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some thought that Russia, currently holding the presidency of the security council, would block Guterres, as Moscow had said it wanted an eastern European in the top UN job.

Guterres’s margin of victory was decisive. He won 13 votes in his support and two abstentions, with no one voting against him. The second-place candidate, the Slovak Miroslav Lajčák, had seven votes in support and six against him – two of them vetoes from permanent council members.

The security council on Thursday will decide whether to have a formal vote or, if the two abstentions change their mind, to simply pass a resolution nominating Guterres by acclamation. That nomination would go to the UN general assembly which would either vote or, more likely, confirm the candidacy by acclamation.

As the UN’s refugee chief, Guterres persistently appealed to the conscience of the international community over the worst refugee crisis since the second world war, and he vowed to carry on being a spokesman for the downtrodden if he became UN secretary general.

The fact that he was promising to be an activist on humanitarian causes also makes Guterres victory surprising, as both Russia and China in particular have been resistant to outspoken activists in top UN posts

Also there was widespread sentiment this year that it was time for a woman to run the organisation for the first time in its 71-year history and there were several strong female candidates in the contest.

In the final ballot, the highest-placed woman candidate, the head of Unesco, Irina Bokova, finished fourth. Another female candidate for the job, Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres described the result as “bittersweet”.

The contest to replace Ban as secretary general began in April with public hearings in the UN general assembly, the first time candidates for the job had had to make their pitch in public. The new transparency was a result of a groundswell of pressure from civil society activists, in the 1 For 7 Billion movement.

“It’s been shocking for a society to face a situation only known to those who remember Spain coming out of the war,” said Cristina Monge, a professor of sociology at the University of Zaragoza. For many others, she added, “this kind of scenario was until now pure science fiction.”

As a result, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has faced criticism for not prohibiting mass gatherings sooner, and for not stockpiling medical equipment as soon as the number of cases reached several hundred in northern Italy in late February.

Even as Italy locked down its northern regions on March 8, Spain’s first coronavirus cluster had already emerged among participants of a funeral service. Mr. Sánchez’s government did not put the country under the highest level of alert and impose a nationwide lockdown until March 14.

Italy, Britain and France, he noted, declared their own lockdowns only once they had more infections than Spain. He stressed that International Women’s Day, when 120,000 gathered in Madrid on March 8, had also been celebrated on the streets of Brussels, Berlin, Vienna and Paris.

The event has widely been blamed for catapulting the spread of the virus in the capital. Three Spanish government ministers who led the women’s rally later tested positive for the virus, as did Mr. Sánchez’s wife and mother.

the government’s response to the virus was complicated by the diffuse nature of Spain’s political system, in which the country’s 17 regions progressively gained more autonomy, including the management of hospitals, after Spain adopted a new Constitution in 1978.

The gap between regional and national decision-making also encouraged many wealthy Madrid residents to hurry to their seaside homes, once all Madrid schools had been shut, at the risk of further spreading a virus that was already firmly embedded in Spain’s capital.

“A new and fragmented government starts with a huge disadvantage in this kind of crisis situation, because it requires quick and forceful decisions to be taken without constantly worrying about whether somebody else is gaining a political advantage,”

As a measure of the difficulties, Quim Torra, the separatist leader in northeastern Catalonia, refused even to sign a joint declaration with Madrid on coordinating the lockdown with the national government.

an epidemiologist and university professor, said Spain should not be judged harshly over its response to a pandemic that every government had passively watched unfold in a neighboring country “as if watching a movie.”

Spain watched Italy, he acknowledged, but with the mitigating factor that many scientists believed until recently that asymptomatic people were probably not contagious.

Even so, Spain’s main neighbor has fared much better so far. Despite sharing a 750-mile border with Spain, Portugal passed 200 coronavirus deaths last week just as Spain reached 10,000.

There, another Socialist minority government leader, Prime Minister António Costa, has seen opposition politicians close ranks behind him. Mr. Costa has been warning that Portugal could face more pain, but Dr. Rodríguez Artalejo said that Portugal so far deserved admiration.

