Washington Post: "The Israeli cabinet voted Sunday to accept a U.N.-declared cease-fire, even as Israeli military forces and Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon launched some of their most intense barrages of the war in anticipation of the Monday morning deadline. The Lebanese government and Hezbollah agreed to the cease-fire Saturday."
AP: "The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution Friday that calls for an end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and authorizes 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers to help Lebanese troops take control of south Lebanon as Israel withdraws.... Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert endorsed the resolution late Friday, after a day of brinksmanship including a threat to expand the ground war."
"Most young people are unaware" of the world's water crisis, but if they knew about the "staggering numbers" of people affected by lack of clean water, they would be moved to act, Def Jam President and CEO Jay-Z said at United Nations Headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed the help of the internationally known recording star and MTV President Christina Norman in raising public awareness of water scarcity through a new global initiative. LINK
From the UN Foundation:
Our post-tsunami water and sanitation reconstruction partnership with The Coca-Cola Company has been selected as a finalist for the US Chamber of Commerce's "Partnership Award." After the tsunami, the UN Foundation partnered with The Coca-Cola Company to find ways to contribute to longer-term recovery efforts, with a focus on community-based water and sanitation needs. Working in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme UNDP), the partnership is responding to long-term water and sanitation needs in remote, tsunami-hit areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Thailand. To learn more about the partnership and to vote click here: http://www.unfoundation.org/features/tsunami_partnership.asp
"With a quarter of Lebanon's population forced to flee their homes and violence claiming lives daily in the conflict between Hizbollah and Israel, the United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on Friday to discuss the worsening situation in the war-ravaged country." [More]
In the midst of defending Ambassador John Bolton's performance on the job, Thomas P. Kilgannon, author of Diplomatic Divorce: Why America Should End its Love Affair with the United Nations, claims that the Millennium Development Goals amount to "nothing more than UN-imposed tax on the American economy."
This is a common canard offered by the rabidly anti-UN crowd. It's time, once and for all, to dispel the myth that the Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) are some sort of "global tax."