| November 1, 2009 | -
President Barack Obama caved to pressure from Congress and military contractors and passed a $680,000,000,000 defense bill. Obama also hosted a Halloween event at the White House, where he distributed M&Ms and dried fruit but did not wear a costume. First Lady Michelle Obama appeared as Cat Woman, dressed in a leopard-print top, fuzzy ears, and black eye shadow. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice dressed up as Goofy.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Breitbart
|
| September 23, 2009 | - With 15 minutes allotted to him, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi spoke to the General Assembly of the United Nations for more than an hour. During his address he tore up a copy of the U.N. founding charter, proposed resolving the Israeli-{Palestine|Palestinian} conflict by creating a single state called “Isratine,” and stressed that Arabs do not hate the Jews. “You are the ones who burned them,” he said to the Assembly, “not us.” He also suggested that the swine flu virus was a military weapon that escaped from a lab.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 8, 2009 | - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's presidential election. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the election results a “divine miracle,” but fraud and voter irregularities were reportedly rampant; Ahmadinejad's main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, asked the ayatollah for an investigation into the results. “They didn't rig the vote,” said an official with Iran's interior ministry, which conducted the election. “They didn't even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.” Iranians protesting the results took to the streets, where they were attacked with clubs, metal batons, baseball bats, stones, and teargas. “He ran a red light,” said Ahmadinejad of Mousavi, “and he got a traffic ticket.” During the campaign, Mousavi advocated increased engagement with the United States and accused Ahmadinejad of being “superstitious” and “brazenly staring at the camera and telling lies to the nation,” citing September 2005 footage in which Ahmadinejad discussed being surrounded by a mysterious light during an appearance at the United Nations: “I felt the atmosphere changed,” he said, claiming that, for 27 minutes, his audience did not blink. “I’m not exaggerating,” he continued, “when I’m saying they didn’t blink.”
| Source 1:
Bloomberg
Source 2:
New York Times
Source 3:
CNN
Source 4:
New York Times
Source 5:
New York Times
Source 6:
Times Online
|
| April 5, 2009 | -
North Korea defied United Nations resolutions and launched a rocket over the Pacific Ocean, prompting President Obama to call for a world without nuclear weapons. “I'm not naive,” he said. “But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, 'Yes, we can.'”
| Source 1:
BBC
Source 2:
Politico
|
| August 26, 2008 | - A United Nations investigation of last week's coalition airstrikes in Afghanistan found that the United States had killed 90 civilians, including 60 sleeping children.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 2, 2008 | - The United Nations agreed to oversee India's civilian nuclear facilities, a key step toward a U.S.-India nuclear pact desired by the Bush Administration.
| Source:
LAT
|
| July 4, 2008 | - The United Nations brought female excrement carriers from India to New York City to appear on the catwalk alongside top models at a fashion show, crowning one woman the princess of sanitation workers. “This is the dream coming true of Indian independence hero Gandhi-ji,” said an organizer.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| June 4, 2008 | - The United Nations held a three-day emergency food summit; the director of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization condemned U.S. subsidies for biofuel, saying that they deprived people of food in order to “satisfy a thirst for fuel for vehicles.”
| Source 1:
Guardian
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| May 30, 2008 | - At a literary festival in Wales, British columnist George Monbiot attempted a citizen's arrest of John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on charges of war crimes, but was obstructed by security guards.
| Source:
Democracy Now
|
| May 23, 2008 | - The United Nations, responding to food riots in 30 countries, said that the number of chronically hungry people in the world was expected to rise 100 million to 950 million. Japan released 20,000 tons of its 1.5-million-ton rice stockpile for sale to Africa.
| Source 1:
The Washington Post
Source 2:
The Daily Star
Source 3:
AFP
|
| May 18, 2008 | - A three-day period of mourning was also declared for 130,000 dead or missing victims of the cyclone in Myanmar, where the country's military junta, under protest by the United Nations, continued to turn away much foreign aid.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| May 5, 2008 | - U.S. military reports on the interrogation of four captured Shia militia members concluded that Hezbollah was training small groups of Iraqi insurgents in Iran. John Bolton, ex-ambassador to the United Nations, said that attacking Iran was “really the most prudent thing to do”; the Iraqi government said that it would conduct its own inquiry. “We do not want to start a conflict with Iran,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. “We need our own government documentation of this interference, not from the Americans, not from the media.”
| Source 1:
The New York Times
Source 2:
Reuters
Source 3:
The Christian Science Monitor
Source 4:
Fox via Thinkprogress
|
| April 5, 2008 | - The United Nations found that women make up 70 percent of the world's poor, own only 1 percent of the world's titled land, and are discriminated against in almost every country.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| March 16, 2008 | - The United Nations Environment Program released data showing that the rate at which the world's glaciers are melting has doubled in the past seven years. “There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine,” said a UNEP spokesman. “The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| November 20, 2007 | - UNAIDS, the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, lowered its estimate of the number of people infected with the disease worldwide, from 39.5 million to 33.2 million.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 28, 2007 | - President George W. Bush skipped all events related to the U.N. discussions on global warming, except for dinner, because he was holding his own summit later in the week; reporters covering the Bush conference received a pocket-sized handout aimed at dispelling “myths” about the administration's environmental policy, including the myths that Bush refuses to admit that humans are a factor in climate change, or that climate change is real.
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
Associated Press
|
| September 26, 2007 | -
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hailed by his countrymen as the “Socrates of the Third Millennium” for “disarming other speakers through his sharp reasoning,” gave a speech on Monday in which he claimed that Iran had no homosexuals and disavowed reports of his nuclear ambitions. “Let me tell a joke here,” Ahmadinejad said. “I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs, or testing them, making them, politically they are backward, retarded.” On Tuesday he met with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, addressed the United Nations (where he announced that he would disregard any resolutions adopted by the Security Council), and hosted a reception at the Intercontinental Hotel that was attended by Brian Williams and Christiane Amanpour.
| Source 1:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
Source 2:
Adnkronos International
Source 3:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
Source 4:
New York Times
Source 5:
Time
|
| September 26, 2007 | - The annotated text of Bush's address to the U.N. General Assembly appeared briefly on the U.N. website. The speech included phonetic spellings for the name of French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a), and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| September 23, 2007 | -
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended the United Nations in New York City and gave a speech at Columbia University. “There is,” he said in an interview, “no war in the offing.”
