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UNITED NATIONS, (AP) -- The U.N. chief on Tuesday accused Israel of lying about attacks on United Nations schools and other facilities during the Gaza military campaign — including one reported to have killed more than 40 people — and formally demanded compensation. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said a U.N. investigation found conclusively that Israeli weaponry — some containing white phosphorus — was "the indisputed cause" of attacks on several schools, a health clinic and the world body's Gaza headquarters. Israel denies that it intentionally struck the compounds, and says it was forced to act against militants using the buildings and...

The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a Security Council statement calling for an immediate Israeli-Hamas cease-fire in Gaza and southern Israel and expressing serious concern at the escalation of violence. US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the United States saw no prospect of Hamas abiding by last week's council call for an immediate end to the violence. Therefore, he said, a new statement at this time "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, would not do credit to the council." France's UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the current council president, announced that there was...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Ban telephoned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ahead of an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council Saturday night and said he was disappointed that Israel launched a ground offensive and "alarmed that this escalation will inevitably increase the already heavy suffering" of Palestinian civilians, the UN spokesman's office said in a statement.

World reaction to Israel's sudden, massive strike against terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip ranged from immediate condemnation and a call to halt all attacks to cautious acknowledgement of Israel's right to defend its citizens. Some international powers spoke against Hamas's bombardment of communities in southern Israel since the cease-fire ended last week; others wrung their hands over the humanitarian suffering in the Strip. In a statement released Saturday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an immediate halt to all violence in both Gaza and southern Israel. "While recognizing Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza,...

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday urged Israel to stop using "disproportionate and excessive force" against the Palestinians. "Israel's disproportionate and excessive use of force has killed and injured many civilians including children ... I condemn these actions and call on Israel to cease such acts," Ban told the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)summit in Senegal's capital Dakar. Earlier at the summit, Senegal's president and the new OIC chairman, Abdoulaye Wade, said he would make solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a priority for the organization. "The just and legitimate cause of Palestine remains at the heart of our concerns," Wade...

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- The eight-month closure of Gaza has created "grim and miserable" conditions that deprive Palestinians of their basic dignity, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief said Friday. Later Friday, a powerful blast went off in the house of a senior Islamic Jihad activist, killing him and five others, medics and an Islamic Jihad spokesman said. Islamic Jihad said an Israeli airstrike targeted the house, but Israel denied it. John Holmes, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, visited Gaza during the day and urged that the territory's borders be reopened to relieve the suffering. Israel and Egypt severely restricted access...

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- The United Nations' torture investigator criticized the White House Wednesday for defending the use of waterboarding and urged the U.S. to give up its defense of "unjustifiable" interrogation methods. The comments from Manfred Nowak, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on torture, came a day after the Bush administration acknowledged publicly for the first time that waterboarding was used by U.S. government questioners on three terror suspects. Testifying before Congress, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the suspects were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. "This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law," Nowak said. "Time has come that...

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- Delegates to a U.N. weapons conference agreed Tuesday to negotiate a new accord regulating the use of cluster bombs — but stopped short of pursuing a legally binding treaty The use of cluster bombs — which typically scatter hundreds of small bomblets over a wide area — has come under growing criticism from Canada, the European Union and others. However, the United States, Russia and China insist the weapon has a legitimate military purpose and have resisted a legally binding treaty on cluster bombs, which are not explicitly regulated by the U.N. Convention on Conventional Weapons,...

WASHINGTON: Mohamad ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, urged the Bush administration Sunday to soften its rhetoric against Iran while maintaining diplomatic pressure on it to halt the nuclear enrichment that could lead to the production of a nuclear weapon. But American lawmakers appearing on Sunday television talk shows were divided as to whether efforts to influence Iran had been helped or hindered by the administration's tough talk, exemplified by President George W. Bush's warning of "World War III" if Tehran obtained a nuclear weapon. "We cannot add fuel to the fire," ElBaradei said on CNN. "I...

Two weeks after Israel's alleged bombing raid in Syria, which some foreign reports said targeted North Korean nuclear material, the UN's nuclear watchdog elected Syria as deputy chairman of its General Conference on Monday. The 51st session of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) opened in Vienna on Monday and will run through Friday. The Syrian news agency SANA proudly reported the election on Tuesday, adding that Syria was also successful in including "the Israeli nuclear arsenal as an item on the agenda of the conference." The agenda for the meeting includes the item "Israeli nuclear...

