UN Chief Says People Are Looking to Leaders for Way Out of Current Global ‘Mess’ 

18 September 2023, US, New York: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the conference on the status of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Summit ahead of the General Debate of the UN General Assembly. (dpa)
18 September 2023, US, New York: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the conference on the status of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Summit ahead of the General Debate of the UN General Assembly. (dpa)
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UN Chief Says People Are Looking to Leaders for Way Out of Current Global ‘Mess’ 

18 September 2023, US, New York: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the conference on the status of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Summit ahead of the General Debate of the UN General Assembly. (dpa)
18 September 2023, US, New York: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the conference on the status of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Summit ahead of the General Debate of the UN General Assembly. (dpa)

Leaders of a world fractured by war, climate change and persisting inequality gather under one roof Tuesday to hear the UN chief summon them to take united action on humanity’s huge challenges – and to start delivering their own assessments on the most global of stages.

“People are looking to their leaders for a way out of this mess,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said ahead of the annual gathering of presidents and premiers, ministers and monarchs at the General Assembly.

He said the world needs action now – not merely more words – to deal with the worsening climate emergency, escalating conflicts, “dramatic technological disruptions” and a global cost-of-living crisis that is increasing hunger and poverty.

“Yet in the face of all this and more,” Guterres said, “geopolitical divisions are undermining our capacity to respond.”

This year’s week-long session, the first full-on meeting of world leaders since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted travel, has 145 leaders scheduled to speak. It’s a large number that reflects the multitude of crises and conflicts.

But for the first time in years, US President Joe Biden, who will speak soon after the UN chief, will be the only leader from the five powerful veto-wielding nations on the UN Security Council to address the 193-member assembly.

China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Rishi Sunak are all skipping the UN this year. That should put the spotlight on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will be making his first appearance at the assembly’s podium later Tuesday, and on Biden, who will be watched especially for his views on China, Russia and Ukraine.

The absence of leaders from the four Security Council powers has sparked grumbling from developing countries who want major global players to listen to their demands – including for money to start closing the growing gap between the world’s haves and have-nots.

The G77, the major UN group of developing countries that now has 134 members including China, lobbied hard to make this year’s global gathering focus on the 17 UN goals adopted by world leaders in 2015. Those are badly lagging at the halfway point to their 2030 due date.

At a two-day summit to kick-start action to achieve the goals, Guterres pointed to grim findings in a UN report in July. He said 15% of some 140 specific targets to achieve the 17 goals are on track. Many are going in the wrong direction, and not a single one is expected to be achieved in the next seven years.

The wide-ranging goals include ending extreme poverty and hunger, ensuring every child gets a quality secondary education, achieving gender equality and making significant inroads in tackling climate change — all by 2030.

At the current rate, the report said, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty and 84 million children won’t even be going to elementary school in 2030 – and it will take 286 years to reach equality between men and women.

Guterres told leaders at Monday’s opening of the summit he called to rescue the 17 sustainable development goals, or SDGs, that they promised in 2015 to build “a world of health, progress and opportunity” for all people – and to pay for it.

Soon after he spoke, leaders from the 193 UN member nations adopted a 10-page political declaration by consensus which recognizes that the goals are “in peril.” But it reaffirms more than a dozen times, in different ways, leaders’ commitment to achieve the SDGs, reiterating their individual importance.

The declaration is short on specifics, but Guterres said he was “deeply encouraged” especially by its commitment to improving developing countries’ access to “the fuel required for SDG progress: finance.” He pointed to its support for an SDG stimulus of at least $500 billion a year, aimed at offsetting challenging market conditions faced by developing countries.

At the summit, leaders were then supposed to make pledges to meet the SDGs.

As an example, Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who chairs the UN group of least developed countries, said they need “massive scaling up of affordable finance” including through the SDG stimulus. He said foreign investment to the least developed countries fell about 30% in 2022 compared to 2021, and he urged developed countries to be more generous in helping the world’s poorest countries.

There are also hundreds of side events during high-level week.

The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell told reporters after a closed meeting to try to revive the decades-old peace process between Israel and the Palestinians that there was “a strong commitment to the two-state solution.”

He said there were 60 participants at the meeting organized by the EU, the Arab League and several other countries, and called it “a good starting point.”

There was “an injection of new political will,” Borrell said, and three senior-level working groups were established to examine what Israeli-Palestinian peace would look like. He said they will start work in a month in Brussels.



