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UNITED NATIONS -- Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has died, Venezuelan U.N. Ambassador Rafael Dario Ramirez Carreno, president of the U.N. Security Council for February, said on Tuesday. He was 93. An Egyptian, Boutros-Ghali served one five-year term as U.N. chief from 1992 to 1996. The 15-member Security Council observed a minute's silence. No further details on his death were immediately available. As the United Nations' first secretary-general from Africa, Boutros-Ghali associated himself with the famine in Somalia and organized the first massive U.N. relief operation in the Horn of Africa nation. But success eluded him there and elsewhere as...

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has died, the U.N. Security Council announced Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. Boutros-Ghali, who was 93, died in a Cairo hospital, Egyptian media reported.

Thirty years ago, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian politician and diplomat who would go on to become UN Secretary-General in 1992, warned of Middle Eastern wars to come. His prediction was correct but he was wrong about the cause. What should have worried him was the rise of extremist movements within the Islamic world. What worried him instead was water. This was an issue to which he and other global authority figures would frequently return. Their solution? Ten years ago, in an interview with the BBC, Mr. Boutros-Ghali "urged the international community to ensure a fair division of water between nations."...

The U.N. Meddling with Religion: Part 7 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, June 3-14, 1992 Informally called the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil.Another example of the United Nations trying to blend all religions together into a New Agey "Global Consciousness aka: the coming Planetary Transformation aka: World Awakening aka: Shift to the New Aquarian Age" and get rid of the "exclusive" Christian Gospel.Conference Secretary-General: Maurice StrongFrom this UN page:The two-week Earth Summit was the climax of a process, begun in December 1989, of planning, education and negotiations among all Member States of the...

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no "urgent" and "external" inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January. Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S....

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United Nations is studying whether it was appropriate for the top U.N. envoy for North Korea to maintain business ties with a South Korean businessman accused of wrongdoing in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, U.N. officials said Tuesday. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he had not known about the ties between Maurice Strong and Tongsun Park, a native of North Korea and citizen of South Korea who was also accused in the 1970s of trying to buy influence in Congress. Strong is the U.N. point man on stalled six-nation talks aimed at persuading North Korea to...

Archie Bunker’s immortalized role in television’s All in the Family takes a backseat to the role family ties play in the United Nations Oil-for-Food brouhaha. A gem laid out in Paul Volcker’s tabled Interim Report: Director of the discredited Oil-for-Food Program Benon Sevan, helped steer oil contracts to a relative of former UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. The relative is Ghali’s son, with whom Sevan was in business. And then there’s Sevan’s Panamanian bank account with Boutros Ghali. Ghali was head honcho at the UN in 1966 when Oil-for-Food got underway. He’s also the guy who chose the Banque Nationale...

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 3 (AFP) - An independent inquiry into the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq questioned Thursday former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali's choice of a French bank to handle the immense sums of money involved in the scheme. Boutros-Ghali selected the Banque National de Paris (BNP) in 1996 even though it was not the lowest bidder for the contract to manage the programme's escrow account, the inquiry committee said in an interim report. Moreover, neither Boutros-Ghali nor any other appropriate official justified in writing the rejection of the lowest acceptable bidder as being in the interests of the United...

DIPLOMATS who received money from the United Nations’ discredited oil-for-food programme in Iraq were "parasites" profiting from the misery of an impoverished nation, the country’s human rights minister claimed yesterday. Bakhtiar Amin said those responsible should be brought to justice and the money repaid to the Iraqi people. "It shows that some so-called dignitaries had not an iota of shame in their bones, no conscience and no morals," he said. "They profited as parasites on the misery of an impoverished nation." The £32 billion oil-for-food programme, which ran from December 1996 to November 2003, allowed Saddam Hussein’s government to sell...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Iraq called Friday for a widening of the investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program and demanded the immediate return of money in the U.N. account that paid for administration of the humanitarian relief effort. Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie also reiterated the government's demand that the United Nations stop using oil-for-food money to pay for the independent investigation into the program led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. "It is outrageous that Iraqi funds were mismanaged and then we have to pay for finding out about the mismanagement," he told a news conference a...