Eighteen months to go.  That?s the mantra you hear these days:  Only 18 more months before the end of arguably the worst presidency in American history.  On January 20, 2009, our long nightmare will be over, and a new era of sanity and sweetness, measured action and multilateral diplomacy, will commence. I don?t think so.   First of all, we can?t wait 18 month...

UNITED NATIONS, July 10 (IPS) - Mark Malloch Brown, a former U.N. deputy secretary-general, recently anointed with the newly-created portfolio of British "minister of state for Africa, Asia and the United Nations", was a devoted loyalist who stood by the beleaguered former Secretary-General Kofi Annan right to the end. "I loved it here. But I am longing to get back to something in ...

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 (OneWorld) - The U.S. Congress is under increasing pressure to support the creation of a new UN peacekeeping force that would help stop armed conflicts in the world before they turn into a Darfur-like humanitarian catastrophe. A wide array of civil society groups sent a letter to federal legislators today urging them to support the proposed House Resolution 213 calling f...

OneWorld US Citizens for Global Solutions relayed news this morning that a climate compromise might be forthcoming from the G8 negotiations, where U.S. intransigence had been expected to hold up any sort of meaningful deal to cut global carbon emissions. Germany's Angela Merkel, Italy's Romano Prodi, and U.S. President George W. Bush at the G8...

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 5 (IPS) - When leaders of the world's most advanced economies -- also known as the Group of Eight (G8) -- tried to set new targets to fight climate change at their summit in Britain in 2005, the United States balked. Two years later, despite mountains of studies warning of dangerous consequences to the future of humanity, the world's largest polluter seems to be taki...

From space, the Earth looks like a fragile drop of blue, green, brown, and white floating in a sea of black. National borders are not visible. But the vast oceans and seas are. What from space appears to be humanity?s common heritage, however, is the subject of considerable dispute. During the Nixon administration negotiations began to create a common set of rules for how nations use our oce...

Last week, Fidelity Investments, the world's leading mutual funds company, announced it had sold 91 percent of its American Depository Receipts in PetroChina, which amounts to nearly half the investment firm's total holdings in the state-owned oil company that operates in Sudan. Fidelity did not explain why it made the move to sell its PetroChina shares, but observers say it was clear...

By September, predicts Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, we may know whether or not the "military part" of the surge is working in Iraq. By then we may also learn whether another surge -- one that eclipses the 20,000 additional troops approved for Iraq in January -- has been successful as well. In the last eight months, the demand for United Nations peacekeepers has increased b...

Foreign Policy In Focus invited a group of peace activists and scholars to respond to Lawrence Wittner?s proposal for a strong, national peace organization. Here is a link to Lawrence Wittner?s essay How the Peace Movement Can Win. Lawrence S. Wittner?s essay, ?How the Peace Movement Can Win? kicks off a very important conversation. Unfortunately, Wittner?s conclusion -- that to succeed ?t...

The International Criminal Court ruled Monday that Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with recruiting child soldiers as young as 10 and sending them into battle, will be the first defendant to face trial at the newly established court. At a public hearing in The Hague, presiding Judge Claude Jorda announced that evidence presented by prosecutors was sufficient to "establish st...