LONDON — Advocates of a global overhaul of efforts to meet the needs of the world’s 850 million chronically hungry people have received a boost with the decision by CARE, a top U.S. aid organization, to walk away from tens of millions of dollars in annual U.S. federal financing. In opting out of the mechanism by which donated U.S. food aid is transported overseas and sold in local markets to fund anti-poverty programs — a decades-old process known as monetization — CARE joins a growing number of international non-governmental and governmental groups demanding an end to a policy they say [...]
For several years, Iranian officials have sought to strengthen their ties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran became a formal observer nation at the July 2005 SCO summit, but the country’s leaders have continued to pursue full membership. In April 2007, the Iranian Foreign Ministry submitted an official application to this effect. Even before the seventh annual SCO summit convened in Bishkek on Aug. 16, however, the existing SCO full members announced that they would indefinitely postpone accepting new members. In the case of the SCO, a primary Iranian objective has been to keep other Eurasian countries from aligning [...]
WASHINGTON — Recent changes in the leadership of two of the closest allies of the United States are altering the dynamic of the trans-Atlantic relationship in ways that would have seemed highly improbable a year ago. The election in early May of the pro-American Nicolas Sarkozy as president of the French Republic has rekindled relations between Paris and Washington, previously soured by differences over Iraq. At the same time, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair in late June, used a U.S. trip to put new distance between his government and the Bush administration. The traditional close ties between [...]
