Guterres, Antonio

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    U.N. Orders Agencies to Find Budget Cuts, Including via Staff Moves From N.Y.

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    The instructions from the office of Secretary General António Guterres were reviewed by The New York Times and came after President Trump ordered a review of U.S. funding to the agency.The United Nations, anticipating that President Trump will slash U.S. contributions to the global body, has told its departments to draw up plans for budget cuts, including through staff relocations from New York and Geneva to less-expensive cities.The instructions — outlined in a two-page memo dated April 25 that was reviewed by The New York Times — were sent from Secretary General António Guterres’s office to the heads of all agencies that report directly to him. The memo set a May 15 deadline for all proposals so that they could be added to the 2026 budget.“Your objective is to identify as many functions as possible that could be relocated to existing lower-cost locations,” the memo reads, “or otherwise reduced or abolished if they are duplicative or no longer viable.”In February, President Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of the overall U.S. funding and ties to the U.N. He withdrew the United States from several U.N. organizations, including those dealing with human rights, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, Palestinian aid and global health. In his first term, he also reduced U.S. contributions to peacekeeping efforts.Three senior U.N. officials said on Tuesday that the drastic, cost-cutting measures laid out in the memo had caught the agency’s departments by surprise and went beyond what they had expected. The officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the directive was largely viewed as a way for the U.N. to brace for potential additional cuts by Mr. Trump and to proactively insulate it from the financial blow.But the U.N. officials said the budget cuts were ordered only partly in response to Mr. Trump’s moves. The directive comes as the U.N. is adjusting to a host of financial problems, they said, from the withdrawal and reduction in financial contributions by major donors like the United States and Europe to a cash-flow crisis caused by member states’ not paying their annual dues on time and in full.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Says Deadly Blast in Yemen Was Caused by Houthi Missile

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      An explosion near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital on Sunday killed 12 people, according to health authorities tied to the Houthi-led government.A deadly blast on Sunday near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital was caused by a Houthi missile, not a U.S. airstrike, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said on Thursday.The health ministry of the Houthi-led government said earlier this week that an American airstrike had hit a densely populated neighborhood of Sana, the Yemeni capital, killing 12 people and injuring 30 others. The blast struck an area adjacent to Sana’s Old City, a UNESCO world heritage site filled with ancient towers.Dave Eastburn, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that while the damage and casualties described by local health officials most “likely did occur,” they were not the result of an American attack. While the United States had conducted military operations over Sana that night, the closest American strike was more than three miles away, he added.The Pentagon’s assessment that the damage was caused by a “Houthi Air Defense missile” was based in part on a review of “local reporting, including videos documenting Arabic writing on the missile’s fragments at the market,” Mr. Eastburn said. The Pentagon did not provide those videos or evidence of its claims in its statements.An initial review by The New York Times of local reporting and open-source material in Yemen found a video showing a missile fragment with Arabic writing posted to social media, however it was from a different location from the market in Sana’s Old City. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ Politburo, said in a phone interview that the American denial was an attempt to smear the Houthis. He reiterated that the group believed that the United States targeted the neighborhood on Sunday, “just as it previously targeted ports, cemeteries and citizens’ homes, resulting in the deaths of hundreds.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.N. to Pull International Workers From Gaza Amid Israeli Strikes

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      The United Nations is withdrawing about one-third of its international work force in Gaza, with the reduction coming after an Israeli tank shell hit a U.N. compound.The United Nations announced on Monday that it would reduce its presence in Gaza by withdrawing about one-third of its international workers there, following repeated strikes of its facilities by Israel.Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement that the decision to reduce the organization’s footprint in Gaza was “difficult” at a time when humanitarian needs were soaring and as a resumption of Israeli attacks were killing hundreds of Palestinians, including women and children.The drawdown announced Monday would be the first time since the start of the Israeli-Hamas war in 2023 that the United Nations has reduced its work force in Gaza, but it will retain a presence there.“The U.N. is not leaving Gaza. The organization remains committed to continuing to provide aid that civilians depend on for their survival and protection,” Mr. Guterres said in the statement.At least 280 U.N. staff members have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, the organization’s largest loss of life in any conflict in its history, Mr. Guterres has said.Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said that about 30 percent of the organization’s 100 or so international staff members from different agencies would be leaving Gaza over the next week and that likely more would depart in the coming weeks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Hanging by a Thread’: U.N. Chief Warns of Missing a Key Climate Target

