Free Republic

UNITED NATIONS — A former Nicaraguan foreign minister who once called President Ronald Reagan “the butcher of my people” has been appointed to represent Libya at the United Nations after its delegate was denied a visa, the Nicaraguan government said on Wednesday. Nicaragua said the former minister, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, 78, an outspoken critic of the United States and a Catholic priest, would replace the Libyan diplomat Ali Abdussalam Treki, who had been unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States. Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, defected in late February after denouncing Col. Muammar...

While meaningless United Nations hand-wringing over the North Korean nuclear weapons program garners the headlines, the world body is moving ahead with a global conference to lay the groundwork for world government financed by global taxes. The communist head of the U.N. General Assembly is leading the effort, but he is getting crucial support from "progressive" economists who advise the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party. The United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, previously scheduled for June 1-3, will now take place on June 24-26. U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto...

Sometime in the next few weeks, the U.N. General Assembly will elect a pugnacious, anti-American politician from Nicaragua as its 63rd president. Not since the final years of the Cold War 20 years ago has a vocal opponent of Washington held this leadership position. But after Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, stole the election in Managua last year, Nicaragua turned on a dime from an alliance with Washington to a close friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The selection is set, and U.N. bylaws require the vote to be taken no later than June 16....

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...