Keyword: United States of America

US Pulls All Funding for UNESCO After Sweeping Vote to Support Palestinian Membership

Video In an emotional - and largely symbolic - move, the United Nations cultural organization known as UNESCO overwhelmingly voted to grant membership to the Palestinians, despite opposition from the United States and Israel. Now the United States says it will cancel a $60 million payment due in November to the U.N. body. Membership dues paid by the U.S. account for about a fifth of UNESCO’s annual budget.  The U.S. is also threatening to veto any Palestinian effort to be recognized by...

'Something Has Started': Michael Moore on the Occupy Wall St. Protests That Could Spark a Movement

Video Oscar-winning filmmaker, best-selling author, and provocateur laureate Michael Moore talks about the growing "Occupy Wall Street" protests in Lower Manhattan, which he visited on Monday night. "This is literally an uprising of people who have had it," Moore says. "It has already started to spread across the country in other cities. It will continue to spread. ... It will be tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people ... Their work ahead is not as difficult...

'Occupy Wall Street': Thousands March in NYC Financial District, Set Up Protest Encampment

Video Demonstrators are marching on Wall Street in a campaign dubbed "Occupy Wall Street," which began on Saturday, 17 September 2011, when thousands gathered in New York City’s Financial District. Inspired by the massive public protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, hundreds have marched and slept in a park near Wall Street since Saturday. Ad Busters, a Vancouver-based culture-jamming magazine, put out a call for Saturday’s protest...

Mary Robinson: War on Terror Erodes International Human Rights Standards

Video Speaking on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002, contends that "there were many mistakes made in response to those terrible attacks. The worst in my view was to start a war on terrorism. I pleaded at the time that we should treat these terrible atrocious acts as crimes against humanity and focus on going after the criminals." "When you declare a war, its easier to erode standards,...

Chomsky: US To Veto Palestinian Statehood Bid Despite 'Overwhelming International Consensus'

Video President Obama publicly confirmed Monday that the United States will oppose any attempt by the Palestinians to achieve statehood at the United Nations, but Palestinians leaders are still vowing to move ahead with their bid for statehood this week. What will the ramifications of a U.S. veto be? For more, Democracy Now speak with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus, Noam Chomsky. “If the Palestinians do bring the issue to the Security Council and the US vetoes it,...

9/11 Not an 'Intelligence Failure'

Video In the run up to 9/11, high ranking CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence (head of the CIA), George Tenet, were aware that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered America in the year 2000. However, they withheld this information from the FBI and "more or less lied" about it to the US Congress and the 9/11 Commission in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism adviser to the Bush...