In The News

The Guardian: Syria Resumes Airstrikes

December 7, 2018
The Syrian government resumed airstrikes in the wake of alleged poison gas attacks by rebels in Aleppo. The bombings in north Syria are in violation of the truce brokered by Russia and Turkey that enabled “relative calm to the country’s north for the past two months,” reports the Guardian. Meanwhile, the rebels have denied carrying out the attacks and accuse that the Syrian government of...

Washington Post: US Senate Rebukes Trump on Yemen

Karoun Demirjian, Carol Morello and John Hudson November 29, 2018
Yemen is the Arab world’s poorest country. Its three-year civil war with intervention by Saudi Arabia and Iran has displaced millions, and a 63-37 US Senate vote signals that the United States may back off from its involvement. “The resolution… seeks to invoke the War Powers Act to end U.S. military support for the ¬Saudi-led coalition, which human rights groups accuse of fomenting in Yemen the...

BBC: Israel-Gaza Violence Erupts

November 13, 2018
Palestinians and Israelis exchanged rocket fire in Gaza after Hamas militants stopped an Israeli unit’s vehicle a few kilometers inside the Gaza strip, apparently exposing an intelligence-gathering mission. “Due to the secrecy of the operation, Israel has not revealed specific details about the mission,” reports BBC News. “The IDF said, however, that the operation was ‘not intended to kill or...

DW: The UN Migration Pact

November 2, 2018
Displaced peoples and global migration are at historic highs with climate change, conflicts, natural disasters and an oversupply of jobs in some countries and undersupply in others. “The United Nations' Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration marks the first time the world body has ever agreed on a list of global measures to tackle the risks and challenges involved in...

Times of India: Khashoggi Mystery

Nayan Chanda October 22, 2018
The death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul puts a spotlight on Saudi-US relations and investigations that seem more about spinning stories to ease public concerns than getting at the truth. “The Khashoggi mystery is proving hard to solve not because it is such a tough case to crack, but because the known facts are too simple to reach anything other than a damning...

Spiegel: Killing Fields of Yemen

Fiona Ehlers October 3, 2018
Despite technological advances in warfare, bombings in Yemen are indiscriminate. Fiona Ehlers, writing for Spiegel Online, describes the anguish of interviewing a father who displayed love for his sons while serving tea in his family home and learning a few weeks later that three of his four boys were killed while riding a bus to school. The war in Yemen is overlooked by much of the world because...

Washington Post: 380,000 Deaths in South Sudan’s Civil War

Siobhán O'Grady September 26, 2018
A study funded by the US Institute for Peace and the US State Department finds that more than 380,000 people died from civil war in South Sudan. The United Nations put the number at 50,000 in 2016, and South Sudan officials suggest it is even lower. Calculating casualties in a war zone is challenging, and the lead epidemiologist with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggests the...