Latest world news analysis on environment, global change, international security, science, women/female entrepreneurship & youth empowerment in the Middle East.
In October 2021, a vote by the UN Human Rights Council recognized that we all have a right to a safe, healthy and sustainable environment. Our most fundamental human rights are inextricable from the health of the natural world, including the right to adequate food and even the right to...
These past two years have made the international community finally realize that complex global challenges and crises will not go away easily and are likely to become the norm rather than the exception in this turbulent 21st century. First, the COVID-19 pandemic is obviously far from over....
On November 21, Bloomberg reported that US intelligence had shared Russian plans for a potential invasion of Ukraine with its NATO allies. Estimates indicated about 100,000 soldiers in around 100 battalion tactical groups were deployed on the Ukrainian border. Since then, this troop buildup has...
In 2019, former US President Jimmy Carter told a church congregation about a conversation he had with Donald Trump, the incumbent president at the time. He said Trump called him for advice about China. Carter, who normalized US ties with China in 1979, told the president that the United States had...
On December 6, the world saw Myanmar’s leaders ousted by a military takeover earlier this year receive their first verdict in a series of trials. National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were both initially sentenced to four years in prison for inciting...
Let’s start with a tricky question. Is the European Union’s Green New Deal a path toward the world's first climate-neutral continent by 2050, as European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen sees it? Or do you agree with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s view of the deal as a...
Many people have been concerned with the disruption to children’s education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since early 2020, schools throughout the world have been shut during repeated national lockdowns. While some children are used to attending classes virtually, others struggle to even...
First, let’s be clear: Russia already invaded Ukraine. At the end of February 2014, Russian soldiers without insignia seized key facilities in Crimea and then helped secessionists in eastern Ukraine some weeks later. Crimea is now under Russian control and a civil war continues to flare up over...
The Russian military buildup along Ukrainian borders conducted over the last few months — similar to an escalation by Russia in April — has led to new direct talks between US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The biggest fear in the West is whether...
As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe, it leaves a multitude of long-lasting consequences in its wake. Among them, a host of mental health issues including an uptick in depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders. One of the less frequently discussed, however, is eating...
Since the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the United States has been the unchallenged dominant power in the Middle East and North Africa. As such, it often saw its role, for better or worse, as fixing the region’s many problems. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq and Saddam Hussein, Iran,...
