We have seen today one of the biggest shows of hypocrisy in history when South Africa became the legal arm of a terror organization, Hamas," a Foreign Ministry spokesperson. The war against Hamas came only after the attacks in which hundreds of Israelis were "massacred, executed, murdered, burned alive, raped and kidnapped." Israel, the spokesperson said, "is executing its right to self-defense."

Israeli officials, though, are nervous about the outcome of this week's hearings. "Since there is a bloc of anti-Israel judges, we should be worried," Hebrew University's Robbie Sabel told The Times of Israel. A declaration of genocide, he said, "would be a stain on our reputation."

What the commentators said

The charges against Israel "cannot be so easily dismissed," Mark Leon Goldberg argued at The New Republic. South Africa's case quotes "over a dozen senior civilian and military leaders," including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to support the notion that the mass death of Gaza civilians "is not merely an unfortunate consequence" of the war against Hamas, but is instead "part of the point." Don't expect any judgments soon, however. At the ICJ, "the wheels of justice move very, very slowly."

"Israel is not committing genocide — but Hamas is," Stanislav Pavlovschi and Arsen Ostrovsky wrote at The Hill. The crime of genocide "has nothing to do with the number of civilian casualties" and everything to do with the intent to destroy "a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Hamas has declared its goal is the destruction of Israel. But Israel's goal is to destroy Hamas. "Israel," the pair write, "is not seeking to destroy the Palestinian people, whether in whole, in part, or in any manner."

"Genocide or not, Israel has lost the moral high ground," Avraham Shama countered, also at The Hill. After Hamas' initial attack, the "world's public opinion was supportive of Israel's right to retaliate." But the "wholesale, indiscriminate killing of Palestinians" has reversed that calculus. Israel "can no longer claim 'we are different, we are more humane.'"

What next?

Israel is hoping for vindication at ICJ, Axios reported, with a "strategic goal" of having the court "recognize that the Israeli military is operating in the Strip according to international law." But it's not clear how much difference an adverse ruling would actually make. The court, after all, already ordered Russia to cease its invasion of Ukraine — and the war is still grinding on after two years. "While ICJ orders are binding, they are hard to enforce."

But some critics say that Israel has already lost a significant battle by seeing this case go before the court. "South Africa has already won by getting the hearing, and Israel knows it," Francis Boyle, a human rights lawyer, told CBS News. An order to halt the war could — technically — be accompanied by United Nations sanctions against Israel, though it is likely the United States would veto any U.N. efforts to punish Israel. The Biden administration remains committed to Israel, and that remains true amidst the genocide charges: Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week called the allegations "meritless."

From Taylor Swift to Lionel Messi, some big names have attracted their fair share of headlines this year, but there have also been some remarkable achievements from people who are a little less well-known.

The Week takes a look at 2023's unsung heroes. 

Ava DuVernay

The Oscar-nominated director made history this year by becoming the first African American woman to have a film entered at the Venice Film Festival in its 91-year history.

DuVernay's short film "Origin", which explores racism in the United States, premiered at the Italian film festival in September. During a news conference for the film she told Variety: "For Black film-makers, we're told that people who love films in other parts of the world don't care about our stories and don’t care about our films. This is something that we are often told: you cannot play international film festivals, no one will come." 

DuVernay revealed she had been discouraged from applying for the film festival because of its history. "And this year, something happened that hadn't happened in eight decades before: an African American woman in competition. So now that's a door open that I trust and hope the festival will keep open," she said.

Nigar Shaji

The aerospace engineer was the project manager behind the Indian space agency's first ever mission to the Sun. 

Launched in September, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is a ground-breaking probe dedicated to studying the Sun's atmosphere and surface. The data it collects "could help solve lingering solar mysteries" such as why the Sun's atmosphere is "considerably hotter" than its surface, said Space.com. The mission has already had success, capturing its "first glimpse" of a solar flare in early November. 

As project manager, Shaji was the "mastermind" behind the mission, said Mashable. The 59-year-old scientist has been part of  the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for 35 years. She told the news site that the successful launch of the spacecraft was "a dream come true".

Britney Schmidt and Peter Davis

Cornell University's Britney Schmidt and the British Antarctic Survey's Peter Davis are the authors of a major new paper on the melting of the vast Thwaites Glacier, which is about the size of Florida, in the Antarctic Ocean. 

The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier would mean a global sea level rise of up to two feet, "enough to wipe out many coastal cities", said Time. Schmidt and Davis used "a hot-water drill and a camera-enabled underwater robot" to be able to "look at the glacier's underside to better understand how, and how fast, it was melting". 

