Free Republic

The U.S. Senate soon could be debating whether you, your spouse and each of your children – as well as your in-laws, parents, grandparents, neighbors and everyone else in America – each will be spending $2,500 or more to reduce poverty around the world. The plan sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the office of president, is estimated to cost the United States some $845 billion over the coming few years in an effort to raise the standard of living around the globe. S.2433 already has been approved in one form by the U.S. House of...

Interesting read over at the Volokh Conspiracy concerning the UN's disdain for our 2nd Amendment. I've got just two quotes from the article here. I love the arrogance of this first one (we don't have to bow down to the UN? We're still free to make our own laws? Oh, Thank you, Mr. UN Poobah!) “States remain free to have their own national legislation,” said Daniel Prins, chief of the Conventional Arms Branch of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs.Here's another goodie. Stalin himself couldn't have said it better: Citizens should only be allowed to own guns if...

Gillerman in Final Speech: Whatever Happens, Israel will Prevail by Gil Ronen Israel's outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Gillerman, gave his last speech Tuesday to the U.N. Security Council. Referring to Jerusalem's second tractor terror attack in three weeks, which occurred just hours before his speech, he said that when the first tractor attack occurred, people said the driver was "a madman." It now is clear, he added, that the problem was not a solitary madman but rather "a phenomenon."

In 1945, as the war in Europe was winding down, American soldiers began to discover the death camps built by the Third Reich in which Jews and others considered too imperfect were murdered and treated with such savagery that every thought about civilization and civilized nations was proven to be only provisional. Dwight D. Eisenhower proved to be extremely farsighted. Looking at all of the cadavers and the hills of human ash, he ordered that every available photographer and film crew in the European theater be brought to the camps because, the general said, unless this is recorded, 50 years...

LONDON, July 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The solution to global warming, says a UK charity, is to implement laws that would result in people having fewer children. Governments should put slow pressure on people to limit their offspring to one or two children to save social and environmental resources. "There is no unlimited right to have children," said the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), the group known to be one of the most militantly anti-life organisations in the world. There is a limit, the Trust said, "on the number of children to which people are 'entitled'." "A voluntary population policy should...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on state television that he would again go to New York to attend this year's United Nations General Assembly session. It will be Ahmadinejad's third trip to New York since his presidency in August 2005. DEVELOPING...

I am tired of the U.N. headquarters in New York City being a forum for men like Castro, Ahmedijinad, and Mugabe (and decades ago, Kruschev). I wish our elected officials would compile a list of countries whose "diplomats" and heads of state would be banned from the U.S. If that violates some agreement with the U.N., that organization should feel free to relocate to Switzerland or wherever. I think our continuing to provide a forum for our enemies is interpreted, correctly, as a sign of weakness.

As with Darfur and Burma, the depredations of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe have become a target of the world's moral outrage. Also like those two countries, the chances of anyone doing something about Zimbabwe are falling into the diplomatic abyss that is the United Nations. The Bush Administration has been prodding the Security Council to impose an arms embargo and pass ... sanctions that would pressure the Mugabe regime to sponsor honest elections and stop killing democratic opponents... But ... Russia and China vetoed the sanctions on grounds that they amounted to interference in Zimbabwe's internal affairs... And in a...

Just how bad does the tyranny in Zimbabwe have to get before the world takes action? Robert Mugabe has already installed himself as President-for-life, having stolen two elections and had more than 5,000 of those who supported the opposition party either killed or imprisoned. He also ensured that a further 200,000 were evicted from their homes. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition, sensibly decided there was no point in continuing to co-operate with Mugabe's grotesque parody of democracy. Mugabe then claimed victory in a sham of his own creation. ...The leaders of the democracies in Europe and America tried to...

HARARE (AFP) - President Robert Mugabe's government was triumphant Saturday at the failure of a UN bid to impose fresh sanctions on Zimbabwe as Britain pledged to return to the Security Council if political violence continued. Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown would discuss further measures with EU partners next week, a spokesman for the premier said in a statement. "We will continue to stand firmly for human rights and democracy and will return to the Security Council in the absence of early progress on mediation, humanitarian access and an end to violence," the statement added. Mugabe's government, meanwhile, thanked those...