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      His comments came as the world body’s weather agency said it expected Earth to soon surpass the record high temperatures experienced in 2023.With the planet in the grips of its highest temperatures in more than 100,000 years, scientists with the United Nations weather agency have crunched the numbers and come to a stark conclusion: More record-hot years are all but inevitable.In the next five years, there’s a nearly 90 percent chance Earth will set yet another record for its warmest year, surpassing the scorching highs experienced in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report Wednesday.The chances are almost as great that, in at least one of these five calendar years, the average global temperature will be 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than it was at the dawn of the industrial age. That’s the level of warming that countries set out to avoid under the 2015 Paris Agreement.“The target of limiting long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is hanging by a thread,” the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in a speech in New York City on Wednesday. He called for urgent action in a number of areas, including slashing carbon dioxide emissions and adopting renewable energy, helping poor countries finance their climate plans, and clamping down on the fossil fuel industry.On the last subject, Mr. Guterres reiterated past exhortations to end taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas. But he also turned his attention to a new target: He urged governments to ban advertising by fossil-fuel companies, comparing oil and coal producers to the tobacco industry, which faces advertising restrictions worldwide. And he urged the news media and tech companies to stop displaying their ads.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. and Allies Penalize Iran for Striking Israel, and Try to Avert War

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      While imposing sanctions on Iran, U.S. and European governments are urging restraint amid fears of a cycle of escalation as Israel weighs retaliation for an Iranian attack.The United States and European allies joined together on Thursday to impose new sanctions on Iranian military leaders and weapon makers, seeking to punish Iran for its missile and drone attack on Israel last weekend, while imploring Israel not to retaliate so strongly as to risk a wider war.White House officials said the sanctions targeted leaders and entities connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s Defense Ministry and the Iranian government’s missile and drone programs. The sanctions also seek to block exports by Iran’s steel industry that bring Tehran billions of dollars in revenue, they said.“I’ve directed my team, including the Department of the Treasury, to continue to impose sanctions that further degrade Iran’s military industries,” President Biden said in a statement. “Let it be clear to all those who enable or support Iran’s attacks: The United States is committed to Israel’s security.”Britain said it had imposed sanctions on seven people and six entities linked to Iran’s regional military activity and its attack on Israel, which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a “reckless act and a dangerous escalation.”“These sanctions — announced with the U.S. — show we unequivocally condemn this behavior, and they will further limit Iran’s ability to destabilize the region,” Mr. Sunak said in a statement.“Let it be clear to all those who enable or support Iran’s attacks: The United States is committed to Israel’s security,” President Biden said in a statement on Thursday.Al Drago for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.N. Chief Calls Conditions in Gaza a ‘Moral Outrage’

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      In a visit to the Rafah border crossing, Secretary General António Guterres called for an immediate cease-fire and expressed solidarity with Palestinians in the territory.António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, reiterated his call on Saturday for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza, using a visit to a border crossing in Egypt to slam the “nonstop nightmare” Palestinians faced in the territory.“I want Palestinians in Gaza to know: You are not alone,” Mr. Guterres said. “People around the world are outraged about the horrors we are all witnessing in real time. I carry the voices of the vast majority of the world: We have seen enough. We have heard enough.”Mr. Guterres spoke to reporters from the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, one of the two main ground corridors being used to transport desperately needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. More than five months into Israel’s war against Hamas, Palestinians in Gaza are facing widespread hunger and deprivation despite a huge international relief effort.For months, aid organizations have struggled to transport and distribute sufficient food and other supplies in Gaza, which faces a blockade that is jointly enforced by Egypt and Israel.U.N. officials have said the obstacles include lengthy Israeli security inspections, attacks on aid convoys by desperate Palestinians and organized gangs, and roads badly damaged by months of airstrikes and fighting. Israel has blamed the delays on U.N. staffing and logistics and says it does not impose limits on the amount of aid that can enter Gaza.The worsening conditions this week led the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global authority that has classified food security crises for decades, to project that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza. Aid groups and U.N. officials have argued that it would be better for Israel to ease entry restrictions for trucks at established crossing points into the enclave and to do more to speed the delivery of goods inside Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More