Remember Yemen? It was only four months ago that everyone and their second cousin seemed to be pronouncing on the country. Now, you hear nary a squeak about the place.
When an Indicted War Criminal is Elected Leader of Sudan, How Will the Obama Administration Respond?
For the past week, activists have been clamoring for the United States to condemn Sudan's elections. When polls opened on Monday, acting director of the Save Darfur coalition Mark Lotwis said, "When the election is over, the Obama administration should declare that results of the election are illegitimate." Well, polls are now closed. And pretty soon, the Obama administration will have a choice to make.
In this edition of UN Plaza I sit down with Suzanne Nossel, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Prior to that role, Nossel worked with Human Rights Watch and is the founder of the excellent blog, Democracy Arsenal. She's also the person who first coined the term "smart power" in a 2004 Foreign Affairs article about how to better harness international institutions to serve American and global interests. <
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released its annual score card on donor country support for development aid. The OECD measures and compares "official development assistance" (ODA) that wealthier countries give as humanitarian aid, debt forgiveness, to multi-lateral development bodies and directly to poor countries. These figures exclude private philanthropy and only take into account governments' budget expenditures
Our friends at the UN Foundation (disclaimer) pass along a story that appeared in the World Food Progamme newsletter Wavelength about an Australian Vodafone employee who volunteered with the UN to provide ICT consulting on projects in three African countries.
The 40-plus heads of state gathered for the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. are spending the morning discussing ways to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is a topic that is long overdue. Over the past ten years, the IAEA has transformed from a backwater international agency to the first line of defense for non-proliferation. Along the way, however, its own members have failed to fully empower the IAEA to fulfill its new mission as the world's "nuclear watch dog." As a result, the IAEA is struggling.
Everyone agrees that the greatest single external threat facing the United States is terrorists potentially geting their hands on a nuclear weapon. The point of the Nuclear Security Summit underway in Washington, D.C. this week is to agree upon concrete measures to minimize that risk.
A story about the struggles of Nepalese women migrant workers, from the United Nations.
A video of the historic arms reduction treaty between Russia and the United States, signed today in Prague.