Free Republic

CNSNews.com) – A U.S. House committee Thursday approved a bill linking U.S. contributions to the United Nations to significant financial and other reforms, one day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned she would recommend that President Obama veto the measure if it reaches his desk. Deeply divided along party lines, the House Foreign Relations Committee voted 23-15 for the U.N.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, holds press conference... VIENNA (AP) - The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.

THE UN Security Council has again rejected pleas that it call for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon after the United States objected, diplomats said overnight. Washington argued in closed-door talks that the focus for Middle East diplomacy for now should be on the weekend summit in St Petersburg of the Group of Eight industrialised nations, council diplomats said. It was the sole member of the 15-nation UN body to oppose any council action at all at this time, they said. "We would expect much more from the Security Council," Lebanese Foreign Ministry official Nouhad Mahmoud told reporters after...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A U.N. panel created to recommend how the Internet should be run in the future has failed to reach consensus but did agree that no single country should dominate. The United States stated two weeks ago that it intended to maintain control over the computers that serve as the Internet's principal traffic cops.

Coming down heavily on anti-offshoring campaigns, the World Trade Organisation has said predictions that a large spectrum of IT jobs could be lost to cheaper providers from low-income countries like India have been exaggerated. In its annual trade report, the WTO rejected estimates by associations and business consultants that a string of domestic IT jobs, ranging from data entry typists to software developers were at risk from cheaper workforces, such as those in India and the Philippines. This spate of offshoring reports, which peaked during 2003 and the first quarter of 2004, cited a wider digitisation of information, and the...

BAGOTA, Columbia, June 27, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Despite the repeated failure of attempts by the UN to pressure Colombia into decriminalizing abortion, the UN funded Women’s Link Worldwide (WLW) is suing Columbia into permitting abortion in so-called ‘extreme cases’. WLW is funded by the notoriously pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This recent case is merely the latest in a series of attempts by the UN and UN-funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to impose their idea of “reproductive” and “women rights” on Colombia. In 1999 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against women (CEDAW) demanded...

AP Exclusive: Internal U.N. Audits Revealed Bilking of the Oil-for-Food ProgramBy Desmond Butler Associated Press Writer Published: Jan 8, 2005 NEW YORK (AP) - Internal audits conducted by the United Nations of its oil-for-food program revealed lapses in U.N. oversight that allowed contractors to overcharge by hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to copies obtained by The Associated Press. Two of the audits examined irregularities including overcharging by two companies that were hired to monitor oil sales and the import of humanitarian goods under the program. Another detailed financial mismanagement by a U.N. agency administering humanitarian aid under the program....

The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations' humanitarian-aid chief called the donation "stingy." "The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery challenges that the world has ever known," said White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy.

The government - ever eager to control every aspect of your life - has now launched a campaign to determine what and how much you eat. Having taken over much of the health system via Medicare, the government is now concerned about the cost of illnesses resulting from obesity, the same way it worried about the cost of illnesses associated with smoking. As such, the government has embarked on an effort to control individuals' personal lifestyle choices, as well as accusing the fast-food industry of causing obesity. The lessons of Prohibition, the outlawing of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s, have...