CHILDREN APPEAL FOR END TO CHILD SOLDIER USE — Children from more than 100 countries recently appealed to world leaders to do more to end to the use of children as combatants in armed conflicts. Despite international protocols preventing the practice, an estimated 250,000 children around the globe are fighting as soldiers. Former child soldiers and young activists personally delivered their plea in the form of a petition featuring 250,000 red handprints to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Feb. 12, the fifth anniversary of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Child soldiers are still [...]
Last week’s parliamentary elections in Israel saw the country take a collective step to the right, but it is incorrect to conclude, as conventional wisdom seems to be doing, that the vote marks the end of peace efforts. Instead, the elections could take those efforts in a different — and possibly even fruitful — direction: Israel’s next government could end up playing down the Palestinian track in favor of a major push to reach a peace agreement with Syria. Negotiations to form a new government are just getting started, and there is no certainty about how they will conclude. The [...]
In January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advocated a new national security strategy entailing closer cooperation between the State Department, the military, government and civilian humanitarian agencies, and foreign allies. “Smart power,” she called it. Just a month later, U.S. smart power is becoming a reality in one of the world’s most troubled regions. Off the coast of Somalia, a country that hasn’t had a functional government in 18 years, a Navy-led international humanitarian and training mission has joined a new, firepower-heavy counterpiracy fleet, while State Department negotiators play a key supporting role. What has emerged is a complex, sophisticated [...]
