Palau: At the Edge of the World
Just beyond the vibrant coral reefs on the eastern rim of Palau’s island archipelago, the clear blue of the Western Pacific suddenly becomes even bluer, both on the map and in reality, as it...
Focus on Afghanistan: The West’s abandonment of Afghanistan: A story of arrogance, ineptitude, and...
Political cartoon by Jeff Danziger, contributing editor to Global Insights and a member of our media partner Cartooning for Peace. See additional articles on Afghanistan in Global...
France’s crumbling chateaux: Not the only cultural heritage under threat.
It’s a noble concern that will appeal to many. President Macron’s aim is to use the lottery – quickly - as a means of mobilizing private money to avoid raising taxes and leaving a...
Could better-funded journalism have prevented the pandemic?
What is so ironic is that had donor governments, foundations, corporations and private individuals with means bothered to support independent news organizations at a time when credible journalism is in crisis with...
Nepal’s Covid Doctors
Politics are feeding the fire. For the second time in five months, Nepal’s government was dissolved on 22 May 2021, furthering bureaucratic paralysis. Nepal risks becoming an imploding catastrophe. It is already...
Democracy – Quo Vadimus — Where Do We Go?
What connects both incidents is a growing sense that the political polarization gripping the country has begun to shake the very foundations of law and order, of civilized behavior itself. In this...
Botswana’s rhino poaching crisis: COVID-19 increases the pressure
Any thought that the coronavirus outbreak and supposed clampdowns in China and other East Asia countries on illegal wildlife trade and markets will cut demand for rhino horn is misplaced. Chinese traditional...
Keeping it Family : How Africa’s Corrupt Leaders Stay in Power
UPDATED 2 November, 2020
Once again, another corrupt African politician - President John Magufuli of Tanzania - has abused his country and people by undermining democracy with allegedly fixing the 28 October 2020 presidential elections...
Biden visit to the Middle East: Choosing the nasties over the nasties
Cartoonist Jeff Danziger is a contributing editor to Global Insights Magazine and Global Geneva Group. He is also a member of the Geneva-based Cartooning for Peace. For more information on Danziger, please see our Global Geneva profile A...
No Exit for Putin
The “military operation” to take over the Ukraine was simultaneously a catastrophic miscalculation and a threat to Russia’s long-term security. War in Ukraine, potential famine in the Middle East,...
The Ethiopian-Tigray Conflict: View of a worsening situation from the other side of the...
Fleeing violence in Tigray, Ethiopia, more than 61,000 people have registered as refugees after crossing the border into Sudan since November 2020. Recently, I visited two refugee camps - Al Hashabat and...
Coronavirus Stories: Lessons from the roller coaster life of an Italian ICU nurse
Tears do not roll easily from the eyes of veteran journalists who have covered death and destruction in many parts of the world. I have reported war and catastrophe in Africa,...
Michel Lavollay: A Cri du Coeur From a Doctor-Diplomat Who Knows
The following column by contributing editor, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum is from his regular comment The MortReport. PARIS — Breakfast with Michel Lavollay at Café Flore, pleasant under any...
Afghanistan Today: Is Russia back to old tricks?
The Red Army suffered a humiliating defeat and retreated from Afghanistan in February, 1989. Now the Kremlin is clawing its way into a diplomatic thicket in which Pakistan, India and Iran are also vying...
Focus on Afghanistan: Whose responsibility?
This is an updated version of an article that first appeared in The Christian Science Monitor on 9 September 2021. See additional articles on Afghanistan in Global...
Russia’s Ukraine Intervention: Death by a Thousand Cuts?
William Dowell’s regular Tom’s Paine column. Cartoon by Jeff Danziger. (Also see LINK to Danziger's latest book, The Vietnam War according to Lieuttenant Dangerous) The...
On being taken for Salman Rushdie…and nearly lynched
At least two men were brandishing swords, while little boys were picking up stones, a bad sign. While covering the final...