Text of report by private Sudanese newspaper Al-Ra'y al-Amm on 12 July Sudan's Permanent Representative to the UN, Abd-al-Mahmud Abd-al-Halim, has revealed that there are two directions inside the UN Security Council regarding the new arrest warrants of the International Criminal Court [ICC] [against high-ranking Sudanese officials]. The first is led by China and Russia who are calling on [ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-] Ocampo to refrain from demanding the arrest of high-ranking officials and the other is led by the US, France and Britain who support this. Abd-al-Halim told Al-Ra'y al-Amm that China and Russia were seeking to issue...

This bill would commit the United States to spending 0.7% of its gross national product on foreign aid, in addition to that $16.3 billion. 0.7% comes out to $845 billion dollars over 13 years. Obama wants another $65 billion a year or, around $2000 per American citizen in new taxes a year, for fighting poverty in third world countries. Another troubling detail in the bill is our requirement to coordinate "the goal of poverty reduction with other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals." The "Millennium Development Goals" are a United Nations creation, and according to Cliff Kincaid, means you could lose...

Dozens of nations dominated by Islam are pressing the United Nations to adopt an anti-"defamation" plan that would make Christians criminals under international law, according to a United States organization that has launched a campaign to defend freedom of religion worldwide. "Around the world, Christians are being increasingly targeted, and even persecuted, for their religious beliefs. Now, one of the largest organizations in the United Nations is pushing to make a bad situation even worse by promoting anti-Christian bigotry," the American Center for Law & Justice said yesterday in announcing its petition drive.The discrimination is "wrapped in the guise of...

LONDON - The Former US ambassador to the UN says a military action against Iran is dangerous and risky yet it has to be on the table as a last resort, PressTV reported. "I don't think anybody views the use of military force against Iran's nuclear program as an attractive option. I think it's dangerous, risky, and not something that you would look at except as a last resort," John Bolton said in an exclusive talk with al-Jazeera on Thursday. "Five years of European diplomatic efforts have failed and left us with very few alternatives. That's why I think the...

The creation of UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV and AIDS, was justified by the proposition that HIV is exceptional. The foundations of exceptionalism were laid when the "rights" arguments of gay men succeeded in making HIV a special case that demanded confidentiality and informed consent and discouraged routine testing and tracing of contacts, contrary to proved experience in public health.1 But exceptionalism grew—to encompass HIV as a disease of poverty, a developmental catastrophe, and an emergency demanding special measures, requiring multisectoral interventions beyond the leadership of the World Health Organization. The exceptionality argument was used to raise...

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 30 (IPS) - After a two-week fact-finding tour of U.S. prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country's flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law. Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, addresses a press conference concerning his findings during a country-wide visit to the United States © UN / Devra BerkowitzPhilip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, addresses a press conference concerning his findings during...

Every attempt so far to get emissions under control turns out to be about money. Let's examine an important question. Are the major schemes created by global politicians to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to combat global warming, effective? The answer is no, because they aren't about addressing global warming. They're about making more money for governments and large corporations. Let's start with the Kyoto accord. Will it be effective in lowering global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? No. It wasn't meant to be. Kyoto, a United Nations treaty, exempts the developing world -- 143 of 180 nations which ratified it...

I got a letter from Kofi Anan (sic)! I'm so excited! And I just can't hide it! Kofi Anan (sic) really loves me. And he wants me to be rich!DATE:26-2-2008 Attention: How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you. We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS. This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONA have agreed to compensate...

The Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S.2433) is coming up for a Senate vote sometime after the July 4 recess, according the office of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Once Harry Reid and the Democrat leadership put it on the calendar, we could have as little as a week to prepare for the vote. The bill is sponsored in the Senate by Barack Obama. If passed, it will cost taxpayers $845,000,000,000 over the next 13 years, in addition to our current foreign aid expenditures. And the best part is that it will be administered in conjunction with...brace yourselves...the United Nations. The...

The buzz circulating now is that IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei said on al-Arabiya that Iran could be months away from producing a nuclear weapon, as noted by AllahPundit at Hot Air and Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly. Hot Air actually nails it in interpreting that ElBaradei is not so much making a statement about the state of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program as he is projecting himself and the IAEA as the world's only line of defense against a nuclear-armed Iran. Frankly, there is no substantiative historical reason to place faith in such a claim. What's more, just about all analyses...

