Washington Post: "Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a conservative political scientist who became the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, died at her home outside Washington late Thursday, colleagues announced today. She was 80."
BBC: "Discrimination against women is holding back economic and social development across the Arab World, a report by the UN's development agency says.
CNN: "The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday authorized an African force to protect Somalia's government against an increasingly powerful Islamic militia, hoping to restore peace and avert a broader conflict in the region.
The U.S. resolution, co-sponsored by the council's African members, also partially lifts an arms embargo on Somalia so the regional force can be supplied with weapons and military equipment and train the government's security forces."
"The United Nations plans to become more deeply involved in efforts to end the Lord's Resistance Army's reign of terror in northern Uganda, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday.
The LRA, which says it wants to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments, has become notorious for massacring civilians, mutilating survivors and abducting thousands of children as fighters, porters and sex slaves.
About 100,000 people have been killed and nearly 2 million more driven from their homes and into camps in 20 years of brutal war waged by the group in northern Uganda, the U.N. Security Council said two weeks ago." More
"President Bush has accepted the resignation of U.N. Ambassador John Bolton when his recess appointment expires." LINK
"Marking the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for stepped-up measures to end the practice and to address the entrenched poverty which leaves people vulnerable to enslavement. "Contemporary forms of slavery - from bonded labour to human trafficking - are flourishing as a result of discrimination, social exclusion, and vulnerability exacerbated by poverty," the Secretary-General said in a message on the observance." More
"Mr. Annan said it is crucial that the Council preserves and strengthens what he called its "crown jewel" - the system of Special Procedures, or rapporteurs, independent experts and working groups tasked with examining a specific area of human rights.
"It has long since been recognized in theory, and increasingly also in practice, that the rule of law cannot be left to the discretion of governments, no matter how democratically elected they may be." The Secretary-General said the area most in need of innovation is the organization of the universal periodic review, a peer review mechanism. More