Greetings from the Global Policy Forum!

This has been a busy week at GPF - especially for Executive Director, Jim Paul, who had a particularly interesting and full schedule.

Jim went down to Washington DC to speak on Tuesday at a Forum sponsored by the Alliance for United Nations Sustainable Development Programs, in cooperation with The Center for the Global South, American University and the Heinrich Bí¶ll Foundation. Following keynote speaker, UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette, Jim spoke in a plenary titled "Making the System Work More Coherently: Examining the Relationship Among UN Agencies and Between the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions".

Jim warned that closer ties between the UN and the Bank and the Fund may not be a good thing. He argued that critical distance is important for the UN. Better coordination, he said, too often means domination by the increasingly-discredited Bretton Woods neoliberal agenda. Other speakers on this panel were Alfredo Sfeir-Younis, World Bank Representative to the UN; John Langmore, Director of the Division for Social Policy Development at the UN; and Paolo Oberti UNDP Resident Representative for the Dominican Republic.

This past weekend, Jim was a keynote speaker at Smith College's 5th Annual International Student Conference. The theme -- "Towards a Newer World Order - Changes in Politics and the Politics of Change". Joining Jim on the keynote panel was Saul Mendlovitz of Columbia University Law School, Co-Director of the World Order Models Project and a GPF board member.

During the week, GPF organized a meeting of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council with Peter van Walsum, Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the UN, we attended an open meeting of the Security Council where there was a debate on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. We also had consultations during the week with NGO partners on the UN's Financing for Development initiative.

On the web site this week we have posted 23 new items. Highlights include: "Two Takes on the State of the World Economy in February 1999", two articles which offer a juxtaposition of views on the global economic crisis. Further insight into the affects of the global economy are provided by the articles "Markets are Freer than Politicians" and "What's Wrong With This Picture of Nationalism".

We have two UN press releases on the Open Security Council meeting GPF attended last week. A third UN Press Release is on the UN Social Development Commission which has been meeting here in New York City.

Seven of the additions to the web site this week are on the Iraq situation, including a piece from 1998 on how the UN 'Inspects' an Iraq site.

We are also following UN and Security Council issues with articles on East Timor, the Central African Republic, Angola, Korea, and Israel. China's use of its veto power against extension of UN peacekeeping force in Macedonia - only the 6th time China has exercised this power.

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