IF YOU REALLY believe that the planet is at the tipping point on global warming and the consequences will be fatal for people around the world, especially the poor, then all industrialized nations need to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions. If the United States must sacrifice, so must China, which is fast emerging as largest producer of industrial greenhouse gases on Earth. Yet U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon, in a breakfast meeting with The Chronicle editorial board Friday, suggested that industrialized nations - read the United States - have a "historical responsibility" to cut emissions, which are "almost to the saturation point,"...

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- The European Union, heavily outnumbered by African and Asian members on the U.N. Human Rights Council, on Thursday defended a new accord governing the body that has been severely criticized by the United States. The EU said it, too, regretted that Israel will be regularly singled out by the council and that special investigations of Cuba and Belarus were halted. But it said it accepted the accord as a "necessary compromise" in the hope that the council will have enough good features to be effective as a defender of human rights. The council was created in...

UNITED NATIONS, (AP) -- The U.N. Human Rights Council has failed to criticize egregious human rights violations since it replaced a discredited U.N. rights body last year, two watchdog groups said Monday. The two groups, U.N. Watch and Freedom House, released reports charging that rights violators such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China have shielded themselves — and countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe — from criticism as members of the new group. The groups said the U.N. General Assembly is also expected to select several other countries with poor rights records to become new members of the body this...

UNITED NATIONS, (AP) -- Zalmay Khalilzad started his new job Monday as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, with one ambassador on the Security Council saying he 'can't be as bad' as his controversial predecessor — John Bolton. Khalilzad was confirmed by the Senate on March 29 by unanimous voice vote to replace Bolton, whose nomination by President Bush sparked a bruising Senate debate. Bolton resigned in December, weeks before his recess appointment was to expire. When asked about Khalilzad as he headed into a Security Council meeting Monday, South Africa's U.N. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo said with a smile,...

Palestinian Authority officials on Thursday expressed fear that the United Nations may formally declare the Gaza Strip a dangerous zone - a move that would result in the evacuation of the remaining foreign nationals from the area and drastically hamper international humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. PA security sources told The Jerusalem Post that 25 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip last month in internal fighting. Another four were killed in the West Bank, the sources added. "We're moving very quickly toward such a scenario," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, member of the PLO executive committee and a close aide...

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for patience Monday to give the rival Fatah and Hamas factions in the new Palestinian unity government time to coordinate their positions and hopefully recognize Israel and renounce violence. The Quartet of international mediators trying to promote Mideast peace - the UN, the US, the European Union and Russia - has demanded that the coalition government meet those conditions and accept past peace agreements. But with Hamas refusing to do so, international sanctions have remained in place, preventing millions of dollars from flowing through the Palestinian Cabinet. Ban, who just returned from an 11-day Mideast...

Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion, a response largely to the furor last year over caricatures published in a Danish newspaper of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The statement proposed by the Organization of Islamic Conference addressed what it called a "campaign" against Muslim minorities and the Islamic religion around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The resolution, which was opposed by European and a number of other non-Muslim countries, "expresses deep concern at attempts to...

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- Three Somali police speedboats and a U.S. military vessel were headed Monday toward a U.N.-chartered cargo ship hijacked by pirates, a senior police official said. Piracy has been rampant off the Somali coast. Somali pirates boarded the MV Rozen — which had just delivered a total of 1,884 tons of food aid in northern Somalia — on Sunday, taking the crew hostage, officials said. It is the third U.N.-chartered ship to be hijacked in Somali waters since 2005. Police boats were within sight of the ship "but we asked them to stop going further because our...

Defense officials slammed UNIFIL and the Lebanese government Monday night, claiming that their "slackness" was what enabled Hizbullah to plant five deadly explosive devices along the border between Israel and Lebanon. IDF officials said it was possible that the bombs were planted as part of a planned kidnapping attack similar to the July 12 abduction of reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser that sparked the war this past summer. Defense Minister Amir Peretz transmitted a harsh-worded message to UNIFIL command in Lebanon and urged the peacekeeping force to crack down on Hizbullah and prevent the guerrilla group from returning to...

The former United Nations oil-for-food chief was charged Tuesday with bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in the scandal-tainted humanitarian program. The charges against Benon Sevan, 69, of Nicosia, Cyprus, were contained in a rewrite of an indictment stemming from the scandal over the operation set up from 1996 to 2003 to permit the Iraqi government to sell oil primarily to buy food and medicine for suffering Iraqis. The program was designed to help Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions, but authorities said it was corrupted by bureaucrats, oil tycoons and Saddam Hussein after the former Iraqi...