A decade until 2030 looks like a long time, but not when the world is faced with crises on multiple fronts that require sustained action. The world was intended to be a better place when the international community pledged commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) after the...
People of Aleppo are suffering from a lack of political will to take decisive action among the world’s powerful countries. The fall of Aleppo, and the horrific bombing campaign that has including the targeting of schools and hospitals, has been compared with the atrocities of Srebrenica,...
The people of Zimbabwe are struggling with many problems, but the scale of the challenges they are facing in this drought is more than they can manage alone. This year started with torrential rain: Bridges swept away in the north of England, my friend Colin’s studio in Yorkshire was under five...
Fair Observer's five best articles of May. This has been an eventful month. A gory murder of a soldier in London has shocked much of the world. The barbarity that one associates with Africa and Afghanistan suddenly seems close to home. In the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, President...
America's international relations are now described more often by its drones. "While launching an international airlift of humanitarian aid to the former Soviet Union, US officials have contracted with a Roman Catholic agency to begin shipping food into remote provinces of...
As the Syrian refugee crisis deepens, charitable trips have turned into publicity stunts. Despite aid convoys developing into an institutionalised process of our global charity sector, the increase in the number of humanitarian relief convoys sent out is not proportionate to their affectivity in...
The registration of refugees is designed to protect. But its system of conditional aid has distanced the concept of aid from its universal roots. Everyday hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are forced to flee their home countries in search of refuge. Leaving with little more than...
Refugees are created by untenable circumstances within boundaries formed by the West. Late last fall, I was sitting outside in our farm yard in Vermont, just south of the Canadian border. My wife and I were remarking on the influx of the Common Red Poll, a bird not often seen in such numbers where...
