By Thalif Deen – UNITED NATIONS – The 15-member UN Security Council (UNSC) stands virtually paralyzed in the face of genocide charges against the government of Myanmar where over 730,000 to one million Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh since a 2016 crackdown by Myanmar’s military. A…

By John J. Metzler - UNITED NATIONS — Thirty years ago on Nov. 9 1989, the world suddenly changed.  Mass civil and religious demonstrations rocking East German cities created a political tsunami which soon reached Berlin. Berlin, the divided city and German capital at the epicenter of the Cold War, would see an unexpected performance…

By Thalif Deen | UNITED NATIONS  - When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made a global appeal for “zero hunger” on World Food Day last month, he provided some grim statistics rich in irony: more than 820 million people do not have enough to eat, he said, while two billion people are overweight…

By John J. Metzler - UNITED NATIONS — From Hong Kong to Barcelona, and from Beirut to Bolivia and Chile, a global rage seems to be boiling over. It ranges from Hong’s Kong’s pro-democracy pushback to Beijing’s dour diktats, to Spain’s Catalonia region’s revived separatism against the central government, to Beirut’s crowds protesting Lebanon’s corrupt…

By Jens Thurau (DW) – President Donald Trump pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord isn’t really a surprise, even if the move made headlines. International climate protection is much more stable than most people think. A protester wearing a Trump mask stands next to protesters dressed as Polar…

Viewpoint by Dr Palitha Kohona / COLOMBO (IDN) – Asia, after having been accorded the dubious distinction of being the poorest continent in the 1960s, has within a very short space of time, transformed itself in to the economic powerhouse of the world and is achieving prosperity at a dizzying pace.…

By John J. Metzler - UNITED NATIONS — In a stunningly gloomy presentation, UN human rights experts reviewed the situation in Myanmar/aka Burma, the Southeast Asian country where the government  continues to persecute, harass and eliminate members of minority religious groups, especially the Muslim Rohingya. An already bad human rights situation deteriorated two years…