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As readers of UNToday will be all too well aware, today’s uncertain international situation is beset by what some commentators have termed polycrises: interconnected challenges to peace, security and well-being that feed on each other in a menacing cycle of...
The UN is a wonderful place to work. I recall my excitement when I first crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan, about to start an assignment in the Secretary-General’s Office - having just resigned after a few years with the UK Foreign Service. Some...
The 10th of December is Universal Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). What a magnificent affirmation of the human spirit is expressed in its first article: All human beings are born free and equal...
When mankind became too pushy, you may recall from the biblical story, they were thwarted in their ambitions by the divine imposition of multiple languages. So, they could no longer understand each other and the Tower of Babel collapsed, together with humanity’s reach...
Imagine you were back just a few decades, before the internet, emails, mobile phones and social media. There was the nightly news broadcast on television — or before that, just on the radio (the wireless, as my parents used to call it when we sat down to hear the BBC...
“Google Search is fundamentally an online rankings system,” that’s what the Editor of US News Best Colleges suggested to me recently. And indeed, Google says much the same itself: they process “hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most...
Adult education, continuing education, lifelong learning, further education…it seems that we are made to feel thoroughly inadequate today if we do not constantly rejuvenate our brain cells and equip ourselves with the new knowledge needed to survive in the current...
The World Economic Forum (WEF), whose annual meeting was supposed to have taken place in person last month, purports to be devoted to “improving the state of the world”. It has become an increasingly prominent feature of the global elite’s landscape since 1971, when...
Did you know that the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has declared an International Day of Neutrality? Introduced by Turkmenistan, Resolution 71/275 of 2017 declares 12 December the International Day of Neutrality – and invites all Member States to mark its observance....
In the third week of September the UN in New York – and virtually – was the stage for a vast number of affirmations and commitments with respect to Sustainability and Climate Change. We had the opening of the General Assembly, the Food Systems Summit, the UN Uniting...
