"There's a Lot That Philip Alston Can Say About Basic Inequality That Goes to the Heart of the Rights That He Is Reviewing"

"Martha Davis, a law professor specializing in US human rights at Northeastern University, said that such vast regional variations present the UN monitor with a huge opportunity. Unlike other international officials, he has the ability to move freely at both federal and state levels–and be equally critical of both."

Ed Pilkington at The Guardian reports on the beginning of a national tour by the United Nations "special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights."

"It Is Imperialism"

"For Trump, by contrast, sovereignty means both that no one can tell the United States what to do inside its borders and that the United States can do exactly that to the countries it doesn't like. That's not the liberal internationalism that Obama espoused. Nor is it the realism of some of Obama's most trenchant critics."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic criticizes Donald Trump's speech at the United Nations.

"Chilling the Impulse to Create Beautiful Things That Outlast Us"

"'Not only popular dress, hairstyle, and music but more recently literature and art are at the forefront of the debate,' Scafidi noted. We may not live to see an international bureaucracy organized and proactive enough to catalog every book and painting that outstretches its author's culture of origin. But there will be more complaints against painters, sculptors, literary writers and fewer freshman seminars assigning old novels that could now be deemed culturally appropriative, and fewer authors writing new ones."

Alice B. Lloyd at The Weekly Standard discusses the United Nations' Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore.

"This Is the Paradox That Defines Our World Today"

"A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before, and yet our societies are filled with uncertainty, and unease, and strife. Despite enormous progress, as people lose trust in institutions, governing becomes more difficult and tensions between nations become more quick to surface.
"And so I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.
"I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward, and not backward. I believe that as imperfect as they are, the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law that we have forged remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century."

The Independent publishes Barack Obama's last address to the United Nations as president.

"The Justice that Exists When Governments Serve Their People--and Not the Other Way Around"

"And I promise you this: Long after the killers are brought to justice, Chris Stevens’s legacy will live on in the lives that he touched--in the tens of thousands who marched against violence through the streets of Benghazi; in the Libyans who changed their Facebook photo to one of Chris; in the signs that read, simply, 'Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans.'       

"They should give us hope. They should remind us that so long as we work for it, justice will be done, that history is on our side, and that a rising tide of liberty will never be reversed."

The New York Times prints President Obama's speech to the United Nations.

"Leave It to Dag"

"Of all the people I have known, Hammarskjold was by far the most successful in organizing his public life and his widespread intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic interests into an integrated and self-sustaining pattern. Literature in three or four languages, music, the visual arts and nature were his beloved companions, and his posthumously published diary, 'Markings,' showed that he was developing his own version of mysticism. His friend the sculptor Barbara Hepworth said, 'Dag Hammarskjold had a pure and exact perception of aesthetic principles, as exact as it was over ethical and moral principles. I believe they were, to him, one and the same thing.' But Hammarskjold’s feet were firmly on the ground. 'The United Nations was not created to bring us to heaven,' he told an audience in 1954, 'but to save us from hell.'"

Brian Urquhart in The New York Times praises Dag Hammarskjold, fifty years after the United Nations secretary general died in a plane crash.