By Karl Vick May 25, 2014 on Time.com Francis' invitation to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres to pray together at the Vatican exploits their one shared desire: To avoid painful specifics. By inviting the president of Israel and the head of the Palestinian Authority to his [...]

BY FRIDA GHITIS Miami Herald Did Pope Francis take sides when he visited the contentious heart of the Middle East a few days ago? You might think so if you saw the one photograph from the trip that went viral. It showed the pope standing at the barrier that separates [...]

June 1, 2014 By Andrés Cala Exclusive on Consortiumnews.com: Colombia’s future may be decided by the June 15 runoff election between a far-right candidate who favors a renewal of counterinsurgency war and the incumbent president who has staked his political career on a negotiated outcome, as Andrés Cala explains. The [...]

By Maciej Bartkowski - May 21, 2014 - War on the Rocks The Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the continued destabilization of southern and eastern parts of Ukraine by separatists, and the Russian special operation forces and the approximately 40,000 Russian “peacekeepers” poised on the Russian-Ukrainian border raise the [...]

The YaLa Young Leaders group, which will hold an annual virtual peace conference on Sunday, has attracted almost 500,000 followers from around the region. By The Associated Press | May 20, 2014 | 8:04 AM With the collapse of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of young people [...]

By Erik Solheim, Chair of OECD DAC, UNEP special envoy for environment, conflict and disaster, and former Norwegian Minister of environment and international development It might be the beginning of the end of the nightmare in South Sudan when Valerie Amos, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and Norwegian Foreign Minister Brende [...]