United Nations

Two top U.N. officials said Friday that the continuing conflict in Darfur had thwarted a yearlong effort to start peace talks and deploy a peacekeeping force there, while new conflict in neighboring Chad could ignite a regional war. U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno and the special envoy for Sudan, Jan Eliasson, told the Security Council that increasing clashes between Sudanese troops and rebels in western Darfur made it difficult to deliver aid to the area and deploy peacekeepers.

Re "Castro hints at a younger ruler in the coming Cuba," Feb. 20 You could have saved all the ink you spilled over the resignation of dictator Fidel Castro and summed it all up in four words: "Goodbye and good riddance." Arnold G. Regardie Los Angeles -- Castro calls it quits, and so should the United States. Our government's embargo on Cuba must end. It is a vestige of our fear of the Soviet Union, a superpower long gone. Terrorists have replaced superpowers.

Britain and France formally introduced a Security Council resolution Thursday calling for a third round of sanctions against Iran over its failure to suspend uranium enrichment. The United States pushed hardest for the sanctions, but China and Russia, the other permanent members of the 15-nation council, have been in general agreement on them.

The United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency says it has "serious concern" about Iran's potential to assemble a nuclear bomb because the country has not addressed questions about weapons designs, but it credited Iran for clarifying all other issues about its nuclear program history, a report released Friday says. The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency comes as the U.N. Security Council is considering new sanctions against Tehran. Iran has continued to defy earlier U.N.

The United States has failed to uphold its international obligations to protect the human rights of migrants, subjecting too many to prolonged detention in substandard facilities while depriving them of an adequate appeals process and labor protections, a United Nations investigator said Friday. In the international body's first scrutiny of U.S. treatment of its 37.5 million noncitizen migrants, U.N.

With food and fuel prices soaring, the United Nations agency charged with feeding the world's hungry has launched an "extraordinary emergency appeal" to cover costs and avoid having to cut aid, a senior official said Monday. The World Food Program called on donor nations for urgent help in closing a funding gap of more than $500 million by May 1.

The pope may be viewed by his church as infallible, but for his U.N. visit, it was Alice Hecht's job to make sure everyone else would be as close to perfect as possible. Hecht, United Nations chief of protocol, said that prepping for Friday's visit by Pope Benedict XVI was much more difficult than getting ready for a state visit by President Bush, who didn't move around the building as much or require the same kind of security. Hecht, a U.N.

Higher food prices risk wiping out progress toward reducing poverty and, if allowed to escalate, could hurt global growth and security, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday. Opening a United Nations trade and development conference here, Ban pledged to use the full force of the world body he heads to tackle the price increases, which have already sparked riots in Asia, Africa and Haiti.

Only weeks after laying out his full foreign policy agenda, Sen. John McCain has begun scaling back a key proposal that had been greeted with alarm by some Republican supporters and wariness by important U.S. allies. McCain has said that, as president, he would call for creation of a "league of democracies" that would move aggressively to tackle problems the United Nations fails to resolve, such as the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, civil strife in Sudan and world health crises.

The U.N. secretary-general and top diplomats made a groundbreaking move Monday to update and reform the world body -- or at least its antiquated headquarters. Wielding shiny silver spades and wearing U.N. blue construction helmets, Ban Ki-moon and 16 other officials broke ground on the U.N.'s North Lawn to mark the beginning of a five-year, nearly $2-billion renovation.