The Democrats have been saying for some time that Barack Obama will restore our reputation in the eyes of the world, and I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out what went wrong in the first place. The world hates us. We know this, because our own media inform us of it regularly through polls, editorials, and documentaries. Because of our actions, our policies, over the years, we have built up a reservoir of resentment worldwide that only Obama can sooth. You know, I think they are right. Let's look at the sins we've committed with an eye...

Whether out of hubris or principle, or both, the United States has not understood its support for international law and institutions to imply a surrender of its own commitment to self-government. As the international system became more powerful, and international law diverged from U.S. law, the United States inevitably began to show unilateralist tendencies -- not simply out of self-interest but because the United States is committed to democratic self-government. The continental European democracies, with their monarchical histories, their lingering aristocratic cultures, and their tendency to favor centralized, bureaucratic governance, have always been considerably less democratic... The American and French...

Toddlers are to be taught about human rights and respecting different cultures in a scheme condemned as an "absurd" waste of time. Nurseries across the country are adopting the project, which will see teachers explaining to children as young as three that people across the world live different lives but everyone has a right to food, water and shelter. Staff will also be expected to ensure that children are treated as independent human beings, and have the "right" to choose their toys or have a drink of water whenever they want. It is an extension of a Unicef scheme already...

The United Nations High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS took place at UN headquarters in New York this week to review progress made in fighting the global AIDS pandemic. The two-day meeting, which brought together members of government and civil society, was punctuated throughout by calls to end stigmatization and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS by expanding rights for "sexual minorities" and "commercial sex workers," including decriminalization of sodomy and prostitution. At the opening panel discussion, a representative from UNAIDS, a joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, asserted that the international community "must move beyond the classical understanding" to include sexual...

Welcome to a world where criticism of militant Islam could land you in court or worse. In Vancouver, Canada's venerable Maclean's magazine awaits a hate-speech verdict from a human-rights tribunal for publishing a chapter from syndicated columnist Mark Steyn's best-selling book "America Alone." The accusers charge the author and publisher with "Islamophobia." Last week, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), warned a gathering in Kuala Lumpur that "mere condemnation or distancing from the acts of the perpetrators of Islamophobia" would not suffice. He recommended that Western countries restrict freedom of expression and demanded...

A group comprising survivors and relatives of the victims of the massacre in Srebrenica have called on a court in The Hague to lift the United Nations' immunity. The six thousand Bosnians want to bring charges against the UN and the Netherlands for their role in the fall of the Muslim enclave. But that can only happen if the judge in The Hague makes legal proceedings against the UN possible. The judge will consider the request and deliver a ruling in mid-July. The Muslim enclave in Srebrenica fell on 11 July 1995 into the hands of Bosnian Serb troops who...

The United Nations, a body devoted to peaceful resolutions to conflict across the world, may regret appointing the actress Angelina Jolie as one of its Goodwill Ambassadors. In an interview in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly to promote her latest film Wanted, in which she plays a hired killer, she says that she advocates political assassination in extreme cases, a complete no-no as far as the UN is concerned. "I am a strong believer that without justice there is no peace," she says. "I'm somebody who's very curious about the International Criminal Court and supportive of following through on...

The UN Human Rights Council said the UK must "consider holding a referendum on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution, preferably republican". The council has 29 members including Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Sri Lanka. It was the Sri Lankan envoy who raised concerns over the British monarchy. The resulting report said Britain should have a referendum on the monarchy and the need for a written constitution with a bill of rights.

Earlier this year, the 57 Muslim nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) made an attempt to impose an "Islamic Blasphemy Law" as the Universal Standard, a law which would promote the death penalty for those who blaspheme against the Prophet Muhammad. Professor Dr. Ekmeleddin Insanoglu, the Turkish Secretary-General of the OIC (including supposed moderate Turkey), issued the above frightening statement on February 15, 2008, partly in response to the re-publication of those now infamous Danish cartoons.

Last week’s unopposed election of Nicaraguan Reverend Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann as the next President of the 192-member United Nations General Assembly will further undermine the standing of the UN in the eyes of the American public. D’Escoto served as foreign minister of Nicaragua during the Sandinista dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s and is known for his extreme, stridently anti-American views. In a June 2004 radio interview with Democracy Now, the Los Angeles-born Roman Catholic priest referred to former President Reagan as “the butcher of my people”, who was “responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans,” and a...

