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State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert withdrew her name from consideration for the U.N. ambassador nomination, the department said Saturday. “I am grateful to President Trump and Secretary Pompeo for the trust... Developing story

Monday was UN Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the United Nations was supposed to pay homage to victims of the Holocaust. As part of the proceedings, the Austrian and Norwegian missions to the UN hosted a well-attended event, complete with high-end food and beverages. Among the included drinks were a variety of wines.Unfortunately, someone quickly noticed that the labels on one of the brands of wine had all been defaced with a marker. The bottles were the product of the award-winning Golan Heights Winery in Israel, but someone had gone through and blacked out the name of the winery on all...

Anti-Semites are violating federal law by boycotting Israel and Israeli companies and institutions. Activists in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, one of the highest-profile global projects of the left, are subject to criminal and financial penalties, including jail time of five years and fines up to $50,000. A U.S. exporter can lose the right to export any products to any country. So why isn’t the U.S. Department of Justice enforcing the anti-boycott laws? President Donald Trump should order the Office of Antiboycott Compliance to come out of cryogenic stasis and get back to work, and order DOJ to...

Taking charge of Group of 77, which encompasses 134 developing countries, Abbas slams Israel’s ‘occupation of the state of Palestine,’ condemns ‘terrorism in all its forms’ Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas assumed the chairmanship of the largest bloc of countries at the United Nations on behalf of “the State of Palestine” on Tuesday in New York City. The Palestinians are slated to serve as the leader of the bloc, known as the Group of 77, for the next year. In a speech at the UN headquarters, Abbas called the task of leading the Group of 77 “a great responsibility.” "I...

Palestinians’ ultimate version of the two-state solution is two Palestinian majority states from river to sea, in addition to Jordan, which has its own majority Palestinian population Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday took over as chairman of the United Nations’ Group of 77 and China, a coalition of 134 developing nations which often votes in unison. He could only do so because of the UN’s complicity in treating Palestine as if it were an actual state. Several years ago, Palestine was designated a non-member observer state. Last year, it was accorded additional rights and privileges to participate in...

Racial obscenity of international proportions Through UNWRA, the Palestinians have received 25 times more aid per capita than did the whole of Europe to rebuild their shattered countries after World War II And yet, many decades later, Palestinians still use the victimhood card of poverty and statelessness, even though massive funding flows through the hands of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. 
UNWRA is the only UN refugee agency dedicated to a single group of people. They do not solve the refugee problem. They inflate it. One needs to ask why.
Palestinians do not absorb their refugees. Instead, with cooperation from UNWRA,...

The United States and Israel officially quit the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency at the stroke of midnight, the culmination of a process triggered more than a year ago amid concerns that the organization fosters anti-Israel bias. The withdrawal is mainly procedural yet serves a new blow to UNESCO, co-founded by the U.S. after World War II to foster peace. The Trump administration filed its notice to withdraw in October 2017 and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit. The Paris-based organization has been denounced by its critics as a crucible for anti-Israel bias: blasted for criticizing Israel’s occupation...

On its face, Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act toward Israel. But it isn’t. On its face, President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act towards Israel. But it isn’t. Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria is of a piece with outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s address on Tuesday to the UN Security Council regarding the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Both statements reflect the depths of the administration’s friendship and support for the State...

"The fact that the Muslim world, which has a population of 1.7 billion people, does not have even a single permanent member in the UN Security Council, is a result of this distortion," says Turkey's president Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday said that Muslims have been shoved to the corner of the world in the new global system. "The Muslim region has been used as a fodder in a great game in the recent period, Its resources have been plundered and its borders have been redrawn," he said an award ceremony for the Scientific and Technological Research Council...

Just as the United Nations failed to condemn Hamas’s terrorist activities, it will undoubtedly fail to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization as Israel has requested, let alone take any action to stop Hezbollah’s aggressive behavior The United Nations Security Council held a special session on Wednesday, requested by the United States and Israel, to discuss Hezbollah’s underground attack tunnels that penetrated the Blue Line, the border demarcation between Lebanon and Israel. The tunnels were recently discovered by the Israeli Defense Force. The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) independently verified the presence of the tunnels, two of which it...

Nearly 200 nations have agreed rules on implementing the 2015 Paris agreement. After marathon talks in Katowice, Poland, the rulebook was approved unanimously on Saturday evening. The agreement aims to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below 2C. The final session was delayed by more than 30 hours amid an ongoing stand-off over carbon markets to reduce emissions. Some accused the hosts of not shepherding the agreement through.

