In a new edition of Blogging Heads TV, Matthew Lee and I discuss a week's worth of news at the United Nations. We have it all covered, from UN peacekeeping funding, to the tragic UNIFIL fatalities, to Somalia. Matthew offers an interesting perspective -- he's someone "on the ground," blogging from the fourth floor of the UN Secretariat every day. While we certainly don't see eye-to-eye on everything, he is an excellent sparring partner. Particularly enlightening to me was our discussion on equipment shortages at UN peacekeeping. Apparently, says Matthew, the truck carrying the Spanish peacekeepers in Lebanon was not equiped with a so-called "frequency inhibitor" which can prevent roadside bombs from detonating. As Matthew says, this is considered a "national issue" and Spain, not the UN, is responsible for providing their soldiers' equipment. Watch the entire dicussion.

According to a new report on the Millennium Development Goals, Asian countries have experienced a significant drop in extreme poverty.

Rapid economic growth has spurred progress in the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger in Asia, where the proportion of people living on a dollar a day has been cut by half, but inequality is also growing in parts of the region, says a United Nations report released today in Bangkok.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Report 2007 comes at the midpoint of a 15-year effort to reach those key development objectives that world leaders set at a 2000 UN summit.

More.