Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

In late August it appeared that the United States was very close to an agreement with the Taliban that would see US troops withdraw from the Afghanistan.

Leading the negotiations on the US-side was Z…

Tanzania has long been recognized as stable country, generally more advanced in its democracy than many other countries in East Africa. To be sure, democracy in Tanzania was certainly imperfect and f…

Japan and South Korea are in the throws of a dispute - and its getting worse. What was a trade war escalated to the security realm last month when the South Korean government announced that it was pu…

Greg Stanton has spent a career researching and fighting genocide. He speaks candidly about the psychological toll of this line of work and managing the PTSD which he confronts to this day. 

Fires raging in the Amazon have captured the world's attention and put focus on the policies of the Brazilian government. 

The true extent of the fires is not yet known--but most sources suggest that…

About 75% of the world's population live in societies that practice of form of dowry payment. This is also known as brideprice and it is essentially wealth that a potential husband must pay to the fa…

The fish you eat may have been caught by slaves.

Most Thai fishing boats operating in the South China Sea are dependent on migrant labor. But many of those vessels are essentially floating slave ship…

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released a report in August demonstrating the harmful relationship between climate change and how we humans are using land for …

In August 2017, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya muslims from Myanmar fled across the border to Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a minority population that have long faced discrimination by the B…

In the summer of 2014, ISIS forces swept through parts of Iraq that were home to the Yazidi people. This is an ethnic minority that has lived in Northwestern Iraq for centuries -- and suddenly they w…

When Ben Rhodes first met Aung San Suu Kyi she exuded the all traits that made her such an international icon for human rights and democracy. It was 2012, and Ben Rhodes, who was the deputy national …

The Horn of Africa region, which includes parts of Somalia, Kenya,  Ethiopia, is experiencing a severe drought. This region has been particularly vulnerable to droughts in recent years--but the sit…

Ethiopia is in the midst of a fairly remarkable democratic renewal. Since taking office in April 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has accelerated a process of political opening, including a greater fr…

One of the largest cities in India is running out of water. Is this our climate future?

Monsoons typically provide the bulk of water for Chennai, which is one of the largest cities in India. It is on…

Since taking office the Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to sharply reduce both the number of refugees who are resettled in the United States and also the number of people who can c…

North Korea is under the world's most stringent set of international sanctions. This includes, since 2006, a ban on exporting of luxury goods to North Korea.

This has not stopped Kim Jong Un from ama…

In 2015, the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. These are 17 goals around improving health, welfare and the environment that members of the United Nations agreed to achieve by 2030. The…

Ash Carter served as President Obama's Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2017. What made Ash Carter so unique among his predecessors was that by the time he became the Secretary of Defense, he'd alre…

When Reccep Tayyep Erdogan party, the AKP, won a landslide victory in Turkey's 2002 general elections he became a very different kind of Turkish leader from his predecessors. The AKP is a religious p…

Events are unfolding rapidly between the United States and Iran. At time of recording, it was reported that Trump ordered and then called off a military strike against Iran in retaliation for the dow…