The research, published in the journal Nature, has given us a better understanding of glacier de-formation. "When you don’t understand how a process is happening, you can't hope to forecast it," Schmidt told Time. "Observing Thwaites in detail gives us a chance to make better choices for our future based on what we know is happening today."

Rob and Lindsey Burrow, and Kevin Sinfield 

Rugby league icon Rob Burrow, his wife Lindsey and his best friend and former team-mate Kevin Sinfield have all received a Pride of Britain award for their fundraising efforts for motor neurone disease (MND).

Since Burrow's MND diagnosis in 2019, the trio have raised millions for research through fundraising events, including the recent Rob Burrow Leeds Marathon, in which over 12,000 runners participated to raise money for the Rob Burrow Centre for Motor Neurone Disease Appeal and the Leeds Hospitals Charity.

In a poignant moment, Sinfield pushed Burrow around the 26.2-mile course until the very end, "when, to rapturous applause, he lifted his friend out of his wheelchair and carried him over the finish line", said ITV News.

Sinfield told the broadcaster: "We wanted to finish together. The marathon was built on friends running for a mate with a mate."

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema achieved "one of the decade's biggest environmental wins", said Time – an agreement to conserve or restore nature on 30% of the world's lands and waters by 2030. 

The former executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity for the United Nations, Mrema "shepherded the deal, overcoming vast differences among 195 countries' negotiators", the magazine said. Although not legally binding, the deal will "help boost finance for developing countries, phase out subsidies that harm nature, and protect the rights of Indigenous communities".

The United Nations World Food Program released a report this week warning that a quarter of Gaza's 2.3 million population was starving because food supplies getting through during the Israel-Hamas war were "woefully insufficient." Israel says its military has nearly cleared Hamas fighters out of northern Gaza, but will continue fighting in the south for months, according to The Associated Press. And U.N. officials warned the humanitarian crisis was getting worse as fighting intensified more than two months after Hamas' Oct. 7 deadly surprise attack in southern Israel ignited the war. "I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed," said Arif Husain, chief economist for the U.N. agency.

The report came as the health officials in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the Palestinian enclave had reached 20,000, including 8,000 children, and pressure mounted on Israel to do more to avoid civilian casualties. PBS reported that experts were calling the Israeli military campaign "among the deadliest and most destructive in history." Investigations by news outlets fueled calls from the Biden administration and others for the Israeli Defense (IDF) to shift to "precision" attacks on Hamas militants. 

A New York Times analysis of video evidence concluded that "Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians." The Times reported that Israel dropped 2,000-pound bombs, which can blast craters 40 feet wide, in an area of southern Gaza where it had instructed Palestinian civilians to go for safety. Munitions experts told the Times bombs that powerful "are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore."

A Washington Post analysis published Thursday concluded that evidence provided by the Israeli government "falls short" of proving the Israeli Defense Forces' claim that Hamas was running a command and control center in Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital. Before and after Israeli forces stormed the complex on Nov. 15, Israel said it had "concrete evidence" Hamas was operating in tunnels and bunkers under the hospital. "Terrorists came here to command their operations," Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said on Nov. 22. But the Post found no connections between a tunnel the IDF found and buildings Hagari said Hamas militants used. 

After days of intense negotiations and threats to veto unsatisfactory measures, the United States abstained from voting on Friday as the United Nations Security Council passed a major resolution to address Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in the densely occupied Gaza Strip. 

Initially drafted by the United Arab Emirates, the resolution calls for "urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days to enable full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access." Earlier versions of the measure included language demanding an "urgent cessation" of violence, against the wishes of the United States and Israel, which have held out against a blanket cease-fire over the past 11 weeks of violence. The approved measure came only after the U.S. "countered with 'a more passive formulation,'” one American official explained to CNN, adding that "Israel is aware and can live with it." The U.S. had already used its permanent position on the Security Council to veto earlier cease-fire resolutions, putting it "increasingly at odds with other major powers and with the Arab world," according to The New York Times. 

"We know this is not a perfect text," UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh told the paper. "We know only a cease-fire will stop the suffering." 

Weakening the resolution's calls for a stop to the violence "frustrated several council members" who saw the change as "approval for Israel to further act against Hamas for a deadly Oct. 7 attack," Reuters reported. According to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry, more than 20,000 Palestinians — largely women and children — have been killed by Israel since the war began, with upwards of 50,000 more injured.

According to Reuters, the Security Council also urged Israel and Hamas to "adhere to international humanitarian law" while denouncing "all violence and hostilities against civilians, and all acts of terrorism."

