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US President Trump’s announcement of the creation of the so-called “Peace Council,” involving several countries, including Morocco, sparks a deep debate that goes beyond the diplomatic event itself. It addresses the core of the international order established after World War II. The issue isn’t only about establishing a new international body but also raises an implicit question: Is the United Nations still capable of managing global peace and security, or are we entering a phase in which alternatives are being sought?

From this perspective, the Peace Council becomes a political project par excellence, reflecting shifts in the American vision of the role of international institutions and revealing a structural crisis within the United Nations system.

First: The Peace Council… Read for the idea, not the structure.

Internationally and institutionally, the Peace Council cannot be considered a direct alternative to the United Nations. The latter is grounded in an international charter, legal legitimacy, and semi-inclusive membership, whereas the Peace Council remains a selective framework, initially limited in membership, and its legitimacy is based, in particular, on the political will of the countries involved, foremost among them the United States. However, attention to this formal aspect may overlook the substance of the matter. The true value of the Peace Council lies not in its organizational and administrative structure, but in the political message it carries: explicitly questioning the United Nations’ ability to perform its historical function, offering an alternative grounded in effectiveness rather than consensus, and prioritizing alliance over inclusiveness. In other words, we are facing a shift in how international peace is managed, not just a new institutional addition.

Second: Why does the US administration believe that the United Nations has failed? Washington’s view is rooted in the strong belief that the United Nations has faced significant challenges: it has become hostage to the veto powers within the Security Council; it struggles to enforce its strategic decisions in major international conflicts; and it has shifted from being a mechanism for resolution to more of a platform for political battles. This perspective is not merely popular opinion; it is shared by many international relations scholars, who argue that the UN has not evolved sufficiently to address emerging global and regional issues, including unconventional conflicts, the rise of non-state actors, shifting global power dynamics, and a waning collective commitment to international law. In this context, the Peace Council is regarded by the United States as a tool to address what it perceives as a long-standing institutional paralysis.

Third: The Peace Council… Is it truly an alternative or just a parallel path?

When we look at international relations realistically, we usually consider three levels: 1. Legal level: The Peace Council can’t replace the United Nations when it comes to legitimacy grounded in international law. 2. Practical level: The Council aims to fill a real gap in conflict management, especially in cases where the United Nations has struggled to resolve or contain issues. 3. Symbolic and expressive level: This is where the concern grows, as the Council challenges the UN’s exclusive claim to legitimacy in the “peace industry.” In the end, it’s not just about being an alternative or a supporting body. It’s more like a parallel system that could, over time, become a real competitor if it gains more influence and members.

Fourth: The American Dimension… Redefining International Leadership.

The creation of the Peace Council aligns with Trump’s broader perspective on international relations, emphasizing three key points: reducing dependence on multilateral organizations, strengthening alliances, and shifting decision-making authority to major global powers. From this standpoint, the Council is less about promoting peace and more about reshaping America’s influence and alliances, especially in a world where Washington is reluctant to bear the costs of a global order it cannot fully control. This reflects a shift away from seeking international legitimacy toward a focus on “realistic legitimacy,” in which institutions are judged more by their results than by strict adherence to rules.

Fifth: Morocco and the Peace Council… a strategically chosen location

The Kingdom of Morocco’s decision to join the Peace Council should not be seen as a departure from the United Nations, but rather as a strategic move in its diplomatic efforts to diversify its international partnerships. Morocco maintains strong institutional ties with the UN, actively participates in peacekeeping missions, and is also eager to expand its presence in new global initiatives. By joining the Peace Council, Morocco positions itself favorably in discussions on security and stability, gaining an influential role in shaping international approaches to conflict management. This move also helps to reinforce Morocco’s image as a responsible actor that avoids relying solely on a single framework for its diplomatic and security strategies.

Sixth: Is the time of the United Nations over?

