The General Assembly will vote for the newest members of the UN Human Rights Council today. Here's the slate of candidates:
The General Assembly will vote for the newest members of the UN Human Rights Council today. Here's the slate of candidates:
Some heartbreaking and frightening video of the BP Gulf oil spill.
A couple of recent developments seem to belie the notion that the UN is somehow intractibly anti-Israel. First, we had the staunchly pro-Israel (and Jewish) chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee argue that Obama's policy of engagement at the UN served both American and Israeli interests.
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Howard Berman has touted the Obama administration's policy of engaging the United Nations. In a "Dear Colleague" letter to members of congress, Rep. Berman says the Obama administration "reaped important dividends, both for the United States and Israel" through its decision to join the Human Rights Council and by fighting anti-Israel resolutions at UNESCO.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton devotes her keynote address to the CARE conference in Washington, DC to the topic of nutrition. In the speech, she argues that nutrition is a cross cutting issue in which American dollars and attention can make the biggest difference. She outlines a new US approach to the issue around minute 12.
Israel, Slovenia and Estonia were invited to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of (now 34) wealthy democracies. The OECD does a host of things, from helping to stabilize its members' economies to serving as a focal point for assisting in the economic development of poorer countries.
A group of six UN rights experts are warning that Arizona's controverisal new immigration law may be in violation of America's international human rights obligations. From the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Our friends at the Better World Campaign put together a helpful primer on how the United States pays the United Nations and its agencies. To accompany it, they organized a Q and A with the Better World Campaign's executive director Peter Yeo who answers questions about the UN's budget process.
The World Health Organization released its annual Global Health Statistics which provides a global snapshot of how the WHO's 193 member countries are progressing on the health related Millennium Development Goals. The figures are encouraging.