World roundup: January 31 2024

Stories from Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere

Hey folks, as with last night’s roundup I’m unfortunately going to have to forego the voiceover tonight. I’m starting to think my problem isn’t so much overuse as that I’m fighting a little bug. Hopefully this is as bad as it will get. Thanks!

TODAY IN HISTORY

January 31, 314: Sylvester I takes up the position of Bishop of Rome, aka Pope. He was officially the 33rd person to take that office, skipping over a handful of “antipopes” along the way. There are major gaps in the historical record around Sylvester’s actual pontificate, but later Catholic teaching imbued it with significant meaning in terms of the nature of the papal office. With Constantine shifting the center of Roman power to the east, Sylvester is supposed to have been the recipient of the “Donation of Constantine,” an ~8th century forgery in which the emperor (grateful after Sylvester supposedly cured him of leprosy) is made to declare that the papacy has supreme authority over both the Church and all worldly rulers, as well as direct authority over the western portions of the empire. Needless to say this never really happened, but subsequent popes loved to pretend that it did.

January 31, 1865: The US Congress passes the 13th amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. President Abraham Lincoln signed it the following day, and the amendment was then submitted to the states for ratification, reaching the required three-fourths threshold in December. Several states took longer to ratify the amendment, including Mississippi, whose leaders finally decided that slavery ought to be illegal in, ah, 1995. I guess they just really needed some time to think about it.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

I wrote a couple of days ago that the decision by Western governments to suspend their support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, over unverified claims that a few of its workers participated in the October 7 militant attacks in southern Israel, is going to kill people. That’s true regardless of anyone’s personal feelings about UNRWA itself. Whether you feel the actions of 12 out of 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza have no bearing on what the agency really is or you believe that the UN is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamas, the fact is that UNRWA is the “backbone” of the humanitarian relief network inside Gaza, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Wednesday. That was true before this conflict began and there’s certainly no way to change that basic fact in the middle of a war zone. The implications of defunding it, in a place where disease and starvation are already huge problems anyway, will be—as World Health Organization boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put it—“catastrophic.”

The Intercept’s Ryan Grim explains why this is happening, starting with the Israeli government’s desire to distract global attention from last week’s International Court of Justice ruling: