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UNITED NATIONS — Kofi Annan steps down as secretary-general at midnight today, leaving behind a global organization far more aggressively engaged in peacekeeping and fighting poverty — but struggling to restore its tarnished reputation. Taking office six years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Annan, 68, helped preside over a decade that saw the world unite against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then divide deeply over the U.S.-led war against Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein. At a Millennium Summit in September 2000, he spurred world leaders to adopt a blueprint to wage a global war on poverty and bring...

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday recommitted the world body to "zero tolerance" of sexual exploitation and abuse by a minority of UN peacekeepers as he opened a high-level conference on the festering issue. "Acts of sexual exploitation and abuse by both civilian and uniformed UN personnel continue," the outgoing secretary-general told a gathering of more than 100 senior leaders from the world body, NGOs, UN member states, academics and victim advocates. "There have been crimes such as rape, pedophilia and human trafficking. My message of zero tolerance has still not got through to those who need to hear it...

Australia shows how a real Oil-for-Food investigation is done. ___ At United Nations headquarters, Secretary General Kofi Annan likes to imply that the Oil-for-Food era is over (“If there was a scandal” was his locution earlier this year). But Down Under, that landmark U.N. scam is right now all over the headlines. On Monday, Australia’s Cole commission released the findings of its year-long inquiry into some $220 million in kickbacks allegedly paid by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) to Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime under Oil-for-Food. In a nutshell, the inquiry has cleared the Howard government, but recommends pursuing possible criminal...

War In The Middle East: U.N. peacekeepers may have done more than just look the other way as Hezbollah created its armed state within a state. The blue helmets may have served as Hezbollah's military intelligence. Real-time battlefield intelligence is a keystone of 21st century warfare, especially when you're up against a terrorist enemy that has had six years to construct hardened underground bunkers and tunnels from which to fight while not having to obey the rules of war. The situation gets complicated and your task becomes harder when that real-time intelligence is being provided to that enemy, Hezbollah, by...

The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) is investigating new allegations implicating UN peacekeepers in the "sexual exploitation of minors," it has said. "MONUC has received allegations about the existence of a major prostitution ring involving minors, close to a large concentration of Congolese soldiers and Blue Helmets (UN forces) in South Kivu, (in the) northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo," the UN mission said in a statement Thursday. The statement did not mention the nationalities of the peacekeepers implicated, but the spokeswoman, Sylvie van den Wildenberg, said the region had UN troops from India, Pakistan,...

U.S. officials shut down a ring that’s smuggled tons of khat -- an illegal East African stimulant -- into this country over the past year and a half. The drugs seized have a street value of some $10 million, and the proceeds reportedly helped finance Somali warlords. According to the federal indictment, the ring used U.N. diplomatic pouches to smuggle the narcotics into the United States. Osman Osman, a Somali clerk in the U.N. mailroom, is believed to be the leader of the operation. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan protested the U.S. government’s actions in the case. “These accused individuals were...

UN ambulance picking up fighters in Gaza Strip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqGjz7iJTns&">

I'm certain that Israel hit that UN observation post in southern Lebanon this week by mistake. I'm less certain that this is a good thing. Perhaps Israel should have hit the post by design. Much as one grieves for the innocent observers, the UN as a whole is a worse enemy of Israel than Hezbollah. Maybe bombing it by mistake was the military equivalent of a Freudian slip. I can hear a sharp intake of breath. It's the Well-Meaning Reader sitting up, scandalized. Jonas has really gone wacko this time. He's way over the deep end. Well, in for a...

July 28, 2006 -- What's this? Another scandal at the United Nations? Alas, it is so. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is so busy hectoring the United States and its allies on their supposed moral shortcomings, he cast a blind eye to the international drug-trafficking operation that was being run out of his mailroom. Say this for Annan: On his watch, the United Nations has become an equal-opportunity corrupter of the first order: Fraud, sleaze and criminality

A U.N. employee used U.N. diplomatic pouches to smuggle illegal drugs as part of a ring that brought 25 tons of contraband into New York in the past year and a half, federal prosecutors and the FBI said yesterday.