The prediction that the United Nations mission is coming to an end may be premature, but it still carries weight. The key point is that the UN is facing a crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness, not one of existence. It continues to exist, but it can no longer handle alone a world marked by multiple power centers, rising complex conflicts, and waning trust in collective action. So, the Peace Council isn’t signaling its demise but rather highlighting the deepening challenges facing the traditional international system.

In the end, the Peace Council put together by the Trump administration isn’t officially replacing the United Nations yet, but it definitely marks a shift—signaling that we’re moving from one phase to another. We’re entering a time when peace and security are handled through selective alliances and initiatives driven by major powers, rather than through large umbrella organizations. The big question is, will this new approach bring about more effective peace, or will it make the world less legitimate and more fragile? The answer won’t be found just in the data but in how this new model actually plays out on the ground.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver believes teams are tanking more aggressively than in recent years and is considering many possible remedies to ensure real competition, from taking away draft picks to making wholesale changes to the draft and the lottery.

Silver immediately addressed the hottest topic in NBA circles Saturday in his annual address during All-Star Weekend at Intuit Dome, making it clear the NBA will do almost anything to make sure its teams earnestly compete.

Last Thursday, the league issued a $500,000 fine to the Utah Jazz and a $100,000 penalty to the Indiana Pacers for sitting healthy players, believing their apparent tanking actions compromised the league’s competitive integrity.

“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,” Silver said. “Which was what led to those those fines, and not just those fines, but to my statement that we’re going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior, and very intentionally wanted teams to be on notice.”

Silver knows strong words and six-figure fines might not be nearly enough to compel struggling teams to commit to real competition instead of improving their odds in what’s expected to be one of the deepest drafts in recent history — and that’s why the NBA is looking at stronger solutions.

“The league is 80 years old, it’s time to take a fresh look at this and to see whether that’s an antiquated way of going about doing it,” Silver said of draft process. “Ultimately, we need a system to fairly distribute players. It’s in the players’ interest as well as the teams’ that you have a level of parity around the league. There’s only so many jobs and so many cities, but we’ve got to look at some fresh thinking here. I mean, what we’re doing, what we’re seeing right now, is not working.”

The NBA’s competition committee is reexamining the structure of the draft lottery for ways to minimize the upside of tanking, Silver said. The commissioner also acknowledged the fines could be followed by the revocation of draft picks from tanking teams.

“There is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior,” Silver said.

Yet Silver also acknowledged the essential dilemma at the heart of this problem, one that has bedeviled the league since the 1960s: A team’s draft position is significantly tied to its chances of building a winner.

“It’s so clear that the incentives are misaligned,” Silver said. “My caveat is, and this is where teams are in a difficult place … that the worst place to be, for example, is a middle-of-the-road team. Either be great or be bad, because then [being bad] will help you with the draft. In many cases, you have fans of those teams, it’s not what they want to pay for, to see poor performance on the floor, but they’re actually rooting for their teams, in some cases, to be bad to improve their draft chances.”

But Silver intends to remind every team that tanking is a betrayal of its relationship with fans, both in their home cities and around the world.

In other topics covered by Silver on Saturday:

Expansion grows closer

The NBA still expects to make decisions on expansion this year, starting with more discussions at the Board of Governors meeting next month. The league won’t vote on expansion then, but Silver expects to know whether the league will move on to talk with potential owners.

Silver acknowledged Seattle and Las Vegas are the obvious candidates for expansion and said the league wants to make a decision soon: “I don’t want to tease cities or mislead anyone.”

Clippers investigation

Silver said he has been told the Clippers have been cooperative with the external investigation into their possible circumvention of the salary cap through a suspicious endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a now-bankrupt company.

Silver firmly stated that the investigation and its findings were not purposely delayed while the Clippers host All-Star weekend. Wachtell Lipton, the Manhattan law firm conducting the investigation, has no deadline to produce its findings.

Prediction markets

The NBA is “paying an enormous amount of attention” to the rise of prediction markets, particularly after Milwaukee superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo sparked concern with his investment in Kalshi. Silver didn’t find fault with Antetokounmpo — whose shares are a “minuscule” position, according to Silver — but acknowledged the looming specter of the gambling industry without suggesting a solution.

