On Earth Day, world leaders are expected to sign the historic Paris Agreement, marking an important global step toward slowing climate change. (Pixabay)

By Eric Galatos, Public News Service

April 22, 2016 (New York) -- Leaders from 150 nations are gathering in New York today, Earth Day, to sign the historic Paris Agreement, a coordinated global effort to reduce climate pollution.

 “Tackling climate change is a shared mission for mankind.” – Chinese president Xi Jinping

“We are at the limits of suicide.” – Pope Francis

“Our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.” – U.S. President Barack Obama

By Miriam Raftery

November 30, 2015 (Paris) –Around the world, an estimated million people took to the streets to call for action to save the planet as world leaders convene today in Paris for an international climate summit. But in Paris, where large public gatherings are banned due to a state of emergency declared after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks, thousands of Parisians instead brought their shoes, lining them up along the march route in a silent yet powerful expression.

French President Francois Hollande said he cannot separate the “fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming,” adding that leaders must face both challenges to leave children “a world freed of terror” as well as one “protected from catastrophes.”

By Miriam Raftery

February 17, 2015 (San Diego’s East County)—Last week,  a young Jewish man was shot and killed outside a Copenhagen synagogue. In Paris, as many as 250 Jewish graves were desecrated.  At the University of California in Davis, California earlier this month, swastikas were sprayed on a Jewish fraternity house after a demonstration by pro-Palestinian students, one of whom  proclaimed on Facebook that Hamas and Sharia law had come to the campus, prompting 23 organizations to demand an investigation to protect Jewish students’ safety. These are the latest in a string of hate crimes targeting Jewish people around the world.

It's a violent start to the New Year that continues a chilling trend.  Last year, 2014, was a year of unprecedented anti-Semitic violence worldwide, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reports. That report found that due to violent anti-Semitism, Jewish people worldwide now face the greatest challenges since the end of World War II, when 6 million Jewish people were exterminated in concentration camps by the Nazis.

By Jane Hartley, U.S. Ambassador to France

Photo: Je Suis Charlie rally in support of slain French journalists, by Claude Truong NGOC, creative commons

Editorial originally published in Le Monde January 8, 2015 and on the U.S. Embassy website in Paris

January 9, 2015 (Paris)--Wednesday’s barbaric attack on the journalists and staff of Charlie Hebdo, as well as on policemen guarding them, shocked and saddened the entire world.  As we pause to mourn the loss of life, I am reminded of how the people of France showed their support to us in the aftermath of 9/11.  On September 11, Americans were in a state of shock as we tried to come to grips with that terrible loss and our own grief and a growing sense that our world would be different from that moment on.  I remember seeing Le Monde’s headline that day: “We are all Americans”, and how much those words meant to me that day as an American, a New Yorker and a friend of France.