Free Republic

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no "urgent" and "external" inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January. Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S....

Leveraging Private Money for the United Nations UNITED NATIONS—Since the late 1990s, the U.N. Fund for International Partnerships has been playing matchmaker between small, innovative U.N. programs in need of cash and an increasingly wider world of private corporations and foundations willing to give them a boost. It didn't start with such a big objective. The fund was invented to handle only one windfall: the unexpected gift in 1997 of $1 billion in stock from Ted Turner, the founder of CNN. Because disbursement of the money was to be spread over a decade, and private individuals cannot normally contribute directly...