MOSCOW, Russia - The Russian Orthodox church on Friday called on Pope Francis, the United Nations, the leaders of Germany and France, and other spiritual leaders to protect believers in Ukraine in the face of pressure on Moscow-affiliated clerics. Ukraine’s Orthodox clerics will gather for a meeting Saturday that is expected to form a new, independent Ukrainian church, and Ukrainian authorities have ramped up pressure on priests to support the move. The Ukrainian church has been part of the Russian church for centuries, while enjoying broad autonomy, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has pushed for the creation of an independent...

It is safe to say that there are now two main fronts in what we need to term the Islamist War Against the West. The first has been for many years now the Western liberal democracy of Israel surrounded by genocidal neighbors; the second is France, followed closely by other European countries, Australia, and America. During the week of December 11th, 2018, two sad things happened and this essay shall attempt to enlighten by placing them together. The first is the recent terrorist attack in Strasbourg France, and the second is the signing by most of the world (with the...

China accused some of the richest nations in the world of “backsliding” on pledges to clean up pollution and provide $100 billion a year in climate-related aid by 2020. The comments at a United Nations conference on global warming in Poland spearheaded a push by a group of the 49 Least Developed Countries for clarity on when those promises will be fulfilled. Industrial nations remain about $30 billion short of their pledge to ramp-up climate-related aid to $100 billion a year by 2020. Developing nations are resisting measures that would ensure transparency in the way greenhouse gas emissions cuts are...

Katowice, Poland (CNN)The American delegation came to promote coal. And the kids laughed in their faces. That was the bizarre and symbolic scene that unfolded Monday at the UN COP24 climate talks at a spaceship-shaped conference center in Polish coal country. The nations of the world are meeting here to hash out a "rulebook" to help ensure the viability of humanity -- preventing runaway global warming from causing even greater calamity in the form of superstorms, searing droughts and deadly heat waves. That work, which follows up on the 2015 Paris Agreement, is seen as more critical now than ever....

An arrogant politician expressing contempt for Donald Trump and his supporters experienced a surprising and humiliating defeat in late 2016 in our presidential election. A corresponding scenario seems to be playing itself out again in Paris. A year and a half ago, in the wake of President Trump leaving the Paris Climate accord, France’s President Emmanuel Macron asked for a fight on climate change, in an address delivered in English, making it clear that his target was Donald Trump and the American electorate. As Andrew Bolt, writing for the Herald-Sun in Australia noted, he asked for a fight and “He...

[CUT - On Bill Barr:] "Well, I can't comment on whether I support [Barr] or not yet. I haven't even begun to review his qualifications or his record in the past," Rubio said Sunday. "I know he's been through the Senate process before. I'm going to watch the Judiciary process very closely. At the appropriate time I'll meet with the nominee and get my own take on it, and then I'll have a decision to make. I generally do not support nominees, for the most part, unless I know them personally [CUT - On Heather Nauert:] “Does she have detailed...

Slovakia will open a cultural embassy in Jerusalem for now. But that appears to be a prelude to a larger move. “Slovakia is on its way to relocating its embassy to Jerusalem,” Head of the Slovak National Council Andrej Danko told Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the visiting delegation of Slovak lawmakers announced the Eastern European country would open a cultural center in the Israeli capital. The move, when it materializes, would mark a break from European Union policy on Jerusalem. Slovakia would join the Czech Republic and Bulgaria as the other European Union member states to...

Iran on Saturday launched a ballistic missile that can deliver nukes — and the near-complete silence of the press aside, it’s a big deal. The latest test disclosed, once more, the flaws in the Iranian nuclear deal and the confusion of our European allies, who are alarmed by the mullahs’ behavior but fear losing the deal that enables it. “The Iranian regime has just test-fired a medium range ballistic missile that’s capable of carrying multiple warheads,” Secretary of State Pompeo tweeted Sunday, adding: “This test violates UNSCR 2231” — the United Nations Security Council resolution that made the nuclear deal...

David Attenborough’s climate change fearmongering makes him look a fool"by Andrew Bolt column in the Daily Telegraph (Australia) 5 Dec 2018 It’s embarrassing to see Sir David Attenborough make such a fool of himself after decades of brilliant filmmaking. Organisers of this week’s United Nations’ global warming conference, in Poland, asked the documentary superstar to make a speech that would wake the dead. And he gave it his best shot, trying to sound like an Old Testament prophet but so overdoing the fearmongering that he seemed deranged. “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale,” he thundered....