The U.N. plans to examine Prince William County's aggressive crackdown on illegal immigrants during a visit next week. Jorge Bustamante, the United Nation's special rapporteur on migrants' rights, plans to receive briefings on local enforcement measures, and meet with local officials. County Chairman Corey Stewart said he is willing to meet with Bustamante, but sharply rebuked the international body for what he called an anti-American agenda. But the UN should not have a role, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. "Our immigration policy is not a subject for the U.N. or any foreign institution, pure...

Remember, we just TRIPLED our funding for fighting the global AIDS epidemic, to $50 billion over 5 years. Fifty billion dollars we don’t have, for what experts are now calling a myth: The threat of a global AIDS epidemic is over, the World Health Organisation’s top HIV expert has admitted. Kevin De Cock, who has spent most of his career leading the battle against the disease, said the understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Rather than being a risk to populations anywhere, the threat is largely confined to gay men, drug addicts and prostitutes and their...

LONDON, June 9 - The World Bank on Monday priced a $25 million bond linked to United Nations-approved carbon emission offset credits, the market's first such bond, lead manager Daiwa Securities SMBC Europe said. Payments on the bond are linked to Certified Emissions Reduction credits , which are issued under the Clean Development Mechanism, a trading scheme that allows rich nations to invest in clean energy projects in developing countries. Trade in CERs, which holders can either sell for profit or use to meet emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, more than doubled to $13 billion last year, according to...

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D'Escoto (he's a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He's also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.continued

It’s like some surreal scene directly from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel. These are the knuckleheads that created the hunger problem. People like Robert Mugabe, who took the breadbasket of Southern Africa and turned it into a disaster area. He is in attendance, and has actually blamed the West for his country’s food shortages.

Fascism is alive and well right here in New York City. Home base is Conference Room 1 of United Nations headquarters, where the UN Committee on Non-governmental Organizations is now in session. There are more than 3,000 non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, that are officially accredited by the UN's central processing body. Representing a range of people and interests from around the globe, these groups can enter UN premises, get access to meetings and decision-makers and speak at UN bodies like the Human Rights Council. Now, the UN is on a warpath against one particular NGO. It is poised tomorrow to...

John McCain has proposed that the US should sponsor the creation of a new multilateral organization that includes the world’s legitimate democracies. This League of Democracies would act in the interest of freedom and liberty and would act when the UN gets bogged down in its impotence, especially on Iran and Darfur. Initially rejected, the idea has lately begun to appeal to other democracies, as the AP reports: Gaining ground this political season is a proposed League of Democracies designed to strengthen support for the next president’s overseas agenda and ensure a global leadership role for the United States. John...

Posted on Sat, May. 31, 2008 Special Report By Chris Mondics INQUIRER STAFF WRITER DOBOJ, Bosnia - For years, Saudi Arabia flatly denied it had provided money and logistical support for Islamist militant groups that attacked Western targets. But that assertion is disputed by a former al-Qaeda commander who testified in a United Nations war-crimes trial that his unit was funded by the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a government charity. Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad, the former al-Qaeda fighter, gave the same account to The Inquirer in an interview in this struggling city in the central...

An international watchdog must be set up urgently to investigate widespread cases of child sex abuse by aid workers and peacekeepers, a British charity said today. Save the Children demanded action after its research found that starving and desperate youngsters as young as six were being coerced to sell sex for food, money, soap and even mobile phones in war zones and disaster areas. Hundreds of young people from Ivory Coast, Southern Sudan and Haiti were involved in the research behind the conclusions. One of them was 'Elizabeth', who was 12-years-old when she was snatched from the roadside early one...

YANGON, Myanmar - Myanmar's military government is forcing cyclone victims out of refugee camps and "dumping" them near their devastated villages with virtually no aid supplies, U.N. and church officials said Friday. Eight camps set up by the junta for homeless victims in the Irrawaddy delta town of Bogalay were "totally empty" as the clear-out continued, said Teh Tai Ring of UNICEF, speaking at a meeting of U.N. and private aid agency workers discussing water and sanitation issues. "The government is moving people unannounced," he said, adding that authorities were "dumping people in the approximate location of the villages, basically...

