Notice: You have been identified as a bot, so no internal UID will be assigned to you. If you are a real person messing with your useragent, you should change it back to something normal.
A decision by the United Nations' cultural organization to admit Palestine as a member state set off a confrontation between the U.S. and the U.N., threatening to strip Washington of influence in several key international agencies while cutting off a major source of contributions to the world body.
The Obama administration said it would end funding for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization hours after the group Monday voted 107 to 14 to accept the Palestinian Authority as a full member. The UNESCO action triggered U.S. laws from the early 1990s that bar Washington from giving money to any U.N. body that grants state status to the Palestinian territories.
U.S. officials said they would block a planned payment of $60 million to the group next month, and warned that they could be forced to halt payments for other U.N. groups as well if they accede to Palestinian requests for full membership.
The cutoff deprives UNESCO of 22% of its funding, and could force the agency, which focuses on literacy, human rights and the preservation of historic sites worldwide, to soon begin laying off employees, diplomats said.