| Source:
Herald Sun
|
| September 7, 2007 | - “Bio-warfare” chemicals found at a United Nations office in New York turned out to be cleaning supplies.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 30, 2007 | - An envoy for the UN Human Rights Council announced that acts of sexual violence by armed groups in Congo “are of an unimaginable brutality that goes far beyond rape” and that victims who survive being shot or stabbed in the genitals are often forced to eat excrement or the flesh of their murdered relatives with whom they have also been forced to have sex.
| Source:
Al Jazeera
|
| May 2, 2007 | - The U.N. Refugee Agency reported that more than 36,000 Afghans had been deported from Iran since late April.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| April 19, 2007 | - A senior U.N. inspector revealed that in the past two months Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| April 17, 2007 | -
Sudan agreed to allow more than 3,000 armed U.N. and African peacekeepers into Darfur, where government-supported militia are accused of killing as many as 400,000 civilians.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| March 23, 2007 | - The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to impose new sanctions on Iran. Iranian officials claimed that American authorities had prevented President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from attending the Council meeting by delaying his visa.
| Source 1:
AP via Yahoo! News
Source 2:
BBC
|
| March 22, 2007 | - In the Green Zone, a press conference held by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was interrupted by a nearby rocket attack. Ban, frightened, ducked behind a podium.
| Source:
AP via Yahoo! News
|
| March 22, 2007 | - John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, discussing last summer's conflict in Lebanon, said that he was “damned proud” of U.S. efforts to delay a cease-fire.
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 10, 2007 | - The United Nations reported that 2 million Iraqis, including the judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death, have fled their country since the war began; according to the State Department, the United States has accepted 500 of those refugees.
| Source 1:
CNN.com
Source 2:
Al Jazeera
Source 3:
CNN.com
|
| March 6, 2007 | - The United Nations announced that Afghanistan's yield of heroin poppies rose 25 percent last year.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| February 19, 2007 | - A United Nations expert panel announced a 50 percent likelihood that widespread ice sheet loss was inevitable and could elevate sea levels by up to 19 feet in the next several hundred years.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| February 14, 2007 | - After studying 21 industrialized nations, the U.N. concluded that Dutch children were the most happy, and British and American children the least.
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 16, 2007 | - The United Nations announced that 34,452 civilians were killed in Iraq last year, a number nearly three times higher than previous estimates by the Iraqi interior ministry.
| Source:
BBC
|
| December 8, 2006 | - President George W. Bush blamed John Bolton's departure from the U.N. on the “shallow politics” of the Senate, and Kofi Annan, who will leave the U.N. on December 31 after completing his second five-year term as secretary general, said that he and Bolton were “both graduating together.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| November 12, 2006 | -
Democratic
senators made it clear that they would not confirm John Bolton (who was installed as U.N. ambassador via recess appointment) to his position in 2007.
| Source:
ABC News
|
| November 11, 2006 | - In Beit Hanun, Gaza, Israeli forces accidentally killed 18 civilians, including seven children; Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the killings as a “technical failure.” The U.N. Security Council drafted a resolution condemning the attack, but the United States, represented by Ambassador John Bolton, vetoed it.
| Source 1:
The Jerusalem Post
Source 2:
BBC News
|
| October 24, 2006 | - A United Nations official claimed that the United States has become a role model for prisoner-abusing governments around the world.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| October 16, 2006 | -
China insisted that the U.N. request, rather than require, countries to inspect North Korean cargo. An American expert called the sanctions “kabuki theater,” and North Korea called them a “declaration of war.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 21, 2006 | -
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking at the United Nations in New York, proclaimed his love for all the world's peoples, and suggested that the United States halt domestic fuel production and buy its energy from him “at a fifty percent discount.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 21, 2006 | -
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez objected to the smell of sulfur in the U.N.'s General Assembly hall, and offered to relocate the U.N.'s headquarters to Caracas.
| Source 1:
New York times
Source 2:
Fox News
|
| August 31, 2006 | -
Iran ignored a U.N. Security Council deadline for suspending its uranium-enrichment activities.
| Source:
UPI
|
| August 31, 2006 | -
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan denounced Israel's use of cluster bombs.
| Source:
International Herald Tribune
|
| August 25, 2006 | -
French president Jacques Chirac said that sending 15,000 United Nations troops to Lebanon was “excessive.”
| Source:
International Herald Tribune.
|
| August 14, 2006 | -
Hezbollah accepted a U.N. ceasefire resolution, and agreed to allow Lebanese and U.N. troops to serve as peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| August 1, 2006 | - In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tony Blair should be named United Nations secretary-general when he steps down as prime minister. “It's a big job that he has right now,” Schwarzenegger said, “and I think whatever job he wants he will get, because he has such a great success rate at home and he has done such a remarkable job, I think.”
| Source:
CNN
|
| July 24, 2006 | - The United Nations began relief operations.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 7, 2006 | - A United Nations official in Sudan lamented that violence in Darfur has gotten worse since the signing of a recent peace accord.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| May 14, 2006 | - The United Nations said that 1,200 people were dying in Congo each day.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| May 13, 2006 | - Many species of bananas, said the United Nations, were in danger of extinction.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 23, 2006 | - Via audiotape, Osama bin Laden called on his followers to travel to Sudan and fight against the U.N. forces in Darfur.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| April 6, 2006 | - An independent study of AIDS in Africa, funded by an international consortium and performed in partnership with Johns Hopkins University, found that 3 percent of Rwandans age 15 to 49 are infected with HIV, a much lower figure than the 30 percent estimated by some researchers or the 13 percent estimated by the United Nations. Infection rates, the study found, were similarly overstated throughout East and West Africa, although in southern Africa the rate of infection remained extremely high: for example, 34.9 percent of Botswanans in the 15 to 49 age group are infected with HIV. "From a research point of view," a British economist said of UNAIDS, "they've done a pathetic job."
