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United Nations -- France, Russia and Germany on Tuesday dropped their demands that the United States grant the United Nations a central role in Iraq's reconstruction and yield power to a provisional Iraqi government in the coming months. The move constituted a major retreat by the Security Council's chief anti- war advocates and signaled their renewed willingness to consider the merits of a U.S. resolution aimed at conferring greater international legitimacy of its military occupation of Iraq. All three countries now seem willing to accept a resolution that would retain U.S. authority over Iraq's political future while extending only a...

France in a bleak mood Unemployment, constant public strikes and marginalisation in EU and the world have dented the morale of the French ByTamara Thiessen PARIS - From record unemployment to a chronic budgetary deficit, France's economic woes are taking a toll on the morale of the French. France is increasingly painted as a country which is not only failing to make the grade internationally, but seems hell bent on continuing in that downward spiral. A recent editorial in Le Figaro declared: 'French morale is in its socks.' Mr Yves Threard wrote: 'It suffices to see that conversations in Paris...

ROME, Oct. 4 — French President Jacques Chirac chastised Poland on Saturday for reporting that its troops had found advanced anti-aircraft missiles in Iraq that it said had been produced in France this year. Chirac said the report issued by the Polish defence ministry late on Friday was wrong and was drawn up without proper checks. ''There could not be any 2003 missiles because those missiles have not been manufactured for 15 years,'' he told a news conference at a European Union summit in Rome. ''I believe the Polish soldiers have created confusion that could have been avoided with thorough...

World Friday, Oct. 3, 2003Annan's Defiance of U.S. Puts Vote on Iraq in Doubt UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's defiance of American plans on Iraq on Friday threw into doubt approval of a U.S.-drafted resolution, with Security Council members expressing deep reservations. Spanish Ambassador Inocencio Arias, who supports the U.S. position, acknowledged at least six of the 15 council members might abstain on a vote on the resolution that seeks to recruit more troops and money. "This would be unacceptable," he told reporters, referring to a drive by Washington for unanimity. A minimum of nine votes...

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- There is an old saying that "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." The modern version might be "the United Nations passed resolutions while the world was destroyed by terrorists." President Bush gave a brilliant but useless speech last week at the United Nations, speaking on the need to combat global terrorism and rogue dictators before they strike or acquire weapons of mass destruction because the stakes are too high to do nothing. Unfortunately, "doing nothing" is exactly what the United Nations has in mind. The United Nations is at a "fork in the road," according to Secretary General...

Al Franken is standing up for the manhood of the Democratic Party. The task falls to him, it seems, since he is one of the last white men remaining in that collection of hypersensitive racists, outdated labor unions, infanticidal feminists and globalist socialists not named Kennedy. Al Franken is more than a former comedian, he has now devolved into a media parasite worthy of note. His latest best-seller, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," is in much the same vein as his previous book on Rush Limbaugh, showing him to be a literary mosquito dependent upon sucking blood...

Women Flooding The Davis Zone: Following on the heels of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and several of the Democratic presidential candidates, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards is in West Hollywood today at a women’s event to rally against the recall of Gov. Gray Davis. Continues. ================================================================ Bush Memo to U.N.: Pony up, or stay irrelevant The take-charge U.S. President more than lived up to his billing Today, taking center stage boldly and forcefully, delivering a tour-de-force, audaciously no-holds-barred challenge, throwing down the gauntlet before the U.N. General Assembly with spunk and unwavering resolve. Bush's iron will and determination, the tested...

New York is often called the centre of the world, and for this week at least, that was true. All the world's leaders - including US President George Bush, French President Jacques Chirac, and Russia's Vladimir Putin - were in town, as were other major players in international affairs, like the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and the dapper Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan; Megawati Soekarnoputri from Indonesia, and the veteran Mahathir Mohamad from Malaysia. There was even a delegation from Iraq (who travelled in an armoured vehicle, not surprisingly, since one of their number was shot and killed just days before...

<p>The White House yesterday said President Bush never intended to directly ask other nations for help in postwar Iraq during his visit to the United Nations, leaving that task instead to aides.</p> <p>One of those aides, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, yesterday said the administration is making progress in forging a U.N. Security Council resolution that would lay the groundwork for an influx of more foreign troops and money.</p>

NEW YORK - Hans Blix, the United Nations inspector who clashed often with the Bush administration over allegations of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, has a book deal. Pantheon hopes to publish Blix's book, currently untitled, in the spring of 2004. "The core of the book will be the four months leading up to the invasion of Iraq," Pantheon editor Dan Frank said Thursday. "It will give readers a clear sense of what the U.N. does and the ins and outs of diplomacy." Frank said Blix has written about a half to two-thirds of what should be a...

