Many predicted President Barack Obama would receive a standing ovation from the United Nations General Assembly today. Heritage fellow Nile Gardiner explains why: It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness …
Yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hosted a climate summit in New York designed to improve the chances that the December U.N. Copenhagen Climate Conference would produce a substantive treaty that would cap and cut carbon emissions. The Copenhagen agreement would replace the Kyoto Protocol that was rejected by …
This morning, President Obama delivered his climate change speech at a United Nations Summit on Climate Change. Stressing the need for urgent action, Obama told the Assembly that the United States, in his first eight months as President, is becoming a leader in the war against a warming planet. Obama began …
Earlier this year, there was an unexpected change in government in Honduras. On June 28, President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was removed from power with support of Honduras’ Congress and the nation’s courts. In accordance with the Honduran constitution, Zelaya was replaced with Interim President Robert Micheletti. Although some have …
As if we needed another example of why the U.N. and its affiliated organizations have earned a reputation for poor accountability, opacity, and mismanagement, along comes a scandal from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO is a U.N. specialized agency based in Geneva. The U.S. is a member of …
The U.N. wants to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty. The Heritage Foundation recently published a lengthy study of this proposal. It found that the Treaty, if brought into being as currently projected, will be used not to restrict the access that dictators and terrorists have to conventional arms, but to …
One of the early decisions the Obama Administration made to differentiate itself from the “unilateralist” Bush Administration was to announce that the U.S. would run for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. The Council was created in 2006 to replace the hugely discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights …
The Sunday Times reports: The legitimacy of the $100 billion (£60 billion) carbon-trading market has been called into question after the world’s largest auditor of clean-energy projects was suspended by United Nations inspectors. SGS UK had its accreditation suspended last week after it was unable to prove its staff had …
John Bolton, former UN ambassador under George W. Bush, wants to deliver results at the United Nations by making member country’s funding a voluntary contribution, not a mandatory payment. Bolton believes such a reform would enable the US to have influence commensurate with their level of UN funding, currently 22% of the …
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator released a vague statement Tuesday indicating that Iran will soon offer a diplomatic proposal concerning the standoff over its refusal to abide by its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Saeed Jalili, who also heads the country’s Supreme National Security Council, told reporters that: Iran has …