Iran Weighs Retaliation for US Strikes as Trump Raises Idea of Regime Change

A satellite view shows an overview of Fordow underground complex, after the US struck the underground nuclear facility, near Qom, Iran June 22, 2025. MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/Handout via REUTERS
A satellite view shows an overview of Fordow underground complex, after the US struck the underground nuclear facility, near Qom, Iran June 22, 2025. MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/Handout via REUTERS
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Iran Weighs Retaliation for US Strikes as Trump Raises Idea of Regime Change

A satellite view shows an overview of Fordow underground complex, after the US struck the underground nuclear facility, near Qom, Iran June 22, 2025. MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/Handout via REUTERS
A satellite view shows an overview of Fordow underground complex, after the US struck the underground nuclear facility, near Qom, Iran June 22, 2025. MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/Handout via REUTERS

Iran and Israel traded air and missile strikes as the world braced on Monday for Tehran's response to the US attack on its nuclear sites and US President Donald Trump raised the idea of regime change in Iran. Iran vowed to defend itself on Sunday, a day after the US joined Israel in the biggest Western military action against the country since its 1979 Iranian Revolution, despite calls for restraint and a return to diplomacy from around the world. Commercial satellite imagery indicated the US attack on Saturday on Iran’s subterranean Fordow nuclear plant severely damaged or destroyed the deeply buried site and the uranium-enriching centrifuges it housed, but the status of the site remained unconfirmed, experts said.

In his latest social media comments on the US strikes, Trump said "Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran."

"The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!" he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump earlier called on Iran to forgo any retaliation and said the government "must now make peace" or "future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier."

The US launched 75 precision-guided munitions including bunker-buster bombs and more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles against three Iranian nuclear sites, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, told reporters.

The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said no increases in off-site radiation levels had been reported after the US strikes. Rafael Grossi, the agency's director general, told CNN that it was not yet possible to assess the damage done underground.

A senior Iranian source told Reuters that most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow had been moved elsewhere before the attack. Reuters could not immediately corroborate the claim.

Tehran, which denies its nuclear program is for anything other than peaceful purposes, sent a volley of missiles at Israel in the aftermath of the US attack, wounding scores of people and destroying buildings in Tel Aviv. But it had not acted on its main threats of retaliation, to target US bases or choke off the global oil shipments that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Attempting to strangle the strait could send global oil prices skyrocketing, derail the world economy and invite conflict with the US Navy's massive Fifth Fleet based in the Gulf. Oil prices jumped on Monday to their highest since January. Brent crude futures were up $1.52 or 1.97% to $78.53 a barrel as of 0503 GMT. US West Texas Intermediate crude advanced $1.51 or 2.04% to $75.35.

Iran's parliament has approved a move to close the strait, which Iran shares with Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Iran's Press TV said any such move would require approval from the Supreme National Security Council, a body led by an appointee of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Caine said the US military had increased protection of troops in the region, including in Iraq and Syria. The US State Department issued a security alert for all US citizens abroad, calling on them to "exercise increased caution."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on China to encourage Iran to not shut down the strait, telling Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo" show it would be a "terrible mistake."

"It's economic suicide for them if they do it. And we retain options to deal with that, but other countries should be looking at that as well. It would hurt other countries' economies a lot worse than ours," he said.

The Israeli military said on Monday about 20 jets had conducted a wave of strikes against military targets in western Iran and Tehran overnight. ⁠In Kermanshah, in western Iran, missile and radar infrastructure was targeted, and in Tehran a surface-to-air missile launcher was struck, it said.

A missile launched from Iran in the early hours of Monday was intercepted by Israeli defenses, it said. Air raid sirens blared overnight in Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel.

Iranian news agencies reported air defenses were activated in central Tehran districts to counter "enemy targets", and that Israeli air strikes hit Parchin, the location of a military complex southeast of the capital.

Israel's state broadcaster reported that an Israeli Hermes drone was shot down in Iranian territory, the fourth to be shot down in the area since the start of the campaign.

REGIME CHANGE

In a post to the Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump raised the idea of regime change in Iran.

"It’s not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!" he wrote.

Trump's post came after officials in his administration, including US Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stressed they were not working to overthrow Iran's government.

Israeli officials, who began the hostilities with a surprise attack on Iran on June 13, have increasingly spoken of their ambition to topple the hardline Shi'ite clerical establishment.

As Tehran weighed its options, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is expected to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday. The Kremlin has a strategic partnership with Iran, but also close links with Israel.

Speaking in Istanbul on Sunday, Araghchi said his country would consider all possible responses and there would be no return to diplomacy until it had retaliated.

Russia's foreign ministry condemned the US attacks which it said had undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and warned of conflict spreading in the Middle East. The UN Security Council met on Sunday to discuss the US strikes as Russia, China and Pakistan proposed the 15-member body adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Middle East.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council the US bombings in Iran marked a perilous turn in the region and urged a return to negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.

Commercial airlines were weighing how long to suspend Middle East flights after the US struck Iran. The Middle East route has become more important for flights between Europe and Asia but flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed empty space on Sunday over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Israel.