It's the Brian Lera Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone.

You know, one of the things we've been following on the show this year is the life and death

impact around the world of the severe cuts in U.S. foreign

aid, also the U.S. cutting way back on refugee resettlement, like looking to send back many

people from Afghanistan, even those who helped the U.S. during the war there, whose lives

would presumably be endangered by returning them to the Taliban-run country.

And there's new news on these fronts this morning.

It comes from the International Rescue Committee, the IRC, which helps refugees and other people

affected by humanitarian crises around the world.

Some of you know it was Albert Einstein who founded the organization that became the IRC back in the 1930s to help support refugees fleeing the Nazis.

Now known as the International Rescue Committee, they are out today with their annual emergency watch list report.

But this year, in addition to listing the 20 countries that they cite as the most

at risk of worsening humanitarian crises, and we'll go down some of that list, the emergency watch list

has a subtitle, New World Disorder, driving unprecedented humanitarian crises as global support collapses. So on that collapse,

the report cites a stat that global humanitarian funding, global humanitarian funding,

has shrunk this year by 50 percent, by half. That downward dive led, as you might imagine, by the United States, considered in the

past, the anchor of the global aid system. On the notion of a new world disorder, that phrase,

that title, this is not just a money flow issue. The IRC says the global system previously based

in rules and individual rights is being dismantled, leaving a void that becomes an incentive to use war

as a tool for power and profit, an incentive for using war as a tool for power and profit. The result they say,

obviously, is more death, hunger, and displacement of civilians. Now, the report includes 10 goals

for the coming year, and they include not simply getting aid to people who need it immediately,

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