The same solidarity has been sorely missing in Spain. As Madrid accounted for half of the nationwide death toll, Salvador Illa, the health minister, made “a call for solidarity with the Madrid region.”

“I think each region has acted independently, and that makes any coordination or solidarity initiative very difficult,”

The procurement of emergency equipment has been especially dire. The problem was highlighted when the health ministry acquired, via an undisclosed Spanish intermediary, 640,000 test kits from a Chinese company whose initial shipment proved unusable.

Even so, about 15 percent of Spain’s population is estimated to already have been infected — by far the highest proportion among 11 European countries

The biggest victims of the confused response, beyond those left sickened or dead by the virus, are Spain’s doctors and nurses, who themselves have been infected in staggering numbers.

“This crisis is likely to strengthen the horizontal bonds in our society, between citizens who are making big sacrifices, while weakening further the vertical one with the leadership at the top,”

almost two-thirds of people accused the government of hiding information about the epidemic.

“No politician can be held responsible for creating this crisis,’’ Mr. Michavila said. “But some probably will be blamed for pouring oil rather than using a bucket of water to put out the fire.”

Leaders from around the globe began adding their signatures to a treaty that bans nuclear weapons, although the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries declined to sign it and denounced it as dangerously naïve.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, as it is officially known, will enter into legal force 90 days after being ratified by 50 countries.

a historic first.

“The treaty is an important step toward the universally held goal of a world free of nuclear weapons,” Secretary General António Guterres, who supported the negotiations, said at the ceremony held in the Trusteeship Council chamber.

The United States and the other nuclear-armed states urged other countries not to sign it.

In a statement issued before the signing ceremony, NATO denounced the treaty, saying it “disregards the realities of the increasingly challenging security environment.”

The treaty would outlaw the use, threat of use, testing, development, production, possession, transfer and stationing in a different country of nuclear weapons.

“We’re going to do it in a way that’s very deliberate,” White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters Monday in a call organized by the World Resources Institute. The administration wants to transition to a cleaner economy with good-paying occupations in communities that have been hit hardest by unemployment and underinvestment, she said. “It’s intended to meet the moment we are in.”

“We are on the verge of the abyss,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday

China, the largest greenhouse gas polluter, has said it plans to reach peak emissions by 2030 and effectively erase its carbon footprint by 2060, though the details remain uncertain

despite myriad diplomatic tensions between the two countries, the United States and China vowed Saturday to jointly combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”

The world remains nowhere near meeting the central Paris aim of limiting Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — or ideally, remaining closer to 1.5 Celsius. Failure to hit those targets, scientists have warned, will result in a cascade of costly and devastating effects.

“We are way off track,” Guterres said. “This must be the year for action — the make-it-or-break-it year.”

To craft the new pledge in the administration’s first 100 days, White House officials scrambled staffers at agencies across the government to look for funding, programs and policies that could help curb emissions in the years ahead. Agency by agency, sector by sector, federal officials tallied up the math in an effort to make Biden’s pledge credible.

The International Energy Agency this week projected that global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 — the second-largest increase in history — as the world comes out of the pandemic-induced downturn

“This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,”

In the United States, the power sector represents one of the best opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, a collection of 13 utilities, including Exelon, National Grid and PSEG, urged Biden to pursue a range of policies “to enable deep decarbonization of the power sector, including a clean electricity standard that ensures the power sector, as a whole, reduces its carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”

The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, are already laying the groundwork to curb methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling, in part by reviving Obama administration standards reversed under Trump

the EPA is moving ahead to phase down the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons — which are widely used as refrigerants and in air conditioning — by 85 percent over the next 15 years, as mandated by Congress.

Environmental activists, Democratic lawmakers, foreign leaders and hundreds of private companies, including Apple and Walmart, have implored the White House to make the boldest climate pledge possible.

