John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, said Americans expect the UN to introduce effective reforms or else Washington might look elsewhere for help in solving international problems.
One issue that exemplifies the UN's problems is that it has become a place where terrorist nations serve on the human rights commission and where even denouncing terrorism is debated, Bolton said in a speech to several hundred people on Monday as part of the Jesse Helms Lecture Series at Wingate University.
He noted that a recent session bogged down in discussion over whether national liberation movements should be allowed to engage in terrorism.
"The UN has to shake that off to be more effective," he said.
"Being practical, Americans say that either we need to fix the institution or we'll turn to some other mechanism to solve international problems," he said.
Asked whether his bluntness has been useful in dealing with UN ambassadors, Bolton responded: "They enjoy dealing with someone who tells them exactly what he thinks ... It's the way Senator Helms always proceeded and I always admired him for that."
Helms, the archconservative former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served in the Senate for almost 30 years before retiring in 2003 and founding the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate.
Bolton spoke forcefully of the split between the UN and the US over support for Israel.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly made its "single worst decision," adopting a resolution equating Zionism with racism, he said. That showed that the UN "had strayed from the ideals of its founders," he said.
While the resolution was repealed in 1991, bias against Israel remains, he said.
Other problems, Bolton said, include the oil-for-food scandal, which helped empower Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the tendency for UN peacekeeping missions to continue indefinitely, and the troubling proclivity toward sexual exploitation and abuse "of the very people they're sent to protect" by UN peacekeepers.
"This is not something we can pass off as boys will be boys," Bolton said.
He said he has little expectation that a conference in Tunis on the question of Internet governance will prove useful. He said many of the 191 governments represented in the UN contend they want to collectively exert more control over the Internet.
While the US does not want any additional controls, "we will be under heavy pressure even from our friends in the EU who want to have control," he said.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
RSS