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| March 22, 2006 | - The United Nations celebrated World Water Day by noting that 40 percent of the world's population lacked basic sanitation.
| Source:
ABC News Online
|
| March 16, 2006 | -
UNESCO met to discuss how to preserve world heritage sites, like the Tower of London and the Great Barrier Reef, from the effects of global warming; the United States said that the organization had no brief to discuss an unproven theory.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 16, 2006 | - The United Nations issued a report calling on the United States to either try the approximately 500 inmates at the Guantánamo Bay
prison for their crimes or release them.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 10, 2006 | - Riots over blasphemous cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad broke out in India, Indonesia, Kashmir, Palestine, Thailand, the autonomous Somali region of Puntland, and Afghanistan—where 11 demonstrators were killed, at least 4 of them by NATO troops. A Taliban commander offered 100 kilograms of gold to anyone who killed those responsible for the cartoons. Other anti-Muhammad-cartoon protests were held in London and Philadelphia. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on newspapers to stop re-publishing the drawings, and U.S. President George W. Bush condemned the riots but also criticized publishers. "With freedom," said the President, "comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others." An Iranian newspaper announced that it would publish cartoons mocking the Holocaust. Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor who published the original caricatures of Muhammad, said that he'd like to re-publish the Holocaust cartoons and was subsequently put on leave by his boss. Danes were increasingly concerned that their country would be singled out for terrorist attacks. "We make fun of everything here," said a carpenter in Copenhagen. "One shouldn't take it so seriously."
| Source 1:
Arab News
Source 2:
Al Jazeera
Source 3:
BBC News
Source 4:
Channel 4
Source 5:
ReviewJournal.com
Source 6:
CBC News
Source 7:
Al Jazeera
Source 8:
ABC News Online
Source 9:
Bloomberg News
|
| February 5, 2006 | - Riots erupted over newspaper cartoons, printed first in Denmark and subsequently throughout Europe, that caricatured the prophet Muhammad. Demonstrators rallied in Syria, where they attacked the Danish and Norwegian embassies, and in Lebanon, where they set the Danish embassy on fire. "They should have respected our religion," said a Lebanese protester. Iran recalled its ambassador from Denmark, and protesters outside the United Nations in New York City chanted, "shame, shame."
| Source 1:
BBC News
Source 2:
Newsday
|
| February 4, 2006 | - The IAEA voted to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council because of Iran's nuclear program; Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria voted against the measure. Prior to the vote, Egypt proposed to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, but that proposal was rejected by the United States because it would interfere with Israel's weapons program.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 3, 2006 | - Professor Philippe Sands of University College, London, said he had seen a secret memo that details a January 2003 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush. According to Sands' account of the memo, Blair offered Bush full British support for an invasion of Iraq regardless of whether U.N. inspectors found evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Bush also told Blair that he was thinking of having U-2 reconnaissance planes painted with U.N. colors and then flown over Iraq in order to provoke Saddam Hussein into firing upon the planes.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| November 18, 2005 | -
UN human rights experts decided not to visit Guantánamo Bay because the United States refused to allow them full access to detainees.
| Source:
Turkish Press/AFP
|
| October 10, 2005 | -
UNICEF released a short film that shows an airstrike attack on a village of Smurfs.
| Source:
News.telegraph
|
| September 30, 2005 | - Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations representative in charge of coordinating the response to bird flu, said that a bird flu pandemic could kill from 5 to 150 million people. "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/AIDS," he said, "ten times faster."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 19, 2005 | - A summit of world leaders met at the United Nations in New York City.
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| August 9, 2005 | - The United Nations warned that 2.5 million people will die of hunger in Niger if the country does not receive foreign food aid immediately. President Mamadou Tandja responded that “the people of Niger look well-fed.”
| Source 1:
AlertNet
Source 2:
BBC News
|
| August 8, 2005 | - The head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program, Benon Sevan, was accused of taking nearly $150,000 in bribes.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 1, 2005 | - The Senate went into recess, and George W. Bush appointed John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| June 27, 2005 | - The United Nations turned sixty.
| Source:
Sify.com
|
| June 25, 2005 | - The United States admitted to the United Nations that U.S. prisoners have been tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| June 2, 2005 | -
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said that HIV and AIDS were spreading at an accelerating rate around the world.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 18, 2005 | -
British MP George Galloway went to Washington, D.C., to respond to allegations that he profited from the U.N.-managed Iraq oil-for-food program. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” said Galloway. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”
| Source:
Guardian
|
| April 25, 2005 | - A United Nations investigator in Afghanistan who criticized the abuse of prisoners by United States Army personnel was forced out of his role under pressure from the United States.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| April 14, 2005 | - The United Nations released a video game called “Food Force” that lets players pretend they are feeding the starving.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 22, 2005 | - Kofi Annan proposed to expand the U.N. security council to twenty-four members.
| Source:
[Link]
|
| March 16, 2005 | - The United Nations estimated that 180,000 people have died in Darfur since October 2003.
| Source:
USA Today
|
| March 9, 2005 | -
The President nominated John Bolton, a man who strongly dislikes multinational institutions, to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 9, 2005 | - The United Nations gave up trying to stop human cloning.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| March 4, 2005 | - The U.N. predicted that 90 million Africans will have HIV by 2025.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 2, 2005 | -
U.N. peacekeepers killed sixty Lendu in Congo in order to protect the Hema.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 22, 2005 | -
UNICEF reported that 180 million children aged five to seventeen are forced into the “worst forms” of labor, including the sex and slave trades.
| Source:
HindustanTimes.com
|
| February 17, 2005 | - President George W. Bush nominated John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the first director of national intelligence. Negroponte was ambassador to the U.N. from 2001-2004 and ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985; he is alleged to have turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Honduras and to have helped the Nicaraguan Contras find funds. Negroponte will oversee fifteen separate intelligence agencies and will deliver the daily intelligence briefing to the president.
| Source 1:
Reuters
Source 2:
Talahassee Democrat
|
| January 3, 2005 | - the United Nations said pirates were threatening relief supplies,
| Source:
CDNN
|
| December 31, 2004 | -
United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan cut his Christmas holiday short to meet with world leaders about providing relief and announced that he would fly to affected countries to help organize the effort from the ground.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| December 19, 2004 | - Workmen discovered that U.N. headquarters in Geneva were bugged.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 15, 2004 | - The United Nations reported that there had been widespread smuggling of oil out of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority,
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 12, 2004 | - It was revealed that the Bush Administration has been tapping the phone of Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq, in an effort to find a reason to block his reappointment next summer.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 3, 2004 | - The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, resigned in order to spend more time with his wife of forty-seven years.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 22, 2004 | - The U.N. announced plans to send 7,000 peacekeeping troops to Sudan.
| Source:
Globe and Mail
|
| November 22, 2004 | - U.S. and Afghan forces were looking for three kidnapped U.N. workers in Kabul.
