John Metzler

There they go again! North Korea’s reclusive communist regime ended the year with a provocative intercontinental ballistic launch, flying near Japan and splashing down in the Pacific.

Venezuela’s ruling Marxists are using some time-honored tricks to give their economically battered regime an edge for next year’s presidential elections. In a classic political mobilization tactic, President Nicolas Maduro held a “referendum” to ask his citizens what the future status should be for a mineral rich but disputed region of a neighboring country, namely Guyana.

As violence explodes throughout the Middle East, from Gaza to Yemen, and Syria to Iraq, the political fingerprints of the Islamic Republic of Iran become increasingly obvious on this regional tableaux of terror.

War clouds are swirling in the Middle East as the region steps closer to the precipice. The Second Stage of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas has now begun with all out fighting in the Gaza strip between the terrorists and the State of Israel. But beyond tiny Gaza it appears that regional destabilization now seems a certainty.

Over the past year human rights abuses in places ranging from Afghanistan to Ukraine, and to Myanmar/Burma, Xinjiang China, the Middle East, to name a few sordid cases, have splashed across the headlines.

In an extraordinary and fast paced series of events, the Islamic Republic of Iran was thrust back into the headlines.

The arc of history passed through the UN last week as the global Assembly debated and deliberated on the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Presidents, prime ministers, kings and potentates are converging on New York for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. The 78th annual Assembly of the world organization presents both a global gala and expanded Summit meeting to try to solve a myriad of crises facing the international community.

The tragic collapse of Kabul to the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban signaled the last sordid chapter in the Biden Administration’s appalling and shambolic “withdrawal” from America’s longest military commitment. But beyond the perceived American weakness and strategic myopia it glaringly manifest, the Afghan debacle incentivized what political scientists dub as “bad actors” such as Russia and Communist China.

Most countries politely prefer to look the other way when it comes to confronting widespread reports of North Korean human rights violations. After all what can you do about what goes on in one of the world’s most closed and repressive communist regimes [headed by the dynasty of Kim Il-Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-Un]?

The recent military coup d’etat in Niger, a vast and arid land on the southern tier of the Sahara, underscores the widening political crisis in Africa’s Sahel region, where instability, dire poverty and Islamic jihadi terrorism, have stalked the land.

The one-year countdown for the opening of the Paris Summer Olympics has begun.

The Russians are acting more and more like Soviets. Their brutal war in Ukraine underscores the point that Moscow’s military ambitions have counter-humanitarian consequences.

North Korea’s unannounced launch of another ballistic missile has nearly become a ho-hum event given the rash but predictable actions of Pyongyang’s rulers. After all we have seen this bellicose stunt many times before and thus have become dangerously numb and nearly indifferent to its ultimate threat and consequence.

The United States has long had a tumultuous relationship with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization.