The largest-ever United Nations conference, a summit billed as a historic opportunity to build a greener future, appears to be going up in smoke. U.S. President Barack Obama likely won't be there, and the leaders of Britain and Germany have bowed out. The entire European Parliament delegation has canceled. And with fewer than six weeks to go until the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, negotiations to produce a final statement have stalled amid squabbling. Logistical snags, too, threaten to derail the event.

Voices of the next generation will have the chance to participate in an exclusive global conversation with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon via a Google+ Hangout from the United Nations headquarters...Youths from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States will be able to ask questions on issues that matter to them.

On Monday 2 April 2012, the UN will implement Resolution 65/39 which places 'happiness' officially on the global agenda....This is a major triumph for Bhutan's soft power. Forty years ago, the King of this nation established Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to Gross National Product (GNP)

Ambassador Herbie Hancock believes what the world needs is a little jazz diplomacy. "This is really about the international diplomatic aspect of jazz and how it has throughout a major part of its history been a major force in bringing people of various countries and cultures together."

I am writing today from the world city of London.

In his book, The Al Jazeera Effect, Philip Seib states that “Al Jazeera is a paradigm of new media’s influence,” similar to the way CNN had been the first to influence foreign policy throughout the world. Al Jazeera, Seib writes, goes further by using new media as a tool that ranges from democratization to terrorism, in addition to creating ‘virtual states’.

The world's nations achieved a U.N. goal of cutting in half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water five years ahead of the 2015 target...The water target was one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty that government leaders, nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have been working to achieve, with varying success.