| Source:
SFGate/AP
|
| November 19, 2004 | - A union representing U.N. staff registered a vote of no confidence in the U.N.'s senior management.
| Source:
Fox News
|
| September 19, 2004 | - The United Nations Security Council passed another resolution asking the Sudanese government to prevent its proxies from slaughtering people in Darfur (China, Algeria, Pakistan, and Russia abstained). The resolution, which for the first time formally invokes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, says that the council will "consider" sanctions if the genocide continues.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 20, 2004 | -
bombs went off at United Nations voter registration offices in Afghanistan, and
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| August 3, 2004 | - The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling on Sudan to disarm its militias in Darfur but declined to use the word "sanctions" and made no mention of using force to stop the ongoing genocide; Sudan denounced the resolution as a declaration of war.
| Source:
Daily Times
|
| July 21, 2004 | - The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution demanding that Israel obey the World Court's ruling and remove the West Bank wall.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 17, 2004 | - The United Nations continued to issue warnings about the ongoing genocide in Sudan, where Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, have been slaughtering and raping black farmers in Darfur; more than one million people have fled their homes and hundreds of thousands of refugees could soon die of cholera and other diseases.
| Source:
Reuters, Associated Press
|
| July 10, 2004 | - The World Court declared that Israel's West Bank wall is illegal because it effectively seizes Palestinian land.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| July 2, 2004 | - Nine members of the House of Representatives asked the United Nations to monitor the November elections, and
| Source:
Agence France Presse
|
| June 25, 2004 | - The Department of Health and Human Services took steps to limit free contact between American scientists and the World Health Organization.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 9, 2004 | - The United Nations Security Council voted to support the transfer of Iraqi "sovereignty" to the new interim government; the resolution did not make reference to the interim constitution, however; this omission upset the Kurds, whose autonomy is guaranteed in that document, and they threatened to withdraw from the new Iraqi state if necessary.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 11, 2004 | - The United Nations was investigating accusations of sexual abuse by its staff in Bunia, Congo.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 5, 2004 | -
Sudan, where government-sponsored Arab militias called Janjaweed have been slaughtering black farmers, was elected to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights over the objections of the United States. One Sudanese diplomat scoffed at the U.S. objection and pointed to the American atrocities in Iraq.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 30, 2004 | -
Child abductions were on the rise in Afghanistan, and the United Nations was having a hard time recruiting peacekeepers for its mission in Haiti.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 29, 2004 | - The United Nations Security Council voted to ban "non-state actors" from possessing nuclear weapons.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 28, 2004 | - Terrorists in Syria fought with police and blew up a bomb outside a former United Nations office in Damascus.
| Source:
Scotsman
|
| April 8, 2004 | -
United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, who as the U.N. head of peacekeeping failed to intervene to stop the Rwandan
genocide, said that the reports of massacres and rapes in Sudan "leave me with a deep sense of foreboding."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 31, 2004 | - A United Nations envoy said that peacekeepers might have to remain in Haiti for 20 years.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 30, 2004 | -
Angola was planning to outlaw genetically engineered cereals, which would jeopardize a United Nations program that feeds 2 million people.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 23, 2004 | - Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani warned the United Nations not to endorse the interim Iraqi constitution
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 19, 2004 | - A United Nations official said that Sudan now has the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and he compared the government's program of ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, and murder to the Rwandan
genocide.
| Source:
BBC
|
| February 27, 2004 | - Richard Butler said that when he was chief U.N.
weapons inspector he had to meet contacts in Central Park because he knew that his telephone conversations were routinely intercepted.
| Source:
CNN
|
| February 26, 2004 | - The British government declined to prosecute Katharine Gun, the linguist who leaked a United States National Security Agency memo asking British intelligence to spy on United Nations diplomats before the invasion of Iraq; there was speculation that the government was trying to avoid another embarrassing debate about the legality of the war.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 26, 2004 | - Clare Short, a Labor member of parliament who resigned from the Blair cabinet over Iraq, charged that British agents had spied on United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan just before the invasion of Iraq, and said that she had seen transcripts of Annan's conversations.
| Source:
Independent
|
| January 28, 2004 | -
U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan sent a team to Iraq to see whether it was safe enough to hold elections.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 26, 2004 | - Kay made it clear that the United Nations weapons-inspection process had succeeded in disarming Iraq and said the Iraqis had been reduced to experimenting with ricin, a primitive but deadly poison easily made from fermented castor beans; Kay also said that the CIA had completely misread the situation in Iraq, largely because the agency had no on-the-ground spies after the U.N. inspectors were removed.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 19, 2004 | - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is also the target of a corruption investigation, said that Israel might decide to change the route of the wall it is building around the West Bank but not because of any demands made by Palestinians, the United Nations, or the International Court of Justice.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 19, 2004 | - The Bush Administration, worried that it might not be able to hand over Iraqi sovereignty before the U.S. presidential election, decided to ask the United Nations for help.
| Source:
Globe and Mail
|
| November 22, 2003 | - The United Nations war-crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia heard testimony from Miroslav Deronjic, a former Bosnian Serb politician, that Radovan Karadzic gave the order in 1995 to slaughter the Muslim men and boys of Srebrenica: "At one moment, he said the following sentence to me: 'Mirsolav, all of them need to be killed — whatever you can lay your hands on.'"
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 23, 2003 | -
President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly and devoted a surprising portion of his speech to the global sex trade, which he unambiguously condemned.
| Source:
CNN
|
| September 21, 2003 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and President Jacques Chirac got together to talk about the latest American proposal for a Security Council resolution on Iraq.
Chirac noted that "On Iraq, our views are not fully convergent."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 18, 2003 | - Hans Blix, the former U.N. weapons inspector, denounced the British government's controversial dossier on Iraq's weaponry, which he said was the result of a "culture of spin, of hyping." "Advertisers will advertise a refrigerator in terms they do not quite believe in but you expect governments to be more serious and have more credibility."
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 17, 2003 | - The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that Israel refrain from deporting Yasir Arafat.
| Source:
Los Angeles Times
|
| September 11, 2003 | - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that a new Security Council resolution would be helpful, because it would allow other countries to pretend that the Iraqi occupation was a multinational operation, which would justify sending more money.
Rumsfeld said that tourism will soon be a major industry in Iraq.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 3, 2003 | - A congressional study found that the occupation of Iraq is unsustainable given the current size of the U.S. military, and the United States released a draft resolution calling on the United Nations to create a multinational peacekeeping force for Iraq that would remain under American military and political control.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 27, 2003 | - The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the destruction of the U.N.
headquarters in Baghdad.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 20, 2003 | - A suicide bomber in a shiny new cement truck blew up the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad and killed 23 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.
special representative in Iraq.
