LONDON — Advocates of a global overhaul of efforts to meet the needs of the world’s 850 million chronically hungry people have received a boost with the decision by CARE, a top U.S. aid organization, to walk away from tens of millions of dollars in annual U.S. federal financing. In opting out of the mechanism by which donated U.S. food aid is transported overseas and sold in local markets to fund anti-poverty programs — a decades-old process known as monetization — CARE joins a growing number of international non-governmental and governmental groups demanding an end to a policy they say […]

Just when life looked like it could not get any worse for the people of Gaza, the lights went out. With temperatures soaring into the mid-90s earlier this week, the power company supplying electricity to as many as half of the strip’s 1.4 million people ran out of fuel for several days. As with just about everything that happens in the Middle East, the problem boiled down to politics. Surprisingly, however, the decision leading to the cutoff of fuel shipments came from the European Union, shining a broiling hot spotlight on one of the dilemmas confronting the international community as […]