Free Republic

A UN conference to boost support for global development aid begins on Monday as US funding cuts jeopardise the fight against poverty. But key player the United States is snubbing the biggest such talks in a decade, underlining the erosion of international cooperation on combating hunger, disease and climate change. UN sustainable development goals set for 2030 are slipping from reach just as the world's wealthiest countries are withdrawing funding for development programmes. President Donald Trump's gutting of the US development agency USAID is the standout example, with Germany, Britain and France among other rich economies making cuts when faced...

WASHINGTON — U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown may want to stick to reforming his own office and stop criticizing member states, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday. Malloch Brown was quoted in a British newspaper Wednesday suggesting that he does not think that Hezbollah, the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group currently fighting Israeli Defense Forces, is a terrorist organization. "It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hezbollah employs terrorist tactics; it is an organization, however, whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda," he said, according to a transcript of an...

Under intense global pressure, the United States on Friday dropped its demand to amend a declaration reaffirming the U.N. blueprint to achieve equality for women, saying it was satisfied the document did not guarantee the right to abortion. U.S. Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey said the United States would join other nations in approving the declaration endorsing the 150-page platform for action adopted at the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing. The proposed U.S. amendment would have reaffirmed the Beijing platform and a declaration adopted with it - but only "while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights,...