This week, Europe goes to New York. Too bad, it has nothing worthwhile to offer, not even a credible pledge that it will provide military units for stabilising Iraq. All the French and German bravado still amounts to no more than calculated rhetoric. I have to say it's tempting to urge the Bush administration to give a green light to the infamous French proposal - an immediate transfer of power to a sovereign Iraqi authority - and watch Europe fall on its face. Maybe Bush should pull American troops out and tell the Europeans to do the peacekeeping themselves. Certainly...

Bush solves nothing with bungled pitch to the world PRESIDENT BUSH won what he thought he wanted from the United Nations yesterday, but as he walked away from the podium, it was already vanishing in his hands. It is a superficial triumph that will fail to solve a single one of his problems in Iraq. He will get the UN resolution that he thinks he now needs. That will give UN endorsement to the project of rebuilding Iraq. But if Bush thinks that it means troops and money will now flow from other countries towards Baghdad, he is deluding...

<p>3 PERCENT: Sykes says support is there, just not in governor's race.</p> <p>JUNEAU -- The Green Party of Alaska filed a lawsuit in Anchorage Superior Court on Tuesday challenging the state law that decides which political parties are given access to statewide ballots.</p>

Is the United Nations finished or is it just irrelevant? A little bit of both is the growing opinion of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, which points to the world body's incapacity to meet the threat of international terrorism. In fact, it is not just the United Nations' flibbertigibbet attitude toward Iraq that is at the bottom of this conclusion. Former U.S. secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, in an exclusive interview with Insight, says that the failure of the U.N. Security Council to enforce its resolutions against Iraq is a structural failure that cannot be repaired. "The way in which all...

It was serendipitous. On the eve of the Supreme Court's rulings regarding the University of Michigan's two systems of racial preferences, for undergraduate and law school applicants, the Census Bureau reported that Hispanics have supplanted African-Americans as the nation's largest minority. The rulings effectively say universities can use some sorts of judicially monitored racial preferences forever. But demographic facts say race is rapidly becoming more and more irrational -- indeed, unintelligible -- as a basis for government actions. Since the court's 1978 Bakke decision, it has been constitutional law that "diversity" is a "compelling" reason for institutions of higher education...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Former President Bill Clinton said on Wednesday Congress should change the rule that barred him from seeking a third term in the White House, but stopped short of saying he wants to return as commander-in-chief. Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum here, Clinton questioned certain aspects of the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prevents a person from being elected president more than twice. Clinton said the amendment, passed after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to a record fourth term, should be changed simply to keep a person from being elected to more...

Thursday's unanimous (14-0) passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 marks a welcome — if belated — acknowledgement of reality in the shape of undeniable facts on the ground: Saddam Hussein's gangster regime toppled; mass graves mutely reproaching the tyrant's erstwhile supporters; nearly 200,000 coalition troops deployed throughout Iraq; and pressing civilian needs unmet due to now unnecessary international sanctions.Resolution 1483 rightly lifts (rather than merely suspending) the 13-year-old sanctions regime, thereby offering immediate relief to the long-suffering Iraqi people. It also provides an immediate, much-needed $1 billion infusion to fund transition and reconstruction activities for the acceptable price...

The world’s second largest country is being swallowed up by its own irrelevance. Time investigates Canada’s disappearance Three weeks before the world’s attention froze on the War in Iraq, Canada’s H.M.C.S. Iroquois steamed across the North Atlantic toward the Persian Gulf. The destroyer was to join a 12-ship multinational task force as part of the global war on terrorism. But at sunset on that late-February evening, the Iroquois’s only Sea King helicopter somehow lost power during a routine training exercise. The 40-year-old aircraft came crashing into the ship. No one was killed, which was just about the only good news...

<p>UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- If Secretary of State Colin Powell wants a unanimous Security Council vote to lift sanctions against Iraq, the United States will have to make major concessions to Russia, China and France -- giving the United Nations a bigger role in postwar Iraq.</p>

A few months ago, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham was denouncing the very idea of National Missile Defence. Now he, Defence Minister John McCallum, and even Prime Minister Jean Chrétien have been making noises that suggest Canada will buy into the Americans' plan for a continental missile protection plan. What's changed? The first point that is clear is that U.S. President George Bush, his determination no longer in doubt after the Iraq war, is going to press ahead with development of a small National Missile Defence (NMD) system and has made plans for initial deployment by 2005. No effective NMD...