US: Fifty-nine former American diplomats have urged the US Senate to reject President George Bush's nominee, John Bolton, as ambassador to the UN.
"He is the wrong man for this position . . . We urge you to reject that nomination," they said in a letter to Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Republican-dominated committee will begin hearings on Mr Bolton's nomination on April 7th.
The letter is signed by diplomats appointed by both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Arthur Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and James Leonard, deputy ambassador to the UN in the Ford and Carter administrations.
The former diplomats said Mr Bolton was unacceptable because of his "insistence that the UN is valuable only when it directly serves the United States". They also charged that he had made unsubstantiated claims that Cuba and Syria were working on biological weapons.