World Leaders Arrive in New York to Fix the Planet. The Institution Hosting Them Just Cut Its Own Staff by a Fifth.

Roughly 130 heads of state and government are in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week, five days set aside to discuss wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar, a warming planet, and an artificial intelligence boom nobody has quite figured out how to regulate. Secretary-General António Guterres opens the proceedings with what the UN calls a “state of the world” address, followed by U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, then Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday. The state of the UN itself, as it happens, is that it just eliminated nearly a fifth of its own jobs and is warning its own membership, in writing, that it is racing toward bankruptcy.

A World Summit Hosted by an Organization That Can Barely Pay the Light Bill

This year’s regular budget, finalized after Guterres proposed sweeping reductions, landed at $3.24 billion — a $577 million cut, 15.1% below 2025 — and eliminated 2,681 posts, or 18.8% of the organization’s workforce. Unveiling the cuts, Guterres warned the UN faces a “race to bankruptcy” unless “Member States pay their dues in full and on time.” Two New York office leases are being allowed to lapse by 2027, a move projected to save $24.5 million a year — starting in 2029. None of it delayed the General Assembly by so much as an hour; the flags outside headquarters went up on schedule, one per member state, fully funded.

One Head of State Is Attending by Laptop

For the second year running, the US State Department denied a visa to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and dozens of Palestinian officials, citing a law barring entry to anyone linked to “terrorist activities” and accusing the Authority of having “failed to reform.” The Palestinian foreign ministry called it “an unjustified measure.” The General Assembly’s fix, passed by vote for the second year in a row, is the one it used last time: Abbas will address the 130 leaders gathered a few miles from the hotel he isn’t allowed to check into — by video, on Thursday. Everyone else on the week’s schedule, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that same day, gets the actual podium.

The Emergency Meeting on AI Risk Is Being Held Down the Hall From the Man Who Calls It a Hoax

Wednesday’s Security Council agenda now includes a high-level meeting on artificial intelligence, added after UN human rights chief Volker Türk warned of the technology’s “unprecedented risks.” The same week, the Trump administration is separately hosting its own UN event on AI. The president’s own risk assessment needed no chairman to introduce it: “I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — that AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World,” he wrote, calling it “even wilder than the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam,” and concluding that the only guardrail the technology needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” The Security Council is meeting anyway.

Between the empty seats — Xi Jinping sent a vice president and flew to Washington instead, Vladimir Putin stayed home, Narendra Modi pulled out entirely — the shrinking budget, and a video feed beaming in the one leader barred from the building, the General Assembly remains exactly what it has always been: proof that the world can still agree to show up in the same room, even when it can’t agree on much of anything once it’s there.