A pair of hands and a pair of feet, possibly those of the truck's driver, were found 150 yards from the wreckage.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 19, 2003 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors said they had found traces of enriched uranium in samples taken in Iran.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 28, 2003 | -
Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, called for an international peacekeeping force in Liberia; President Bush called for the resignation of President Charles Taylor; Taylor invited Bush to send American troops to make peace.
| Source:
New York Times, Associated Press
|
| June 12, 2003 | - The U.N.
Security Council voted to extend by one year the exemption for American peacekeepers who commit war crimes.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| June 6, 2003 | - Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, said that the quality of American intelligence on Iraq was very poor and suggested that the American and British governments had "jumped to conclusions" about weapons of mass destruction.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| May 3, 2003 | -
United Nations employees looted restaurants at the organization's headquarters in New York after food-service workers staged a wild-cat strike. "It was chaos, wild, something out of a war scene," said one witness. "They took everything, even the silverware."
| Source:
Time.com
|
| May 1, 2003 | - The United States, the
United Nations,
Russia, and the European Union, acting collectively as "the Quartet," presented Israel and Palestine with the famous "road map" to peace that President Bush promised to reveal once the Palestinians acquired a prime minister independent of Yasir Arafat.
| |
| April 29, 2003 | -
Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, negotiated a surrender to Diane Sawyer of ABC News but changed his mind and turned himself in to military officials, who were also holding the former liaison to U.N.
weapons inspectors and a quarter of the 55 “most wanted” Iraqi fugitives.
| |
| April 29, 2003 | -
President Bush prophesized that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but rejected international calls for United Nations inspectors to augment the search.
| |
| April 29, 2003 | -
“On principle, we don't want the United Nations running around Iraq.” Hans Blix, the U.N.
weapons inspector, pointed out that “We found as little, but with less cost.” Military officials admitted that they were holding children in the high-security prison for terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even though they have not been accused of any offense, and said that they would be detained “until we ensure that they're no longer a threat to the United States.” A Florida mother said she accidentally stabbed her 19-year-old son in the buttocks with a 12-inch knife when he wouldn't get out of bed for work.
| |
| April 22, 2003 | -
America disabled an oil pipeline that had been carrying 200,000 barrels a day from Iraq to Syria, in flagrant violation of United Nations economic sanctions.
| |
| April 22, 2003 | -
President Bush was anxious for the U.N.
to lift the 12-year-old sanctions against Iraq, so that its oil could be sold to help pay for the country's rebuilding, but the six nations that border Iraq — Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, and Jordan — argued that sanctions should not be removed until a legitimate government, formed by Iraqis, was in place.
| |
| April 22, 2003 | -
Syria introduced a draft resolution to the U.N.
Security Council that would declare the entire Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, claiming that Israel is the only country in the region with such weapons; Israel is believed to have roughly 200 nuclear warheads.
| |
| March 25, 2003 | -
The European Union discovered electronic listening devices in the offices of five member nations in Brussels; the offices of the French, German, British, Austrian, and Spanish delegations all contained bugs.
Suspicion naturally fell on the United States, given the recent leak of a National Security Agency memo that outlined a surveillance “surge” against United Nations Security Council members.
| |
| March 18, 2003 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors were ordered to evacuate.
| |
| March 18, 2003 | -
“If there is no U.N. mandate and there is not a vote in the Commons before the commitment of British troops, then we ask the prime minister to consider his position as leader of the party.” Robin Cook, the leader of the House of Commons, resigned from the British cabinet to protest his government's war policy; other resignations were expected.
| |
| March 11, 2003 | -
Someone in the Bush Administration told a reporter that the president took the extraordinary step of sitting still by himself — “in solitude, undisturbed” — for ten whole minutes before he walked purposefully down a long hall on a red carpet to his first prime-time press conference in more than a year, where he told the world that he was prepared to launch an invasion of Iraq within days.
He was described as “a leader impervious to doubt.” Bush said that “as we head into the 21st century, when it comes to our security, we really don't need anybody's permission.” Asked about the danger of undermining the authority of the United Nations, Bush replied: “I want to work — I want the United Nations to be effective. It's important for it to be a robust, capable body. It's important for its word to mean what they say.” Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein “has trained and financed Al Qaeda-type organizations,” and he said that his job “is to protect America. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. People can ascribe all kind of intentions. I swore to protect and defend the Constitution. That's what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath. And that's exactly what I am going to do.” Bush mentioned the September 11 attacks eight times. Some commentators were surprised by Bush's odd, passionless tone; there was speculation in the Washington Post that the president was on drugs.
| |
| March 11, 2003 | -
British authorities arrested someone at its Government Communications Headquarters in connection with the leak of a memo detailing America's spy campaign against Security Council members, and the United Nations opened an investigation into the spying.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
The National Security Agency has mounted a surveillance “surge” targeting the communications of United Nations Security Council members, with special attention directed to Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, and Guinea. The spy campaign was outlined in a top secret memo written by Frank Koza, the NSA's chief of staff for regional targets, that was leaked to the London Observer. Koza instructed analysts to focus on “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.” He also requested that analysts “make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes.”
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
The United States, Britain, and Spain asked the United Nations Security Council to affirm in a new resolution that Iraq had missed its last chance to disarm.
| |
| February 25, 2003 | -
Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector, ordered Iraq to destroy all its Al Samoud 2 missiles after U.N. tests determined that the missiles exceed the 150-kilometer range set by the Security Council. The lightest version of the missile, Blix said, has a range of 193 kilometers.
| |
| February 25, 2003 | -
“If Iraq decides to destroy the weapons that were long-range weapons, that's just the tip of the iceberg,” said President Bush. “So the idea of destroying a rocket, or two rockets, or however many he's going to destroy, says to me he's got a lot more weapons to destroy.” United Nations weapons inspectors complained that the intelligence tips they've been getting from the United States have been “garbage after garbage after garbage.” Dr.
| |
| February 18, 2003 | -
In New York, where the authorities refused to permit a peace march, at least half a million people attempted to assemble at a park near the United Nations; police blocked streets and prevented many of the demonstrators from reaching the rallying point.
| |
| February 18, 2003 | -
Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief U.N.
