Fox News - Fair & Balanced

George Russell Archive

Get updates from George Russell

http://www.foxnews.com/archive/author/george-russell/feed/rss

  • UN anti-poverty agency chases cash rather than long-term results, study says

    Published May 15, 2013

    The $5.7 billion United Nations Development Program, the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency,  is poor at producing lasting results, sets unrealistic or unfocused priorities and often seems more interested in getting funding than in setting up programs that make the best sense, according to an internal assessment that will be discussed at a top-level meeting next month.

  • Anti-Israel UN human rights official can’t be fired, State Department says

    Published May 09, 2013

    That view is likely to enrage even further members of Congress who have circulated letters urging Richard Falk’s ouster after he said last month that the Boston Marathon bombings were connected to the “American global domination project."

  • UN official accused of diverting money still heads unit tied to Olympic Games

    Published April 23, 2013

    A key United Nations official has been charged with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars donated outside normal channels, gaining financial benefits for his family and friends, contrary to U.N. rules, and otherwise abusing his position to “unduly benefit himself and third parties,” according to a U.N. investigation report obtained by Fox News. 

  • Despite sequester, State Department ups support for the UN

    Published April 12, 2013

    Even as the mandated sequester bites into U.S. federal spending -- and newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that he is cutting his budget by 6 percent -- the State Department is planning to boost spending on the United Nations in 2014 by more than 4 percent to at least $3.6 billion.

  • UN humanitarian aid financing is disorganized, unpredictable, study says

    Published March 29, 2013

    The United Nations spends billions annually to relieve the suffering caused by natural disasters and civil war, but those costly efforts are uncoordinated, overlap or duplicate effort, and often don’t show where the money went, according to a report by a special U.N. watchdog unit.

  • Paid to play: Anti-gun group teams with UN to prep African countries for arms trade treaty talks

    Published March 15, 2013

    A week before it opens a treaty conference to impose worldwide limitations on arms sales, the United Nations co-hosted and paid for a series of meetings  involving 48 African nations and an anti-gun group that espouses much greater national and international control of firearms, including registration of small arms and ammunition.

  • As financial backers get impatient, UN officials urgently work on yet another reform plan

    Published March 06, 2013

    The exhortation to think big and look beyond the normal endless talk sessions came in a consultative “non-paper” at a two-day closed-door meeting of senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy, in mid-January. 

  • US, other nations quietly maneuvering to rein in sprawling, inefficient UN system

    Published February 20, 2013

    Frustrated by the epic inefficiency, sprawling disorganization and free-spending of their money by the United Nations, a group of Western donor nations, including the U.S., has been meeting quietly to develop a strategy to rein in the world organization’s more than $20 billion a year in anti-poverty assistance – which even parts of the U.N. concede hasn’t done much to relieve poverty.

  • Already a “failure of management,” UN computer project turns out to be an epic shambles for Ban Ki-moon

    Published February 11, 2013

    For more than three years, a sophisticated computerized management system intended to be a cornerstone of United Nations reform has been one of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s most embarrassing train wrecks, described as a “failure of management” on Ban’s part. Now, the world organization’s attempts to salvage the system -- known in-house as Umoja, a Swahili term for unity – have turned into an even bigger scandal. 

  • Does UN arms trade treaty figure in Obama administration’s gun control plans?

    Published January 23, 2013

    One day after President Barack Obama won re-election, his  Administration agreed to a new round of  international negotiations to revive a United Nations-sponsored treaty regulating the international sale of conventional arms, which critics fear could affect the Constitutionally protected right of U.S. citizens to purchase and bear firearms.