Haifa, Israel (CNSNews.com) - The four United Nations peacekeepers killed in an Israeli attack on their outpost were required to stay at that post "until they were ordered by the [U.N.] secretary general to withdraw," said a member of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization on Wednesday. But the peacekeepers apparently never received such an order, despite the fierce cross-border fighting that erupted in southern Lebanon two weeks ago. The four peacekeepers -- from China, Austria, Canada and Finland -- had taken security precautions and were in a shelter under their bunker when they were killed, said Wicki Dieter, the...

UN peacekeepers have abandoned at least 20 babies fathered with poverty-stricken Timorese women, an investigation has shown. The UN investigation has also uncovered a culture of cover-up, in which babies born to peacekeepers and sex crimes committed by its personnel over seven years have been kept secret because of a "fear of shame and embarrassment". A report on the investigation recommends that a policy of zero tolerance of sexual misconduct be enforced on UN staff. The report reveals for the first time babies born to UN peacekeepers have been abandoned without financial support. Their mothers have been stigmatised and in...

While the United Nations frames its next response to crisis in the Middle East, its last grand venture in that region--Oil for Food--has finally resulted in a guilty verdict in open court. Last Thursday, a high-rolling, globe-trotting South Korean businessman named Tongsun Park was convicted in the Southern District of New York of conspiracy to launder money and act as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Mr. Park's case is much entwined with the executive floor of the U.N. For years, he enjoyed extraordinary access to its top officials, complete (at least at one stage) with a U.N. grounds...

I spoke to a class of bright young folk at the community college in Henderson last week. The most intriguing questions are the ones that catch you off guard. Asked what I thought of the United Nations, I believe I stammered that the Founding Fathers were right: To the extent we need government at all, it's best to keep it as local as possible -- ideally, people you're likely to run into in the produce section of the supermarket so you can give them a piece of your mind. Obviously, it's hard to imagine a body as remote from accountability...

AN AGENT from South Korea who established a “secret backchannel” between a former UN Secretary-General and Saddam Hussein’s regime asked Iraq for $10 million “to take care of some people”, a New York court was told. Iraq set aside $15 million for the bribery scheme and sent $3 million in cash to New York in the year the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme was set up, it was alleged. It also heard that Iraq’s UN ambassador at the time believed that some of the money was destined for Boutros Boutros Ghali, then Secretary-General, although the prosecutors did not suggest that any of...

Saddam Hussein’s regime paid millions of dollars to a South Korean businessman to create a “secret backchannel” to top UN officials, including Boutros Boutros Ghali, then the UN Secretary-General, US prosecutors alleged today. The claim, formally naming Dr Boutros Ghali for the first time, was made at the start of the first US trial over the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal. Prosecutors said that Tongsun Park received $2.5 million (£1.4 million) in cash plus promises of lucrative business deals in return for providing access to Dr Boutros Ghali and at least one other top UN official. “Tongsun Park has access at the...

Crisis management experts are calling for the creation of a "United Nations army"-an international rapid reaction force that could be deployed within 48 hours to intervene in emergency situations around the globe.Composed of up to 15,000 military, police and civilian staff, including medics, the proposed force would be recruited from professionals hired by the U.N. from many countries, and based at designated U.N. sites.

The United Nations is under increasing attack by critics in the United States and other countries. At the heart of the organization's mounting problems is an almost total lack of accountability, which gives rise to suspicions of wholesale corruption. Existing evidence indicates that corruption and mismanagement go beyond the routine fraud, waste, and abuse of resources that mark all public-sector enterprises Available evidence coupled with the United Nations' unwillingness to undergo a thorough audit raise serious questions about its mission and the means used to carry it out.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said Wednesday it is adding 100,000 Gaza residents, mostly government employees and their families, to its food distribution program to meet an increasingly desperate situation there.

by Mark Finkelstein June 7, 2006 According to this article in the New York Times, Americans out in the heartland don't like the U.N., and its all the fault of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Said Mark Malloch Brown a Briton who is deputy to Secretary General Kofi Annan, there is "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping." He added: "Much of the public discourse [about the U.N.] that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said. Malloch Brown also took a swipe at US Ambassador John Bolton....