The international climate conference COP28 took place over the last two weeks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The event, according to the United Nations, "is where the world comes together to agree on ways to address the climate crisis, such as limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, helping vulnerable communities adapt to the effects of climate change and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050." The push to address these issues is becoming ever more prominent as 2023 will soon be the warmest year on record. Despite the urgency, there was plenty of controversy at the event: about where the event was held, who was running it and the overall influence of the fossil-fuel industry. 

Questionable leadership

The conference took place in Dubai, UAE, one of the top ten oil-producing countries in the world. Oil production and fossil-fuel usage are the world's largest contributors to climate change. To add insult to injury, Sultan al-Jaber, the chief executive of the state-owned oil company Adnoc, was appointed as the COP28 president. His position worried environmental activists because he held a "commitment to maintaining a role for fossil fuels in the energy transition," according to Reuters.

The central talking point of the conference was agreement on how to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, per the Paris Climate Agreement. The goal: countries committing to a fossil-fuel phaseout over time. However, The Guardian revealed comments from Al-Jaber claiming, "There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C," a statement which alarmed environmentalists.

He defended his comments, telling reporters that "there is some confusion out there, and misrepresentation and misinterpretation," and that he has, "said over and over that the phasedown and the phaseout of fossil fuel is inevitable." While environmentalists were wary of his leadership at the conference, his supporters believed he could bridge the divide between varying interests.

Fossil-fuel takeover

This year's conference had an unprecedented number of parties, including the COP28 president, who represented fossil-fuel interests. At least 1,300 fossil-fuel lobbyists attended the conference, which is more than three times the number at last year's event, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. While this number only comprised a small portion of the conference's 90,000 attendees, environmentalists "repeatedly questioned their presence at an event where meaningful negotiations have to take aim at the heart of their businesses," the AP added. Others like Bob Deans, director of strategic engagement for the Natural Resources Defense Council, hope that the oil and gas industry "might begin to shift from being the biggest part of the climate problem to finally being part of the fix."

Even with their small numbers, these lobbyists' influence was mighty. While an original draft resolution had specific language indicating that nations would phase out fossil fuels, it was ultimately changed to nations "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade," a far less specific commitment, CBS News noted. The resolution was altered despite more than 100 nations calling for a phaseout. "For 30 years, industry has denied, deceived and delayed climate action at the [United Nations] and every level of government," the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition told The Washington Post. "And yet this body has treated these deceptive, self-serving, disingenuous bad actors to a seat at a table they have no business being at."

Carbon-capture spotlight

With phaseout language removed from the resolution, nations instead discussed banning "unabated fossil fuels." In using this language, nations could potentially continue to use fossil fuels as long as the emissions are offset by another method, namely carbon-capture technology. The problem is that the success of the technology has been shaky at best. "Carbon capture and storage definitely could be a critical technology," Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told The New York Times. "But the history of carbon capture to date has largely been a disappointment."

Carbon-capture technology can play a major role in reducing the effects of climate change, however, as the Times explained, it is "no silver bullet." There are currently not enough capture projects to hit net-zero emissions, and there's no guarantee that enough will be built. In reality, major strides to reduce the usage of fossil fuels are still required to truly reach net zero and prevent the planet from crossing the 1.5-degree threshold.

A revolutionary resolution?

The conference came to a close with the nearly 200 nations coming together and agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels "in a just, orderly and equitable manner." Despite the controversy around avoiding a phaseout, the agreement marks the "beginning of the end," UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said in his closing speech. "Now all governments and businesses need to turn these pledges into real-economy outcomes, without delay."

The resolution specifically details a global commitment to increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency, "rapidly phasing down unabated coal" and limiting new coal power generation, accelerating efforts to net zero and "low-emissions technologies, including … renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies, such as carbon capture" and transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions. Al-Jaber praised the agreement calling it "a paradigm shift that has the potential to redefine our economies."

While this is the first global agreement acknowledging the need to reduce fossil-fuel use, "cavernous loopholes," Jean Su, the energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity told CNN, "threaten to undermine this breakthrough moment." Specifically, the language of the resolution could allow nations to take minimal action. The resolution is also not legally binding. "Whole economies and societies are dependent on fossil fuels," Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environmental minister, told The New York Times. "Fossil capital will not disappear just because we made a decision here," but, nonetheless, an agreement sends "a strong political message that this is the pathway."

'It's becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire'

John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist

There should be a cease-fire in Ukraine, not Israel, says John David Davidson in The Federalist. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked Congress to approve another $61 billion in aid to help his country fight Russia's invasion. It's a "neocon fantasy" to expect $61 billion to accomplish what $100 billion didn't, and "enable a Russian 'defeat' that would send Putin running back to Moscow." A cease-fire deal trading land for independence is the best Ukraine can get.

