The US has decided against taking part in a UN-led conference on racism after it quit the previous session in 2001 over claims of anti-Semitism, US officials said.
“We’re not going to further engage in Durban II,” a senior US State Department official said on condition of anonymity, referring to the conference scheduled for April 20 to April 24 in Geneva.
A US delegation took part in the preparatory talks in Geneva on Feb. 16 and made proposed changes to a resolution expected to be adopted at the conference, which Canada and Israel have said they would boycott.
A statement issued by State Department spokesman Robert Wood later on Friday said the “document being negotiated has gone from bad to worse, and the current text of the draft outcome document is not salvageable.”
“As a result, the United States will not engage in further negotiations on this text, nor will we participate in a conference based on this text,” he said.
The team of former US president George W. Bush had said last year it would not assist in the preparatory discussions, but President Barack Obama’s administration sent a delegation to look at whether its participation is warranted.
“The intent of our participation is to work to try to change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading,” the State Department said last month.
A second US official said on the condition of anonymity that his government had tried to find a way to participate.
The conference was first held in Durban, South Africa, a few days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, and against the backdrop of the second Palestinian intifada.
Israel and the US walked out on the fourth day of the conference in protest against attempts by Arab nations to adopt a resolution that equates Zionism with racism.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema