In-Depth Archive

One year ago, the United Nations appeared to be poised between a moment of renewal and a total meltdown. An energetic new secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, promised to revitalize the organization after a decade of drift under Ban Ki-moon. The former Portuguese prime minister talked about a “surge of diplomacy” and the need to prevent looming conflicts. Listen to Richard Gowan discuss this article on WPR’s Trend Lines Podcast. His audio starts at 29:32: Yet he seemed doomed to run headlong into opposition from the administration of incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. The president-elect had repeatedly belittled and dismissed the U.N., […]

LIMA, Peru—Last December, Maria Victoria Fernandez, a 26-year-old nurse from Caracas, Venezuela, began traveling by bus to Peru, having decided that life in her home country was no longer tenable. The journey of nearly 3,000 miles through Colombia and Ecuador and down Peru’s Pacific coastline to Lima took her five days to complete. She had $170 in her pocket and her 2-year-old daughter, Sofia, on her lap. The day they left home, Sofia fell sick, meaning the trip was, for Fernandez, more stressful than any hospital shift she could remember. “We didn’t have medicine, and she had a fever and […]

A village in Kenya is the only one in Africa known to be receiving a monthly universal basic income, or UBI, stipend. The experiment is intended to encourage countries with high poverty levels to rethink their approach to social welfare, but not everyone is convinced the UBI trial will yield the answers researchers seek. Makanga is a village like many others in rural Kenya. Farmsteads with walls made of clay and roofs of corrugated iron sit on plots separated by bush. Dusty footpaths cross fields that bear signs of the latest drought to hit East Africa—the effects of which are […]