The United Nation's Human Rights Council has launched a witch-hunt against the United States.  The charge is racism against Muslims.  And the United Nations' so-called Human Rights Council has put its top attack dog on the case. His name is Doudou Diène.  He's from Senegal -- a country that is no stranger to legitimate accusations of human rights violations -- and he's in the United States right now, as you read this alert, building a venomous case to present America as a human rights violator to the entire world! But Doudou Diène's mission likely has a purpose infinitely more sinister,...

Washington, DC — When the so-called mainstream media doesn’t want you to know something they simply spike the story – meaning they just don’t cover it. That’s what’s happened to the good news from Iraq. American Heroes in flak jackets and helmets and their Iraqi counterparts are asserting rule of law for millions of grateful Iraqi civilians once tyrannized by Al Qaeda terrorists and Shiite militias. In short, we are winning. That’s the good news that isn’t news. Then there is the bad news that isn’t news. This includes stories about the United Nations interfering in U.S. domestic politics; Iranian...

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The United Nations on Thursday feted 60 years of peacekeeping around the world, with its overstretched "blue helmets" in high demand but somewhat tarnished by sex abuse and corruption scandals. "Today, we have more than 110,000 men and deployed in conflict zones around the world," UN chief Ban Ki-moon said in a message to mark International Day of Peacekeepers. "They come from nearly 120 countries, an all-time high, reflecting confidence in United Nations peacekeeping," he said. And Jean-Marie Guehenno, the Frenchman who has led the UN peacekeeping department (DPKO) for the past eight years, also paid...

BELGRADE, Serbia - A United Nations report released Thursday says the Balkans, a region once known as a hotbed of crime and violence, has become one of the safest zones in Europe. "The vicious circle of political instability leading to crime, and vice versa, that plagued the Balkans in the 1990s has been broken," said Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which compiled the report. However, Costa warned in the report's summary that the region remains vulnerable because of enduring connections between business, politics and organized crime. The region includes 10 countries: Albania,...

The multibillion-dollar procurement business of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency, is a gigantic shambles, according to UNDP’s own investigators. Moreover, UNDP’s management has privately acknowledged that fact and is scrambling to fix the mess — even as it loudly denied concerns of a procurement scandal that have been raised by FOX News, among others. In a confidential report obtained by FOX News, UNDP’s auditors have described the UNDP procurement organization that is spending well over $2 billion annually as: — overwhelmed by its caseload at headquarters and in the field, while procurement ballooned from...

Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN's carbon offsetting programme. Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN's main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

Bangkok - The United Nations will send nearly a quarter of a million condoms into cyclone-hit Myanmar to help needy survivors with no access to contraceptives, a UN official says. So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72 800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May. A total of 218 400 condoms would be delivered, UNFPA aid advisor Chaiyos Kunanusont said. "We don't want regular use of contraception disrupted. An emergency usually damages the health system, so people don't have access to condoms and contraceptives," said Chaiyos.

UN Hatemongers to Investigate U.S. "Racism"   By Joseph KleinFrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, May 19, 2008 The United Nations Special Rapporteur on “contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, Dr. Doudou Diène, has been invited by the U.S. government for a three week visit this month and next to the cities of Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, and San Juan in Puerto Rico. The stated purpose is for Diène to gather first-hand information on racism in America. He is scheduled to hold meetings with governmental representatives, both at national and local levels,...

GENEVA (Reuters) - A special U.N. human rights investigator will visit the United States this month to probe racism, an issue that has forced its way into the race to secure the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The United Nations said Doudou Diene would meet federal and local officials, as well as lawmakers and judicial authorities during the May 19-June 6 visit. "The special rapporteur will...gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," a U.N. statement said on Friday. His three-week visit, at U.S. government invitation, will cover eight cities -- Washington D.C., New York,...

The United Nations has taken it upon itself to investigate the American presidential campaign. Why does the UN have such an interest in our election? Because since Barack Obama is black and will be the Democrat nominee, the United Nations wants to investigate whether racism plays a role in the presidential campaign. Excuse me, but just when did the UN get the authority to become involved in our national elections? Will this be enough to generate a groundswell of opinion against this rancid organization? Probably not, and that's sad. It's time for the UN to go .. go anywhere but...