weapons inspectors, gave an updated report to the Security Council and declared that they were making good progress and had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; Blix dismissed much of Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations last week and said that the satellite photographs of weapons installations he featured could easily depict routine activity.
| |
| February 18, 2003 | -
“Inspectors,” he explained, “must base their reports only on evidence.” Powell was frustrated in his attempt to rally the Security Council behind the war agenda, and Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, was applauded after he told Powell that “in this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of conscience.
| |
| February 11, 2003 | -
Colin Powell presented the United Nations Security Council with America's latest case against Iraq. He played recordings of what he said were intercepted conversations of Iraqis discussing the removal of “forbidden ammo” from weapons sites, and he showed satellite photos in which trucks appeared to be parked next to warehouses.
| |
| February 11, 2003 | -
“This is a defining moment for the U.N.
| |
| February 11, 2003 | -
“If the Security Council were to allow a dictator to lie and deceive, the Security Council will be weakened.” The British government admitted that its new “intelligence” dossier on Iraq, which purported to provide “up-to-date details of Iraq's network of intelligence and security” and which Colin Powell cited approvingly in his presentation to the United Nations, was largely plagiarized from various published articles, including one by a student that described Iraqi intelligence activities in 1990 and 1991.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
The president said that Secretary of State Colin Powell will soon present new evidence of Iraq's evildoing, including its alleged ties to Al Qaeda, to the United Nations Security Council.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
CIA analysts continued to maintain that there is no evidence of Iraqi aid to terrorists, and officials at the FBI also said they were baffled by the president's claims: “We've been looking into this hard for more than a year,” said one anonymous source, “and you know what, we just don't think it's there.” Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations chemical and biological inspections team, rebutted many of the president's reasons for attacking Iraq; Blix said that there was no evidence that Iraq was hiding illegal weapons or weapons scientists in neighboring countries, that there was no credible evidence of Iraqi intelligence agents posing as scientists, and that there was no evidence of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. “There are other states where there appear to be stronger links,” he said.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
United Nations officials covered a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, which hangs near the entrance of the Security Council, with a curtain to prevent it from showing up as a backdrop during photo opportunities.
| |
| February 4, 2003 | -
Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, the commander of the United States forces in the Pacific, requested reinforcements, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that he will refer the matter of North Korea's nuclear activities to the United Nations Security Council.
| |
| January 28, 2003 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors presented their interim report on Iraq's compliance with Security Council resolution 1441.
| |
| January 28, 2003 | -
An American official said that Libya's election as chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission was “regrettable.” Children from single-parent homes are more likely to go crazy, a Swedish study found.
| |
| January 21, 2003 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors discovered 11 empty chemical warheads in southern Iraq; the inspectors said that the warheads were not included in Iraq's weapons declaration, but Iraqi officials said that they were.
| |
| January 21, 2003 | -
Inspectors also searched the private homes of two Iraqi
scientists, one of whom was upset that his clothing and his wife's medical Xrays were examined. The inspectors later expressed surprise that the Bush Administration was making such a big deal out of the empty warheads, which have a range of 12 miles; Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. team, said the warheads were not important, and a French diplomat agreed: “I have only one thing to say — empty.”
| |
| January 21, 2003 | -
A United Nations envoy said that six to eight million North Koreans are in danger of going hungry.
| |
| January 21, 2003 | -
The United Nations reported that the Gypsies of Eastern Europe are getting poorer.
| |
| January 14, 2003 | -
Administration officials then asked a federal judge to deny Jose Padilla, the alleged “dirty bomber,” access to his lawyer because the presence of a lawyer “would threaten permanently to undermine the military's efforts to develop a relationship of trust and dependency that is essential to effective interrogation.” Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations arms-inspections team, acknowledged that no “smoking gun” had been found to prove that Iraq was engaged in the manufacture of illegal chemical or biological weapons but complained that the documents provided by Iraq were incomplete.
| |
| January 14, 2003 | -
A United Nations report entitled “Likely Humanitarian Scenarios” estimated that an American invasion of Iraq will result in some 500,000 casualties and about 900,000 refugees, who will require food and shelter; up to 3 million Iraqis could require “therapeutic feeding.” The U.S. military admitted that it has spammed thousands of Iraqis with email messages urging them to defy Saddam Hussein.
| |
| January 7, 2003 | -
The president later traveled to Fort Hood, Texas, where he told some soldiers that Saddam Hussein “holds the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council and its resolutions in contempt.
He really doesn't care about the opinion of mankind.” It was reported that Condoleezza Rice is sometimes teased by her colleagues in the White House for speaking in complete sentences.
| |
| January 7, 2003 | -
“If at the end of my term of office,” Lula said in a speech, “every Brazilian has the opportunity to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then I will have completed my mission in life.” The United Nations said that it was prevented by land mines from delivering food to 40,000 hungry people in Angola.
| |
| December 31, 2002 | -
The Bush Administration revealed that it is preparing a comprehensive strategy of political and economic measures to pressure North Korea into backing down from its aggressive pursuit of additional nuclear weapons, though Secretary of State Colin Powell refused on television to characterize the situation as a “crisis.” Administration officials privately admitted that it was difficult to explain why it is necessary to go to war with Iraq, where United Nations weapons inspectors have the run of the country, while counseling patience and diplomacy with North Korea, which has threatened “uncontrollable catastrophe” and “merciless punishment” for the United States and which just announced the expulsion of U.N. inspectors.
| |
| December 31, 2002 | -
Serbia's prime minister promised to extradite Serbia's president to the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
| |
| December 24, 2002 | -
North Korea began removing United Nations monitoring devices from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and from its stockpile of plutonium; experts said that North Korea could potentially build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. Russia's deputy foreign minister blamed George W. Bush for the crisis: “How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?”
| |
| December 24, 2002 | -
The United States, which edited Iraq's weapons declaration before distributing it to other members of the U.N.
| |
| December 24, 2002 | -
The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning Israel for killing United Nations workers in the Occupied Territories.
| |
| December 17, 2002 | -
Iraq was upset that the United States took possession of the only copy of its weapons declaration that was given to the United Nations Security Council; Norway and Syria, nonpermanent members of the council, complained that they would receive only edited versions of the document.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
Iraq delivered its 12,000-page weapons declaration to the United Nations, and American officials said they will be ready to mount an invasion by next month.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
Iraqis were amused by the inspection of three gin factories by United Nations weapons inspectors, and reporters were relieved to discover that Iraq's liquor stores are well stocked.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
Slobodan Milosevic refused to undergo a psychiatric evaluation ordered by the U.N. war-crimes tribunal that is trying him for genocide.
