Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — In its annual membership rotation, the UN General Assembly has chosen five new members; Belgium, Germany, Indonesia, Dominican Republic and South Africa, who will serve two-year stints on the powerful fifteen-member Security Council. The election, or more properly selection, is based both on geographical and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — In the midst of an expanding American economy, record low unemployment rates, and buoyant consumer confidence, the Trump Administration has inadvertently planted the seeds of a global commercial slowdown and political showdown. The steel and aluminum tariffs slapped on imports from our key Transatlantic trading […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — The challenge is growing. The risk is widening. The stakes are stark. Those are some of the key takeaways from a UN press briefing on an expanding and dangerous global challenge; human slavery and sex trafficking where forty million lives hang in a precarious balance […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Amid continuing destruction of villages, attacks on children and a widening displacement of refugees, members of the UN Security Council visited Burma and neighboring Bangladesh to assess the widening humanitarian carnage. The officially dubbed Mission to Myanmar, as the country is officially known, offered diplomats […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Just days after the global sigh of relief regarding the upcoming United States-North Korea Summit, world opinion swung back into bitter criticism over the Trump Administration’s announcement that it was scrapping America’s participation in the Iran Nuclear Deal, the penultimate diplomatic legacy of the Obama […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Amid startling twists, turns and tribulations, the United States is preparing for a once improbable Summit meeting with North Korea to defuse Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile threat. Earlier in the year the “experts” and those who instinctively know better were predicting a probable […]
Special to WorldTribune By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Stressing the shared values and security interests which have united France and the United States for over two centuries, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Washington, D.C. This first formal State Visit of the Trump presidency was reserved for the USA’s oldest European ally, not to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — For as long as I can remember, the phrase Castro’s Cuba was synonymous with a Caribbean island ruled by one Family. Indeed for sixty years the phrase had a certain, if unfortunate, political ring. So when Raul Castro, the second member of the ruling dynasty, […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Cold War winds swirled throughout the week at the United Nations where a series of emergency meetings brought the fifteen member Security Council into a dangerously confrontational mode in the aftermath of the Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons killing 48. Accusations, allegations, and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — The setting was all about renewing an old friendship between a political pariah and the People’s Republic of China, its longtime patron. So in his first state visit outside of the African continent, Zimbabwe’s new president Emmerson Mnangagwa visited China to reaffirm and re-enforce the […]