“It concerns me in the totality of all this betting that we need a better handle, no pun intended, on all the different activity that’s happening out there,” Silver said.

Silver also acknowledged the overwhelming size of this task, given that roughly 80 countries allow betting on the NBA while billions more are wagered illegally.

Europe calling

The NBA’s desire to open a European league in partnership with FIBA remains strong, and it still would love to start in October 2027, but Silver acknowledged many hurdles remain.

The league still is working with the players union to determine whether active players will be allowed to invest in NBA Europe franchises — something that would be welcomed by many top players, including Antetokounmpo.

“If there’s an opportunity that comes across my desk to be an owner in sports, I would consider it 100%,” the Greek star said Saturday. “In the real NBA, I don’t know if I have that type of money … but I love basketball, and anywhere that I can be involved with it, I would love it.”

Bijou Phillips needs a kidney donor and she’s asking the public for help.

“I need help finding a new kidney,” the actor wrote in an Instagram post Wednesday. “I’m asking as a friend, a sister, an aunt and, most importantly, a single mother to an incredible and brave daughter. I am in need of a kidney.”

According to her Instagram post, Phillips was born with an underdeveloped kidney. She said she previously received a kidney in 2017 “from a dear friend” but that she has faced “many complications since,” including the BK virus. Per the National Kidney Foundation, the BK virus is common and usually inactive, but it can “wake up” when a person’s immune system is compromised — like after an organ transplant — and affect the success of the transplant.

Phillips is hospitalized at UCLA Health and in stable condition for now, TMZ reported.

Phillips, who is back on dialysis while she awaits a transplant, also shared a link to a living donor form on her Instagram for people interested in getting the voluntary donation process started.

“Please help me find a living donor so that I can have more time with my daughter, family, and friends,” Phillips wrote. “Time is of the essence.”

Phillips shares a daughter with ex-husband Danny Masterson. Fianna Francis was born in 2014.

Masterson was convicted in 2023 of raping two former members of the Church of Scientology and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. He filed a petition to overturn the conviction last year.

SACRAMENTO — Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José and latest entrant into the jam-packed race for California governor, has in recent years raised his profile outside his Silicon Valley-area city by doing something most other elected Democrats would never: publicly criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom.

With the primary election almost four months away, candidates have already been busy trying to convince Californians that they can lead the state through its biggest challenges, including what they might do differently than Newsom on homelessness, crime and the high cost of living.

Democratic hopefuls have so far done so subtly, without taking direct shots at Newsom.

Until Mahan entered the race.

The 43-year-old-mayor began carving a moderate path in 2024, when he broke with Newsom and other Democrats to back Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and crimes involving fentanyl. Despite opposition from Newsom and legislative leaders, voters overwhelmingly approved it.

Mahan has also given mixed reviews to the Newsom administration’s approach to homelessness; he has praised efforts to make it easier for cities to clear homeless encampments but criticized inconsistent funding from the state to help local governments build interim housing.

Although most Democrats running to replace Newsom have praised his fiery opposition to President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, including the governor’s outlandish online trolling of Trump and his allies, Mahan was not impressed.

“Instead of spending so much energy attacking his opponents, the governor and his team should be addressing the high cost of energy, helping hard-pressed families make ends meet and keeping them and their employers from fleeing our state,” Mahan wrote last summer in a piece for the San Francisco Standard.

Mahan told reporters last week that his disagreements with Newsom are “rooted in substance” and praised the governor for muscling through major reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act and behavioral health treatment.

“I see the job of the next governor” as “building on many of the initiatives [Newsom] has championed,” he said, adding he would use those new reforms to build more housing and treatment facilities for people struggling with addiction and mental illness.

Newsom has routinely won approval from the state’s Democratic base, as well as respect and deference from its elected leaders, and his notoriety as a top foe of Trump continues to rise. Because the perch of California governor provides Democrats with an effective cudgel against the Republican administration, attacking Newsom could easily backfire in this left-leaning state.