| |
| December 3, 2002 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors began their work in Iraq; among the first installations to be inspected were Al Dawrah and Al Nasr, two factories that Tony Blair and George W. Bush, citing satellite photographs, had claimed were sites of renewed production of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Inspectors found nothing but ruins.
| |
| November 26, 2002 | -
United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in Baghdad.
| |
| November 26, 2002 | -
Nothing.” An Israeli soldier shot and killed a senior United Nations official, Iain John Hook, in the agency's compound in Jenin, in the West Bank.
| |
| November 19, 2002 | -
One day after Iraq's parliament rejected the terms of the Security Council resolution calling for resumed weapons inspections, a letter from Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri agreeing to the demands was delivered to the United Nations.
| |
| November 19, 2002 | -
The United Nations and Human Rights Watch condemned the police in Kabul, Afghanistan, for shooting into a crowd of unarmed student protesters; at least two students were killed.
| |
| November 12, 2002 | -
France and Russia, after weeks of dickering, voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq after the United States agreed to change the word “and” to “or” and the word “secure” to “restore.” “This would be the 17th time that we expect Saddam to disarm,” said President George W. Bush. “This time we mean it. This time it's for real.” American officials claimed that the resolution was a “mousetrap” that gives the U.S. the right to go to war unilaterally; Europeans pointed to assurances from American diplomats that the document contains “no hidden triggers.” President Bush settled on a war plan for Iraq that will include a short air campaign followed by rapid ground operations involving about 250,000 troops.
| |
| November 5, 2002 | -
North Korea at first refused but then agreed to negotiations about its nuclear-weapons program, though Under Secretary of State John Bolton said it was “hard to see how we can have conversations with a government that has blatantly violated its agreements.” The Bush Administration threatened to withdraw support for the 1994 United Nations accord on population control, which was largely written by the United States and has been ratified by 179 nations, because it contains the terms “reproductive services” and “reproductive health care,” which, the Administration says, imply abortion.
| |
| November 5, 2002 | -
American warplanes were practicing bombing runs in southern Iraq, and President Bush declared that Iraq “has made the United Nations look foolish.” New Hampshire was considering naming a mountain after Ronald Reagan, and a town in California was thinking of changing its name to “Got Milk?” The European Union unveiled a draft for a new constitution as part of a plan to add 10 new member nations; new names were also being contemplated, including “the United States of Europe.” Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former president of France, said that “we need a name which gets across our brand.”
| |
| October 29, 2002 | -
Bush had earlier explained that Iraq is “unique” because Saddam Hussein has gassed his own people and “thumbed his nose” at the United Nations.
| |
| October 22, 2002 | -
Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of the U.N.
| |
| October 8, 2002 | -
Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations' inspection commission, negotiated a deal with Iraq to allow the return of weapons inspectors within two weeks.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
The United Nations Human Rights Committee upheld France's ban on dwarf tossing; a 3-foot 9-inch stuntman had filed a claim saying the ban was discriminatory and had cost him his job in a discotheque.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Israel lift its siege of Yasir Arafat's compound in the West Bank; the United States, irritated at Israel's bad timing, abstained from the vote and let it pass.
| |
| October 1, 2002 | -
Secretary General Kofi Annan noted that the United Nations has held 15,484 meetings and issued 5,879 reports over the past two years, and suggested several measures to make the bureaucracy more efficient.
| |
| September 24, 2002 | -
President George W. Bush challenged the United Nations to prove that it is “a force for good and peace” and not “an ineffective debating society”; he said that America must overthrow Saddam Hussein because “it's time for us to secure the peace”; and he demanded that Congress give him unlimited power to make war.
| |
| September 24, 2002 | -
Iraq agreed to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors without conditions, but the White House denounced the offer as a stalling tactic and insisted that inspections would never work anyway.
| |
| September 24, 2002 | -
The Pentagon presented the President with detailed invasion plans, and Saudi Arabia agreed to allow American forces to attack Iraq from bases there but only if the United Nations blesses the war.
| |
| September 17, 2002 | -
President Bush addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations and demanded that something be done about Iraq; he also announced that America was rejoining UNESCO.
| |
| August 6, 2002 | -
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened hearings on whether to invade Iraq, which this week invited United Nations arms inspectors to Baghdad for talks.
| |
| July 2, 2002 | -
The United Nations issued a report on China's AIDS crisis characterizing the epidemic there as “beyond belief.” The United States vetoed the renewal of the U.N.
peacekeeping mission in Bosnia because American peacekeeping troops were not exempted from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
| |
| June 25, 2002 | -
The United States said that it would not participate in United Nations peacekeeping missions unless American troops were granted immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
| |
| June 18, 2002 | -
The United Nations World Food Summit convened in Rome; delegates dined on lobster, goose stuffed with olives, and foie gras on toast with kiwifruit.
| |
| May 14, 2002 | -
A 13-year-old girl from Bolivia named Gabriela Azurdy Arrieta opened the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. “We want a world fit for children,” she said in her speech, “because a world fit for us is a world fit for everyone.” The United States, the Vatican, and several Arab countries disrupted the proceedings by pushing anti-abortion and sexual abstinence agendas.
| |
| May 7, 2002 | -
Padshah Khan Zadran, an Afghan warlord who has received American support and whose brother is a minister in the national government, fired 200 rockets into Gardez, killing 25 people, mostly women and children.
Zadran was mad at the people there and recently said he would “kill them all: men, women, children, even the chickens.” America regained its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
| |
| April 30, 2002 | -
Israel refused to allow a United Nations fact-finding mission to travel to the Jenin refugee camp to investigate allegations of war crimes.
Yehuda Lancry, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, told Secretary General Kofi Annan that the mission, if it proceeds, would be permitted to gather facts but not to make any “observations” about the facts.
