World ‘must embrace new era of engagement’: Obama

US President Barack Obama Wednesday urged world leaders to move in a new direction saying they “must embrace a new era of engagement” in his first speech to the annual UN General Assembly.
“It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 more than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared,” the US leader said after receiving warm applause as he stepped up to the podium in the imposing United Nations building.
“The religious convictions we hold in our hearts can forge new bonds among people or they can tear us apart,” Obama said.
“We don’t have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work we must do together. I have carried this message and it is what I will speak about today.
“Because the time has come for the world to move in a new direction. We must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect and our work must begin now.”
Barack Obama warned the UN summit that North Korea and Iran threatened to take the world down a “dangerous slope” with their nuclear programmes.
The United States does not view continued Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as legitimate, President Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly Wednesday.
“We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements (in the West Bank),” he said in a maiden speech to the 192-member body.
G20 must set rules to strengthen regulation of all financial centers, Obama added.
Earlier, UNB/AP said: Seizing a chance to challenge the world, President Barack Obama says the global community is failing its people and fixing that is not “solely America’s endeavor.”
“Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone,” Obama said in a passage of the speech he was delivering Wednesday to the United Nations General Assembly.
The White House released excerpts in advance that carried a remarkably blunt tone.
It comes in Obama’s first speech to this world body, a forum like none other for a leader hoping to wash away any lasting images of U.S. unilateralism under George W. Bush. In essence, Obama’s message is that he expects plenty in return for reaching out.
“We have sought in word and deed a new era of engagement with the world,” Obama said, echoing the cooperative theme he promised as a candidate and has since used as a pillar of his foreign policy. “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility.”
He said if the world is honest with itself, it has fallen woefully short.
“Extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world,” Obama said. “Protracted conflicts that grind on and on. Genocide and mass atrocities. More and more nations with nuclear weapons. Melting ice caps and ravaged populations. Persistent poverty and pandemic disease.”
The president added, “I say this not to sow fear, but to state a fact: the magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our action.” Obama’s speech is the centerpiece of a day in which he was also holding pivotal meetings with the new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Immersed in a packed agenda here, Obama foreshadowed his message to world leaders in a speech Tuesday to the Clinton Global Initiative. He spoke of nations interconnected by problems, whether a flu strain or an economic collapse or a drug trade that crosses borders.
“Just as no nation can wall itself off from the world, no one nation – no matter how large, no matter how powerful – can meet these challenges alone,” Obama said.

Courtesy of AFP, United Nations