Why the UN Owes Ethiopia Millions

The United Nations owes 76 countries a total of $221 million for their peacekeeping missions, but Ethiopia tops the list.

When the U.N. slashed its 2018 budget by $285 million last December, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley was quick to claim credit and to portray the organization as profligate with America’s taxpayer dollars. “We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of,” she said. But take a look at the U.N.’s peacekeeping missions, its sword arm in actually keeping the peace globally, and it’s a different country that has the most reason to complain about being taken for granted. And the U.S. may be partly to blame.

The U.N.’s financial data from Sept. 30, 2018, shows that the body owes 76 countries a total of $221 million for their troop contributions. And it isn’t the U.S. — or any Western country — that’s at the top of that pile of nations. It's Ethiopia that the U.N. is most indebted to for peacekeeping missions, with $29 million in outstanding dues.

Women are nothing but listened to in this novel by Chilean lit star Marcela Serrano.

Women’s voices are rising above the din, making a resounding call for change. We’re being heard, sure, but are we being listened to? This question is answered, in part, by Marcela Serrano’s quiet, masterful novel, Ten Women, in which women are nothing but listened to — by each other, by their therapist, by the reader. Ten Women soothes the open wound that is womanhood.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was written in the last year or so, given how neatly it taps into the current zeitgeist of women’s anxieties, angst and general existential dread. In fact, this blissfully plot-free title was published in 2011.

Colima, once an idyllic tourist haunt, is now haunted by a drug war-driven murder rate.

It wasn’t an atypical series of events in Colima.

June 5, 2018 — another warm, summery day in that tiny Mexican state on the Pacific Coast.

First, the discovery that morning, on an unpaved street in the town of Coalatilla, of a male body hogtied with a chain, a single bullet hole in the back of the victim’s head, coup de grace–style. A few hours later, a group of armed men stormed a nearby restaurant, shooting a lone diner, leaving his lifeless body bleeding on the floor.