Don't believe the hype. New polling data shows that a strong majority of Americans have a favorable image of the United Nations. And even in the heat of an election season, warm feelings for the UN are bi-partisan.
With only days remaining until diplomats are due to arrive in Tianjin for the final round of climate negotiations before the Cancun summit, scientists have provided a grim reminder of how little progress governments have made in addressing the threat of climate change.
More than eight months after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and almost six months to the day after the high-level donor meeting at the United Nations where the world pledged about $10 billion over three years for the Haiti Reconstruction Fund, the Associated Press reports that "just $686 million of that has reached Haiti so far."
President Obama's official agenda for the UN Summit will be released sometime on Friday. On Wednesday, at an address at Johns Hopkins School, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Esther Brimmer gave a thematic overview of the issues and messages that the United States will be pushing next week.
Hillary Clinton delivered a sweeping speech on American global leadership earlier today at the Council on Foreign Relations. There is a lot of love for the UN in there. The following excerpt appeared under the sub-heading: "Global Institutions for the 21st Century."
Effective institutions are just as crucial at a global level, where the challenges are even more complex and the partners even more diverse.
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.
This video is a few days old, but I thought folks might be interested in watching Secretary of State Clinton's address to the Commission in the Status of Women at the United Nations last week.
Human Rights is back in the news. On Monday, Hillary Clinton delivered a long speech on the topic at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted an event last night with Susan Rice, which was billed as a conversation about genocide prevention and timed to the one year anniversary of a high-level report on the topic. The Q and A was not earth-shattering, but her fluid articulation of the challenges facing the United Nations and the United States in confronting genocide and mass atrocity did re-enforced every positive bias I have toward my UN