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Donald Trump returns to the United Nations seeking allied cooperation on Iran sanctions enforcement and vowing Tehran will not obtain a nuclear weapon.

The World Meteorological Organization is warning that the climate phenomenon that has the Pacific running a fever will last until at least February, with dire consequences for weather worldwide. The world's leading weather organization is sounding the alarm about this year's super El Niño, issuing its most certain forecast in the history of the organization. In an update issued early Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization predicted a "nearly 100% likelihood" that the El Niño will last through February. The strong language from the World Meteorological Organization--the United Nations' weather and climate agency--underlies just how historic this El Niño is shaping up to be. "This is the first time that a WMO El Niño/La Niña Update has been so unequivocal," the agency says, noting that certainty reflects "the strong agreement within WMO's extensive network."

The quality and accessibility of multilingual datasets are crucial for advancing machine translation. However, previous corpora built from United Nations documents have suffered from issues such as opaque process, difficulty of reproduction, and limited scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a complete end-to-end solution, from data acquisition via web scraping to text alignment. The entire process is fully reproducible, with a minimalist single-machine example and optional distributed computing steps for scalability. At its core, we propose a new Graph-Aided Paragraph Alignment (GAPA) algorithm for efficient and flexible paragraph-level alignment. The resulting corpus contains over 713 million English tokens, more than doubling the scale of prior work. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available parallel corpus composed entirely of human-translated, non-AI-generated content. Our code and corpus are accessible under the MIT License.

This short paper is a primer on the nature of state sovereignty and the importance of claims about it. It also aims to reveal (merely reveal) a strategy for working with vague or contradictory data about which states, in fact, are sovereign. These goals together are intended to set the stage for applied work in ontology about international affairs.

Religion and spirituality (R/S) are complex and highly domain-dependent concepts which have long confounded researchers and policymakers. Due to their context-specificity, R/S are difficult to operationalize in conventional archival search strategies, particularly when datasets are very large, poorly accessible, and marked by information noise. As a result, considerable time investments and specialist knowledge is often needed to extract actionable insights related to R/S from general archival sources, increasing reliance on published literature and manual desk reviews. To address this challenge, we present SpiritRAG, an interactive Question Answering (Q&A) system based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Built using 7,500 United Nations (UN) resolution documents related to R/S in the domains of health and education, SpiritRAG allows researchers and policymakers to conduct complex, context-sensitive database searches of very large datasets using an easily accessible, chat-based web interface. SpiritRAG is lightweight to deploy and leverages both UN documents and user provided documents as source material. A pilot test and evaluation with domain experts on 100 manually composed questions demonstrates the practical value and usefulness of SpiritRAG.

From 2000 to 2015, the UN's Millennium Development Goals guided global priorities. The subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted a more dynamic approach, with annual indicator updates. As 2030 nears and progress lags, innovative acceleration strategies are critical. This study develops an AI-powered knowledge graph system to analyze SDG interconnections, discover potential new goals, and visualize them online. Using official SDG texts, Elsevier's keyword dataset, and 1,127 TED Talk transcripts (2020.01-2024.04), a pilot on 269 talks from 2023 applies AI-speculative design, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation. Key findings include: (1) Heatmap analysis reveals strong associations between Goal 10 and Goal 16, and minimal coverage of Goal 6. (2) In the knowledge graph, simulated dialogue over time reveals new central nodes, showing how richer data supports divergent thinking and goal clarity. (3) Six potential new goals are proposed, centered on equity, resilience, and technology-driven inclusion. This speculative-AI framework offers fresh insights for policymakers and lays groundwork for future multimodal and cross-system SDG applications.

The global rise in homelessness calls for urgent and alternative policy solutions. Non-profits and governmental organizations alert about the many challenges faced by people experiencing homelessness (PEH), which include not only the lack of shelter but also the lack of opportunities for personal development. In this context, the capability approach (CA), which underpins the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), provides a comprehensive framework to assess inequity in terms of real opportunities. This paper explores how the CA can be combined with agent-based modelling and reinforcement learning. The goals are: (1) implementing the CA as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), (2) building on such MDP to develop a rich decision-making model that accounts for more complex motivators of behaviour, such as values and needs, and (3) developing an agent-based simulation framework that allows to assess alternative policies aiming to expand or restore people's capabilities. The framework is developed in a real case study of health inequity and homelessness, working in collaboration with stakeholders, non-profits and domain experts. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a novel agent-based simulation framework, rooted in the CA, which can be replicated in a diversity of social contexts to assess policies in a non-invasive way.

Over the last four years at the United Nations, the international community has witnessed an alarming trend of closer collaboration between Russia and China that poses a significant threat to the "rules-based order" the United States helped design back in 1945. This increased and renewed level of cooperation presents an unprecedented dilemma for the United States and like-minded partners: how to maintain the existing order, warts and all, when two permanent members of the UN Security Council are now working feverishly to subvert it. To many UN observers, China and Russia have now come to the shared conclusion that the UN has become a tool Washington and its allies regularly use to destabilize their regimes and diminish their global influence. Consequently, the United Nations has become a critical battleground in the current era of "Great Power" competition. During my two-plus years as the U.S. ambassador responsible for UN Security Council matters, I have seen first-hand at the UN how these two authoritarian powers repeatedly and energetically spread falsehoods alleging: U.S. Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament Robert Wood attends a news conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, April 19, 2018.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.