Amnesty International said it had “credible evidence” that war crimes were committed in the Jenin camp.
| |
| April 23, 2002 | -
“Combating terrorism does not give a blank check to kill civilians,” said Terje Roed-Larsen, a senior United Nations envoy who visited the camp.
| |
| April 16, 2002 | -
One of Slobodan Milosevic's former aids shot himself in the head to protest a new Yugoslav law legalizing cooperation with the United Nations war-crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
| |
| April 16, 2002 | -
The United Nations announced that old people will soon outnumber young people for the first time in history.
| |
| April 9, 2002 | -
The United Nations said that tens of billions of dollars were needed to help the 5.7 million people who are still being affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
| |
| April 2, 2002 | -
The United States joined the rest of the United Nations Security Council in demanding that Israel withdraw from Ramallah, though later that day President George W. Bush, speaking from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, said that he thought Sharon was doing what he had to do.
| |
| April 2, 2002 | -
United Nations scientists found widespread traces of depleted uranium in Serbia and Montenegro and said that precautions should be taken to prevent stirring up the highly toxic material but nonetheless insisted that the population was safe.
| |
| March 19, 2002 | -
U.N.
secretary general Kofi Annan called on Israel to end its “illegal occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army stopped a new practice of writing I.D.
numbers on detainees' foreheads and forearms; critics had compared the policy to Nazi branding of concentration-camp inmates.
| |
| March 12, 2002 | -
The United Nations told fishermen along the Caspian Sea that they could resume the sturgeon caviar harvest.
| |
| February 12, 2002 | -
The United Nations suggested turning the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor into an eco-tourism destination.
| |
| January 15, 2002 | -
Twenty-five thousand people died in natural disasters last year, the United Nations reported, up from 10,000 in 2000.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | - Mary Robinson, the United Nations commissioner for human rights, criticized the Bush Administration for its plan to hold secret military trials of foreigners accused of terrorism.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | - The United Nations Committee Against Torture warned Israel to stop torturing Palestinians.
| |
| October 30, 2001 | -
United Nations officials asked Ethiopia and Eritrea to please pick up their dead bodies, which were left over from a recent border war, because of the health risk to international peacekeepers.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - The United Nations suspended its food convoys into Afghanistan because of the American bombing campaign.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - Jean Ziegler, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, said the food drop was “totally catastrophic for humanitarian aid” because it links such aid with military operations; he also warned that the indiscriminate “snowdropping” of food could lead hungry children into mine fields.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - Secretary General Kofi Annan shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations.
| |
| September 4, 2001 | -
John Negroponte, who was the American ambassador to Honduras during the Contra war, was awaiting confirmation as the new U.S. representative at the United Nations.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | - The United Nations reported that Western aid to Africa has fallen by a third since 1994.
| |
| July 3, 2001 | - The United Nations General Assembly defined AIDS as a political, human rights, and economic issue; formerly AIDS was a venereal disease.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | - Ruud Lubbers, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, criticized wealthy countries for closing their borders to people fleeing persecution and violence.
| |
| May 15, 2001 | - The U.S. House of Representatives voted to withhold $244 million in United Nations dues if American did not regain its seat on the Human Rights Commission. “This is an affront,” sputtered Dick Armey, the House majority leader, “more to the whole notion of international human rights than it is to us as a nation.”
| |
| May 15, 2001 | - The United Nations
Food and Agriculture
Organization said that 550,000 tons of old, unused pesticides were threatening to poison food and water supplies worldwide.
| |
| May 8, 2001 | - The United States was removed from the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | - America vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an observer force in Palestine.
| |
| February 20, 2001 | -
It was “foreign-policy week” at the White House: President Bush went down to Mexico for a visit, personally authorized what he called a “routine” bombing of five Iraqi anti-aircraft sites, and appointed John D. Negroponte to be his ambassador to the United Nations. Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, where he helped orchestrate Ronald Reagan's covert war against Nicaragua.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | -
United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan presented an 87-point plan to end the suffering of the developing world.
| |
| January 30, 2001 | - The United Nations said the world needed to create 500 million new jobs over the next ten years.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | - Europeans were concerned about Balkan Syndrome, a mysterious set of illnesses that plague veterans of United Nations peacekeeping duty in the former Yugoslavia; over a dozen have died of leukemia; many suffer chronic fatigue, hair loss, and various forms of cancer.
| |
| January 9, 2001 | -
United Nations investigators discovered significant radioactivity in Kosovo, in villages and on farms and in the groundwater.
| |
| December 26, 2000 | - The United Nations Security Council rejected Palestine's request for U.N. peacekeepers; United States Ambassador Richard Holbrooke commented that “this is a resolution that will never be adopted.”
| |
| December 19, 2000 | - A United Nations report said that 79 million girls were “missing” in South Asia because of infanticide and the abortion of female fetuses.
| |
| December 5, 2000 | - Mary Robinson, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, recommended sending international monitors to the West Bank and Gaza, saying that life for Palestinians under the Israeli occupation was “dehumanizing.” The Israeli government issued a report claiming that Palestinians and not Israeli defense forces actually shot and killed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durah as he cowered with his father; the report, which relied heavily on civilians with no training in ballistics, was widely ridiculed. Israel's daily paper Ha'aretz wrote: “It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this bizarre investigation.”
| |
| November 28, 2000 | - More than a billion people lack a basic supply
of clean water, the United Nations reported; it would cost just $10
billion a year to provide them with water and sanitation, which is
about what Europe spends each year on ice cream.
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| November 14, 2000 | -
Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, asked the United Nations Security Council to send a multinational peacekeeping force to the Occupied Territories.
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| November 7, 2000 | - Yugoslavia rejoined the United Nations.
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| November 0, 2000 | - The United States removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism after the nation agreed to provide UN inspectors full access to its nuclear program.
| Source:
BBC News
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| October 24, 2000 | - The United Nations General Assembly was considering a motion to condemn Israel for using excessive force against Palestinians; of the 134 people who have died in the recent uprising, all but 8 were Arabs.
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| October 17, 2000 | - Refugees in West Timor, many of whom believe that United Nations peacekeeping forces will rape and kill them if they return to East Timor, were being held in virtual captivity by pro-Indonesia militias.
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| September 12, 2000 | - One hundred and forty-nine world leaders disrupted traffic in New York City; United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan warned that disease, poverty, war, hunger, and pollution were difficult problems that required cooperation among nations.
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| September 5, 2000 | - A large group of religious leaders met and exchanged business cards at the United Nations; the Dalai Lama was excluded for fear of angering China.
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| August 29, 2000 | - Experts urged the United Nations to improve its peacekeeping department by adding an intelligence unit.
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| August 8, 2000 | - Organizers of the United Nations Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders failed to invite the Tibetan Dalai Lama because doing so would offend China.
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