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The United States is the largest donor among the WHO’s 194 member states, giving about $450 million last year. The WHO said the U.S. cut in funding would affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication and other initiatives in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world

The administration plans to fill the void left by its withdrawal with direct aid to foreign countries, creating a new entity based in the State Department to lead the response to outbreaks, according to interviews and a proposal prepared by the department. The U.S. will spend about $20 billion this year on global public health. (About $9 billion of that is emergency aid for COVID response.) But the senior administration official conceded that important activities led by the WHO, including vaccination initiatives, need to continue. It is not yet clear what will happen to those programs when American funding and participation end, the official acknowledged.

The new directive will require officials to divert their attention from pandemic response in order to review a list of their WHO-related activities and try to justify them on national security and public health safety grounds

In place of stability, what we have today is a ramshackle, largely deregulated system, widely known as “globalisation”. Effectively lobbied for by economic cowboys with no interest in economic justice or environmental sustainability, the result of this system where “the world is governed by market forces”

the international financial and monetary system is both hard to know of and understand, as it is so intangible and detached from regulatory democracy.

It is this very idea of self-sufficiency in steady state economies that I argue for in my book, The Case for the Green New Deal,

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang's remarks that multilateral lenders and commercial creditors should carry the biggest blame for the debt distress of some African states comes as a thinly veiled retort to western critics who accuse China of 'debt trap' diplomacy

While the US and European Union will not attempt to match the size of Beijing's infrastructure investment in Africa, they are attempting to ramp up their diplomatic and economic relations in Africa, anxious to avoid losing more ground to China.

'Africa should be a big stage for international cooperation, not an arena for major countries' competition', said Qin, at a joint press conference with African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat at the new headquarters of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, financed by China.

Mueller’s is the latest in a series of books by so-called restrainers who argue that the United States’ highly militarized pursuit of hegemony is a dangerous mistake that has done very little good and a huge amount of harm, both domestically and abroad. (Other recent examples include Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, the World and Andrew Bacevich’s The Age of Illusions.)

Since 1945, Mueller points out, “the United States … has never really been confronted by a truly significant security threat, a condition that persists to the present day.”

Even worldwide, the number of annual fatalities from Islamist terrorism roughly equals the number of Americans who drown in their bathtubs each year.

“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Experts cited tough economic times on both sides of the Atlantic and a perceived need among European leaders for a cause to unify their frayed union as major reasons that an agreement might be reached now, where past efforts have failed. But an even greater consideration, they said, was the growing economic might of China

Negotiations are not expected to be easy, with entrenched interests, especially in protected sectors of the agriculture industry, fighting to maintain their subsidies and preferences. European consumers have rejected the kinds of genetically modified crops3 that are commonplace in the United States but are known across the Atlantic as Frankenfoods. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama’s announcement was applauded by leading politicians and business groups in Europe, especially here in Germany, and so far the news has not provoked the instant union opposition in the United States that free-trade talks with underdeveloped, low-wage countries do.

In a Democratic administration, free-trade agreements are much easier to reach with higher-wage, unionized countries like those in Europe that do not spook trade unions. And the cross-pollination between American and European companies, as in the auto sector, also is expected to blunt opposition from labor groups

further cement an alliance between Moscow and Tehran that is likely to prove a major stumbling block for any rapprochement between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, who has vowed to rip up a nuclear agreement with Iran that the Kremlin supports.

until 2020 deliveries of conventional weapons must be approved by the United Nations Security Council

Sergey Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, said on Monday that Russia’s support for the Iran deal “has not changed,” indicating that it would oppose any attempt to re-negotiate it. Russia has increased arms sales in recent years as it seeks to earn foreign currency and support potential allies in its confrontation with the West. 

The overpopulated, Israel-sized Ferghana Valley has attracted the armies of Alexander the Great, Arabs, Mongols and Russian tsars. It has also spawned some of the bloodiest conflicts in the former Soviet Union, including ethnic clashes, incursions of armed Islamists and the Uzbek government's merciless crackdown on a 2005 popular revolt.   The glaciers and snows of the Tian Shan mountains around the valley give birth to the Syr Darya, one of Central Asia's two major rivers, and turn the valley into a giant hothouse with nearly perfect conditions for farming. Border areas in nearby Xinjiang, China's troubled Muslim region, also depend on Tian Shan's glaciers for water. But between 1961 and 2012, the sky-scraping range whose name means "Heavenly Mountains" in Chinese, has lost 27 percent of its ice mass, the German Research Centre for Geosciences said last year. The annual loss amounts to up to 5.4 cubic kilometres of water a year, it said.

farmers here are "ready to kill each other for water," a local mirob, or community official responsible for distribution of piped water from a communal canal, told Al Jazeera. The official, who could not give his name because of his job's sensitivity, described how over the past decade farmers have increasingly resorted to quarrels and fistfights and used their connections to officials to influence the timing and duration of water allocation to their land lots. This year, there's next to nothing to irrigate the fields with. "There's been no winter this year, so we're begging God for water," farmer Rasul Azamatov told Al Jazeera

The Ferghana valley is a bit bigger than Israel, but lacks its proficiency in water conservation - and does not have many alternatives to farming. Cheap Chinese exports have killed local plants and factories, and the valley has become a major source of labour migration - mostly to Russia.

Environmental security is still viewed in Western countries that see climate change as a “threat multiplier” in already conflict-sensitive regions differently than in developing countries that consider security implications with regional neighbors when responding to extreme events.

operational risk analyses that focus on environmental systems supporting overall stability

The most crucial of these resources and critical nodes is water.

Iran will cooperate with the U.N. nuclear agency to find ways to "overcome existing issues once and for all", Tehran's new envoy said on Thursday, hinting at a more flexible approach under relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani.

repeated Iran's stance that it would not cede what it calls its legitimate right to a peaceful nuclear energy program.

Western states see a meeting set for September 27 in Vienna as a litmus test of any substantive Iranian shift

Hundreds of thousands will take part in massive parades by civilians and the military, who have been drilled so thoroughly that soldiers are only permitted to blink once every 40 seconds. A dazzling half-hour firework display, using 300,000 shells, will surpass even the pyrotechnic splendour of last year's Olympics, organisers promise.As tanks roll through the heart of the city, and fighter planes zoom overhead, the People's Liberation Army will reveal 52 new types of weapon, including its latest nuclear missiles – all made in China.

Russian experts say listening to an Ahmadinejad speech is a small price to pay for keeping some diplomatic lines open with Iran which, no matter how it is viewed, is an extremely important regional player.