Free Republic

NEW YORK — A former senior investigator on the Independent Inquiry Committee (search) who thinks the panel has gone too soft on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan (search) in its Oil-for-Food investigation has been called to testify before Congress next week. Rep. Chris Shays (search), chairman of the House Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, issued a subpoena to Robert Parton (search) on Thursday. Parton on Wednesday night handed over documents relating to the investigation after he was issued a subpoena by another panel, the House International Relations Committee, on April 29. "He [Parton] did...

The debate on Darfur in the UN security council last night is a salutary reminder that the only hope for peoples abandoned by their own governments is an effective international community. It was a Labour government that hosted the conference in postwar London that gave birth to the UN. Now this Labour government has the opportunity to modernise it by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan's blueprint for a UN for this century. The UN was founded in an era when most of its present members were not independent states, and even fewer were industrialised nations. Nearly all permanent...