Coping with war on the frontline: the Rory Peck Trust 25th anniversary
One of the ways Rory Peck Trust (RPT), a media partner of our NGO Global Geneva Group, has been funding freelance journalists around the world is to provide Hostile Environment and First...
Accountability is about leadership, not mechanisms.
Agent Provocateur is the oped section of Global Insights. At the core of the problem is that we can’t decide what accountability to affected people (AAP) means. The result is...
Coronavirus Stories: My Verbier Covid-19 Experience
It all started with a get-together in the 1,500 metre-high Swiss alpine resort of Verbier. Perhaps it started even before then; I will never know. My closest friends and I from here, there,...
Bosnia: A looming humanitarian crisis in the heart of Europe
All photos courtesy of Kristian Skeie with copyright. Bihać is a city of 56,000 on the Una River in western Bosnia. At its center stands a 13th-century church...
The Hans Hass Fifty Fathoms Award: Communicating the oceans
Tear Drop in the Sea - By Gardner Young (a diver)
I tell you mate, we all tempt fate when we dive beneath the sea
For a man’s a fool, to break the rule, that nature meant...
The Geneva Film Festival & Censored Chinese History: The Story of Chi Xiaoning and...
Before the 1980s, documentary films in China were mostly propaganda made to serve the ideological purposes of the Communist Party. Views critical of the party were prohibited. Only one official voice could...
MortReport Extra: Now or Never
The following column by contributing editor, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum is from his regular comment The MortReport. Global Insights Magazine/Global Geneva Group are supporting Mort’s insightful and frank reporting from different parts of...
Letter from Sicily: The Mediterranean – the World’s most Deadly Anti-Refugee ‘Wall’
This article is part of Global Geneva’s Focus series on Oceans.
In January 2019 I had the good fortune to finally get to Sicily, or at least to the ancient town of Palermo and other...
Abdul Haq: the Afghan commander who could have led to peace
FOCUS on Afghanistan: 40 years of war. This is part of a special Global Geneva series on Afghanistan to be published in the November, 2018 - January 2019 print and e-edition.
I had called Abdul Haq from Washington D.C....
Mort Report Booster Shot
The following column by contributing editor, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum is from his regular comment The MortReport. Global Insights Magazine/Global Geneva Group are supporting Mort's insightful and frank reporting from different parts...
Focus on Afghanistan: The Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan. 4th fully-revised edition. (2014) –...
See additional articles on Afghanistan in Global Insights Magazine (search www.global-geneva.com) plus our specialised updated collection of good pieces on Afghanistan by other media. (See Nusereal link: https://www.nusereal.com/afghan.php)
Focus on Afghanistan: What to do about Afghanistan’s growing disaster: Two key articles
As predicted by some, the ill-advised U.S.-led military pullout in Afghanistan has led to a rapidly deteriorating on-the-ground situation that is increasingly leading to a takeover of much of the country by...
Notes from Oregon: At the centre of the fire storm
September 11, 2020 As I sit down to write this, it feels like I’m writing a journal in a movie about Mars. A reddish-orange hue shines through my tightly...
MortReport: Paris – An Immoveable Beast
Walking and bike path along former railway line in Paris. (Photo: Ville de Paris) The following column by contributing editor, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum is from his...
Peter Jouvenal: Held – and released – by the Taliban
Now back in the United Kingdom with his Afghan wife and three daughters, Peter Jouvenal shows few signs of his six months incarceration by the Taliban. Smiling and confident, Jouvenal, 64, sports...
Un été italien, de Padoue à Venise au fil de l’eau
ÉDITION FRANÇAISE: « Bien des années avant 1830, dans le temps où nos armées parcouraient l’Europe, le hasard me donna un billet de logement pour la maison d’un chanoine : c’était à Padoue, charmante ville...
The Daily Doormat
Political cartoon by Jeff Danziger, cartoonist, author and contributing editor to Global Insights. He is also a member of our media partner, Cartooning for Peace. TUCSON, Arizona --...