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'Tucker Carlson is not Donald Trump'

Alex Shephard in The New Republic

Tucker Carlson has nowhere near the "power and influence" he wielded before Fox News gave him the boot less than a year ago, says Alex Shephard in The New Republic. Carlson was "an agenda-setter" when he had his mainstream media "perch." The announcement of his new "Tucker Carlson Network" streaming project "only underlines just how far Carlson's star has fallen." Without Fox News behind him, Carlson is "just another fish in a very crowded pond."

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'Stop bilking taxpayers'

David Ditch at Reason

America's runaway deficit spending "threatens to derail the economy," says David Ditch at Reason. Two recent signs of the overspending in Washington were the Department of Transportation's hyping of an $8.2 billion grant for passenger rail projects, and the Congressional Budget Office's tallying of a $383 billion deficit for the first two months of the 2024 fiscal year. "Every dollar wasted on political pork, fraud, and poorly considered infrastructure makes the country's fiscal situation even worse."

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'Pacific island countries brace for an uncertain future'

Christina Lu in Foreign Policy

"Low-lying island nations such as the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Kiribati could be underwater" by the end of the century, says Christina Lu in Foreign Policy. And the U.N.-backed Global Centre for Climate Mobility says that "rising sea levels will likely render them uninhabitable even earlier." These places need the world to intensify the fight against climate change, but they also need help planning for a future when the ocean swallows their land and "their people must leave."

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For the first time in history, the United Nations has adopted a deal in which its members have agreed to begin moving away from using fossil fuels.

Nearly 200 nations at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai agreed to the deal, which calls on them to "transition away" from using fossil fuels to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change. However, the agreement immediately faced criticism from some member nations who had called for the term "phase out" of fossil fuels to be used, which was rejected by major oil-producing nations including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq.

While the Cop president Sultan Al-Jaber called the deal "historic", there are still "plenty of problems" with it, said Fiona Harvey in The Guardian. Nevertheless, it "does represent significant progress" for those nations aiming to combat climate change, she added.

What does the deal say?

The deal, which spans 21 pages and outlines how the UN member states will collectively tackle climate change, was passed on Wednesday with no interventions or objections. However, it is "not a legally binding document" and so does not compel members to follow its rulings, said Esme Stallard at the BBC, but it does show a "path forward for countries on climate change".

It's the first time a Cop report has referenced a move away from fossil fuels, outlining that countries will "contribute" to the "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner", with 2050 the target date for global net zero. There is also an acknowledgement that global emissions will likely peak before 2025, while there is also support for tripling clean energy by 2030.

What are the criticisms of the deal?

The strongest criticism has centred on the language used with regard to moving away from fossil fuels. Even before the deal was formed, countries were "fundamentally divided" on what language should be used, said New Scientist. 

Small island nations, some low-income nations, and Western superpowers including the US, UK and EU, all demanded "stronger language" in phasing out fossil fuels. What was considered "unqualified language" was opposed by countries dependent on oil and gas, and those seeking to use them for economic development.

It means the agreement is "fundamentally weak", said Justin Rowlatt at the BBC, and there is a "lack of compulsion" to really make countries act on the commitments made.

There is also criticism that, while the report references fossil fuels, the word 'oil' does not "appear anywhere" in the document, said Al Jazeera. The summit itself faced "criticism for close ties with fossil fuel interests from the start", particularly with UAE oil executive Al-Jaber overseeing proceedings.

The Alliance of Small Island States, which did not object to the agreement passing, said that the decision to pass it had been made while they were "not in the room" and criticised the deal for ignoring "what the science is telling us we should do", as well as its approach to loophole transition fuels and lack of financial support for nations hardest hit by the effects of climate change. 

Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, also pointed out the lack of "requirement for richer countries to help poorer ones in transitioning away from fossil fuels", said Axios, calling it "seriously insufficient" to "close the energy poverty gap".

What next?

The new deal is the "biggest step forward since the Paris agreement", said Matt McGrath at the BBC, but it will "likely not be enough to keep global temperatures under the key 1.5C threshold". It could, in the long term, get the Earth "closer to net zero by 2050", he added, while the requirement for individual nations to submit "stronger carbon-cutting plans by 2025" may make the biggest difference if those with high emissions put "a rapid transition to green energy at the heart of their new plans".

The Cop28 agreement is "far from everything we need", said systems theorist and futurist Dr Nafeez Ahmed at Euronews, but it will play a "key role" in giving countries the "realisation" that the move away from fossil fuels is "ultimately unstoppable". 

The focus should not be on "what we're leaving behind", he added, but looking at "how fast we can build the emerging post-carbon system".

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