by Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

She was an impoverished Jewish immigrant from Russia who had started working in a cigar factory at the age of 11; he was the scion of an old-money Episcopalian family who enjoyed a mansion on Madison Avenue and a weekend house with a bowling alley.

by Tom Phillips, The Guardian

Open letter by photojournalist Sebastião Salgado and global figures warns disease could decimate indigenous peoples.

by Project Syndicate

This week, Project Syndicate catches up with Aryeh Neier, President Emeritus of the Open Society Foundations and a founder of Human Rights Watch.

by Project Syndicate 

The arrest of Félicien Kabuga, one of the alleged masterminds behind the Rwandan genocide, in France on May 16, 2020 brings victims and survivors one step closer to justice 26 years later.

by David Kaye, United Nations

The New York Times’ Editorial Board led on Sunday with this headline: “When Liberty and Health Collide”. It’s a good topic and I am glad that the Times is on it. The pandemic has led governments at national, state and local levels to take measures that impose all sorts of restrictions on Americans’ fundamental rights — freedom of movement, labor, speech, religion, protest, assembly, privacy and so on. It’s a global phenomenon but here I want to reference the American debate, as framed by the Times.

by Anthony Romero, ACLU

On December 9, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt stood before the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, France, to argue forcefully for the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in reply to Soviet resistance. As chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Roosevelt played a pivotal role in the drafting of the document she hoped would become “the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere” after the horrors of the Second World War. Roosevelt’s hard work paid off. At 3 a.m. on December 10, the Declaration was adopted.

Nearly seven decades later, American support has crumbled.