Bangkok is Sinking, but so are other Southeast Asian megacities…
Somneuk
Atipanyo, a Buddhist abbot, stands in front of his temple south of Bangkok
looking out to sea. Here, he says, pointing to the waves lapping at the
shoreline, 20 years ago there was an...
Back to the Cold War
Putin may survive this round, but the post-Ukraine world he has created is not going to be the same. To start with, nothing that Putin says from here on out will have...
Afghanistan: the abandonment of a nation
In autumn 2001, having returned from Afghanistan just prior to the 9 September assassination by Al Qaeda of northern Afghan resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud and before its World Trade Center attacks,...
Is a legal trade the only way to save Africa’s remaining rhinos?
The air buzzed with the sound of an electric saw. Next to me a 2,000kg white rhino slumped on the ground. When the saw fell silent, I was handed a heavy, greyish brown lump...
In South Sudan, the Hope and Pain of Nonviolence
Gunmen killed our children. We seek peaceful justice but cannot be sure it will happen. This article by Yeng Lambo, a USIP program coordinator, was first published...
In Squandered Eden, Paradise Lost
Whether the pen is still mightier than the sword is a tossup. But bulldozers beat them both hands down. Once monster machines ravage nature, there is no going back. And in the...
Coral Vita: Making reef rescue fun – and a business
Gator Halpern, recently named 2018 Young Champion, and his project Coral Vita, founded in 2015 with one-time fellow student Sam Teicher, have already received many awards. Among them: Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018...
A Mort Retort: Facete Rectos Pagare
The following column by contributing editor, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum is from his regular comment The MortReport. Global Insights Magazine/Global Geneva Group are supporting Mort’s insightful and frank reporting from different parts...
Letter from Maine’s ‘Oyster Lady’: The comeback of a mollusk healthy for food and...
The following is part of Global Geneva's ongoing Focus on Oceans series.
As an extraordinary oblong-shaped bivalve, oysters offer a low-carb, low-fat, protein punch packed with essential vitamins, minerals, and trace elements. Hence its new...
Focus on Afghanistan: Afghan Waterloo: Graveyard for the British, Soviet, and US Empires
See additional articles on Afghanistan in Global Insights (search www.global-geneva.com) plus our specialised updated collection of good pieces on Afghanistan by other media. (See Nusereal link: https://www.nusereal.com/afghan.php) Biden’s...
Focus on Afghanistan: The “Tali-Bans’ of the past: waiting for the new decrees.
The first edition of the Crosslines Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan, which was published in 1998 during the height of the first Taliban era (1996-2001), quickly became known as the “Taliban edition.”...
The Global Reef Expedition: A mission to assess the health of coral reefs around...
This article is part of a special Global Geneva Focus series on Oceans.
IN 2011, scientists from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation set out on a mission to explore the remote coral reefs...
Afghanistan’s Taliban still holding western detainees
Peter Jouvenal (right with camera) while reporting during the Soviet-Afghan war. (Photo: Ed Gorman) There is still no news about the possibility of release of the remaining westerners...
The Hindu Kush Himalaya: An endangered “water tower” in a warming world
Mountain systems have long played a vital
role for ensuring replenishable water resources for both human survival and
natural ecosystems, for drinking, farming, hydroelectrical power, irrigation,
transportation and fishing, among other human activities. Inhabitants of...
Pierre-Michel Virot: Seeing the world by looking for it
Stocky, and looking somewhat like a large, Steiff teddy bear, Pierre-Michel Virot speaks intently if not slightly gruffly in English, as if to ensure that you have understood precisely what he has...
Peacekeeping: When all seemed lost …
Monrovia, Liberia, August 5, 2003: General Cobra sat behind a wooden desk, bare but for an elephant carved from rosewood, a porcelain figurine of a bucking bronco, and an abacus. He sported a scarlet...
