United Nations

Taliban Free 2 Westerners Working for U.N., Days After Quiet Detention

ISTANBUL — The Taliban on Friday released two Western citizens and two Afghan colleagues who had been working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, hours after the U.N. had announced that they had been held by the Taliban for several days in Afghanistan. The team members, including Andrew North, a British citizen and former BBC […]

Read More

Afghanistan’s Health Care System Is Collapsing Under Stress

KABUL, Afghanistan — Amena, 7 months old, lay silently in her hospital crib amid the mewling of desperately ill infants in the malnutrition ward. Her mother, Balqisa, had brought the child to Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, the night before. “Her body was so hot,” she said, stroking her daughter’s emaciated leg. […]

Read More

In the Tinderbox of Bosnia, a Serb Nationalist Lights a Match

It was in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that a teenage Serb nationalist set off World War I by assassinating an Austrian archduke in June 1914, and where the seemingly deranged rants of a Serb psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic, presaged a three-year spree of bloodletting in the 1990s. Those Balkan wars left roughly 140,000 people dead, drew in […]

Read More

Why There’s a Growing Push to Ban Killer Robots

It may have seemed like an obscure United Nations conclave, but a meeting this week in Geneva was followed intently by experts in artificial intelligence, military strategy, disarmament and humanitarian law. The reason for the interest? Killer robots — drones, guns and bombs that decide on their own, with artificial brains, whether to attack and […]

Read More

Pope Francis Laments That for Migrants, ‘Little Has Changed’

LESBOS, Greece — Pope Francis returned Sunday to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, the site of one of the definitive moments of his papacy, seeking to elevate the plight of migrants — what he called a “shipwreck of civilization” — to the top level of global concerns, along with the pandemic […]

Read More