Advocacy groups and academics have published detailed analyses, demonstrating ways they say the nation could cut at least half its emissions by the end of the decade.

But other major emitters, including China, India and Russia, have yet to spell out how exactly they intend to help put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.

to reach the 50 percent target, the administration will have to make some difficult-to-guarantee assumptions about the future. For instance, that new regulations aimed at curbing emissions won’t be reversed by a future administration or the courts — even though Trump furiously dismantled key Obama-era climate policies.

some Republicans have insisted that the far-reaching changes needed to cut greenhouse gas pollution so fast could harm an already struggling economy, particularly in communities that still depend on the fossil fuel industry.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has argued that Biden’s aggressive climate actions could kill thousands of jobs in her state. On the Senate floor last month, she called the notion that new policies could quickly replace lost jobs in coal and other fossil fuels with ones in renewable energy “a fantasy world that does not exist.”

Persuading other key nations to bolster the promises they made in Paris remains critical if the world is to meet its collective goal of slowing Earth’s warming. The targets set by countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil could dramatically affect whether the world can reach the goals set almost six years ago.

“The international community will have the opportunity to see that Biden is good for his word,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “A lot of diplomacy is about momentum and building momentum.”

Yemen is already facing what UNICEF calls the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with around 80% of the population—more than 24 million people—needing food and other aid.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that Yemen was "in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades." He added, "In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost."

If the Trump administration goes ahead with designating the Houthi rebels as terrorists, the UN and many international humanitarian groups likely would stop delivering aid to Houthi-held territory in Yemen for fear of running afoul of the United States

By March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's closest allies in the Arab world, intervened in the war with massive air strikes and a blockade of Houthi-controlled areas.

Since taking office in 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to end US involvement in foreign wars, especially in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump and his advisers blamed the war on Iran and its support for the Houthis, ignoring war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which could implicate US officials who continued to sell weapons to the two allies.

Despite international criticism and growing evidence of war crimes, Trump continued to support Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is a major proponent of the Yemen war. In 2019, Trump used his veto power four times to prevent Congress from ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization is likely to make the group more intransigent and to drive it closer to Iran.

Because of constraints imposed by the Houthis on humanitarian work, Washington has already cut nearly half of its assistance to Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen this year. In 2019, US aid amounted to more than $700 million.

The UN also decreased its food rations to millions of Yemenis because of reduced aid from the US and other donors. If the terrorism designation is finalized, Washington would immediately stop its remaining aid to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.

A terrorist designation would also have a ripple effect beyond hampering the work of UN and humanitarian groups: it would dissuade insurance, commercial shipping and trade firms from operating in Yemen because they would be afraid of violating US laws.

As a result, it would become far more difficult and expensive to ship crucial supplies into Yemen, which is almost entirely reliant on imported food. The threat of sanctions or US prosecution could also devastate shipments of medical aid and other supplies intended to shore up a healthcare system that has been devastated by years of war and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also unlikely to be a top priority of the new administration, which could be worried about being portrayed as "soft" on terrorism.

The full scope of suffering in Yemen has gone partly unnoticed because of an unreliable death toll.

"The pandemic is a crisis unlike any we have ever seen. But it is also the kind of crisis that we will see in different forms again and again. Covid-19 is not only a wake-up call, it is a dress rehearsal for the world of challenges to come."

Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to “dissuasion commissions.” For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. The decision to attend is voluntary.

Other countries have moved to channel drug offenses out of the penal system too. But none in Europe institutionalized that route more than Portugal. Within a few years, HIV transmission rates via syringes — one the biggest arguments for decriminalization — had plummeted. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5 percent. Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation. There was no evidence of a feared surge in use.

None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass,” a landmark Cato Institute report stated in 2009.

But in the first substantial way since decriminalization passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

“At the end of the day, the police have their hands tied,” said António Leitão da Silva, chief of Municipal Police of Porto, adding the situation now is comparable to the years before decriminalization was implemented.

the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage

even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.

