UN/Treaties

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit Congress on Wednesday afternoon to brief lawmakers on the U.N.'s response to the North Korea nuclear test and other hot spots.

Ban will meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee around 2:30 p.m. and the House Foreign Affairs Committee later in the afternoon, his spokesman told The Hill. He arrived in Washington on Wednesday morning and starts his day at 11 a.m. with a visit to the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States and a meeting with OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza. 

Spokesman Martin Nesirky said the visit was “long-planned and very wide-ranging” and jointly initiated by the U.N. and Congress.

“The whole range of activities” will be discussed during the meetings on Capitol Hill, he said: “Syria, Mali, North Korea, climate change, relations between the U.S. and the U.N. itself.”

He told lawmakers that America must show leadership in order to isolate nuclear rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

Carney's statements follow a report Monday that said Obama would propose cutting the nation's nuclear stockpile by one-third.

Administration officials and arms control activists believe they now have a new window for action. 

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the House Communications and Technology subcommittee, proposed legislation on Tuesday that would make it the official policy of the United States government to promote a free Internet.

Walden announced his draft bill during a hearing to scrutinize international efforts to regulate the Internet.

Congress approved a non-binding resolution last year that encouraged U.S. delegates to an international telecommunications treaty conference in Dubai to fight proposals that would result in global Internet regulation.

Obama was “committed” to a “united effort” for “young people in both our countries,” Biden told French President Hollande.

President Obama's top adviser for arms control and weapons of mass destruction is leaving the White House to become the executive director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the center announced.

Gary Samore has served as Obama's coordinator for arms control and the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and WMD terrorism for the past four years. As such he led efforts to try to halt Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program and helped negotiate the New START arms control with Russia.

“Gary has been the principal architect of the President’s Prague Agenda on nuclear security, arms control and nonproliferation,” National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said in a statement. “I’m sure he’ll help advance the Belfer Center’s mission to prepare future generations for leadership on these challenging national security issues.”

The investigation will find whether strikes by the United States and others violate international human-rights laws.

The senator laid out his vision for U.S. diplomacy on Thursday in his confirmation hearing.

International scientists announced Wednesday that they will resume research on the deadly H5N1 bird flu after security fears prompted a yearlong moratorium.

Research will proceed in several countries but not in the United States, which is still weighing measures to ensure the virus is safely guarded.

The efforts halted in January 2012 after scientists at the University of Wisconsin and the Dutch Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, created strains of the virus that could, in theory, pass between humans.