“It’s a very delicate balancing act” to campaign to replace a leader of one’s own party, said Democratic strategist Garry South, who has worked on four California gubernatorial campaigns.

“The traditional way to do it is to try to project that you will build on things that the incumbent has done: programs they started, successes they’ve had,” he said.

South, who ran Newsom’s first, short-lived, campaign for governor in 2009, took issue with Mahan’s criticisms of the governor.

“To stick it to the incumbent of your own party might be OK if that person is viewed as a failure. … The fact is, Newsom is not unpopular. This guy’s had four massive victories in California,” he said, listing Newsom’s two elections in 2018 and 2022, defeating a recall in 2021 and overwhelmingly passing Proposition 50 last year.

Like Mahan, billionaire venture-capitalist-turned-environmentalist Tom Steyer has cast himself as an outsider of California’s Democratic establishment. Though he has so far avoided disparaging anyone directly, Steyer dinged “Sacramento politicians [who] are afraid to change this system” when he launched his campaign in November.

Early on in his campaign, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa indicated he would backtrack on Newsom’s strict oil drilling limits and what he calls heavy-handed regulations, which the industry has blamed for the state’s high gas prices.

A Phillips 66 refinery shut down last fall and a Valero refinery in Northern California plans to idle by the end of April, raising concerns that prices in the state’s isolated fuels market could climb even higher.

Villaraigosa previously told The Times he is “not fighting for refineries” but “for the people who pay for gas in this state.”

The former mayor took a more aggressive approach in the California’s governor’s race in 2018, when Villaraigosa accused Newsom of selling “snake oil” with his support for single-payer healthcare in order to win over the nurses union and progressives. Villaraigosa, who ran on a moderate platform, finished in a distant third place in the primary, and Newsom went on to win two terms as governor.

Former Rep. Katie Porter has gone in a more progressive direction on oil. When asked in October to name a policy arena in which she would act differently than Newsom, Porter said she would not have signed recent legislation to allow 2,000 new oil wells in Kern County.

“Drilling new wells is locking us into 100-plus years of energy of the past,” she said. “I absolutely know that we need our refineries to stay open. … But I’m concerned about the environmental consequences, the environmental justice consequences, the shortened lifespan and pollution that we see in some of our fossil fuel-producing places.”

While Newsom and most other candidates for governor have raised concerns about a proposed statewide ballot measure to tax the assets of billionaires, primarily to raise billions of dollars in revenue to blunt the impact of federal healthcare cuts, Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, has embraced the idea.

Even before the potential ballot measure drove some billionaires into leaving the state, Thurmond said that if elected, he would introduce a tax “solely on megamillionaires and billionaires to hire more teachers, healthcare workers, firefighters, construction workers and social workers,” who would earn “decent middle-class wages” to bolster the state’s economy.

Thurmond has also repeatedly said he would pursue single-payer healthcare in California, a promise Newsom also campaigned on before his first term but did not fully deliver.

Betty Yee, a former state controller and budget director, has pitched herself as the most qualified candidate to fix California’s ongoing budget deficits, and took swipes at accounting tricks Newsom and other governors have used in the past.

Newsom and state lawmakers have faced criticism for using short-term tactics like deferred spending and internal borrowing to fill budget shortfalls while ignoring the larger issue: The state regularly spends more money than it brings in.

“No more gimmicks. We can’t kick the can down the road anymore,” Yee said during a recent interview with KTLA. She said she would implement “spending cuts — not like DOGE” and explore “corporations and upper-income earners” potentially paying more tax revenue.

Newsom, aware that he’s entering lame-duck status, has jokingly called himself “a milk carton with a sell-by date” and admitted “these questions about who’s next and all that are uncomfortable.”

Asked specifically about Mahan’s criticisms, Newsom on Thursday declined to fuel any supposed rivalry with the San José mayor.

“I don’t know enough about him,” the governor said. “I wish him good luck.”

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.