In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last.

Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use

When crack pipes are available, the social workers give them out. There’s no judgment, few questions, and no pressure to embrace change.

Summing up the philosophy, Luísa Neves, SAOM’s president, said: “You have to respect the user. If they want to use, it is their right.”

Police deployed in force to the area three months ago to crack down on dealers, who can be and are being arrested. Patrol cars are now stationed in the neighborhood 24 hours a day, scattering people using drug

overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.

“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,

“Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”

An eight-minute walk uphill from Porto’s safe drug-use center, in a neighborhood of elegant two-story homes with hedgerows of roses and hibiscus, neighbors talk of an “invasion” of people using drugs since the pandemic

In Oregon — where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model — attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation

We have to do something with the law. We know they can’t stay here forever. What happens when the police leave?”

Porto’s mayor and other critics, including neighborhood activist groups, are not calling for a wholesale repeal of decriminalization — but rather, a limited re-criminalization in urban areas and near schools and hospitals to address rising numbers of people misusing drugs.

In a country where the drug policy is seen as sacred, even that has generated pushback — with nearly 200 experts signing an opposition letter after Porto’s city commission in January passed a resolution seeking national-level changes.

ave today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.

After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.

Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”

Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab

“Why?”

“Because we know most of them. We’ve registered them before. Nothing changes if we take them in.”

But using them would mean cutting a deal with a brutal leader closely allied with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, underscoring the painful moral and political decisions that now confront Western leaders as they scramble to avert a global food crisis.

The Lithuania route appears to be the most promising for getting food quickly to areas like the Middle East and Africa that need it the most, even if it is also a long shot.

“This is a decision that politicians need to take not me,” Mr. Latakas, the Klaipeda port director, said. “It is up to them to decide what is most important.”

Western nations like the United States, as well as Ukraine, oppose lifting sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion but have not ruled out a deal with Belarus.

The war has halted those shipments, leaving around 25 million tons of grain, according to U.N. estimates, from last year’s harvest stranded in silos and at risk of rotting if it is not moved soon. A further 50 million tons is expected to be harvested in coming months. The grain elevators in Ukraine that have not been damaged or destroyed by shelling are quickly filling up. Soon, there will be no room left to store the incoming harvest.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, said severe bottlenecks meant that the existing routes through Poland and Romania “can provide only limited alleviation of the food crisis” given the volumes that need to be moved.

Warning of an approaching “hurricane of hunger,” the head of the United Nations, António Guterres, has sought to negotiate a deal under which Ukrainian grain would be transported out of the country by ship or train, and in exchange Russia and Belarus would sell fertilizer products to the global market without the threat of sanctions.

That means that Western governments and Ukraine are left to try out a range of possible solutions fraught with problems. Test runs of trains carrying grain from Ukraine through Poland to Lithuania, for example, have taken three weeks because of different track gauges in neighboring countries, requiring cargos to be loaded and unloaded multiples times.

Turkey has proposed using its ships to transport grain from Odesa, which, in addition to getting Ukraine to demine the port, would require an agreement from Russia not to hinder vessels.

But faced with the considerable challenges of executing such a plan, the best option for getting large quantities of Ukrainian grain to hungry people is probably by rail through Belarus to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports in Latvia and Estonia.That “won’t solve everything, but it would significantly alleviate the situation,”

Ukraine is opposed to any easing of sanctions against Russia but, increasingly desperate to move grain trapped by the war, is more open to the idea of a temporary easing of sanctions against Belarusian potash.

Roman Slaston, the head of Ukraine’s main agricultural lobby, said one challenge was that many rail connections through Belarus had been blown up by Belarusian railway employees sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.

“Given that the Russian Army is still in Belarus, who is going to pay to repair that now?” Mr. Slaston asked. “This is like some kind of madness.”

We don’t grow food to store it,” he said. “People in Africa won’t be fed by our grain sitting in bags in our fields.”