Albright Hosts Power Dinner

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hosted women leaders from every continent but Antarctica at a reception and dinner Friday to cap the first week of the U.N. General Assembly session.

Albright told her guests about “the progress, her experience, of women in foreign policy,” and noted that there were now two women on the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, said a State Department official who asked he not be named.

The foreign ministers from Bulgaria, Colombia, Finland, Liechtenstein, Sierra Leone, Slovakia and Sweden joined Albright for dinner. U.N. representatives invited to the reception beforehand hailed from Australia, the Dominican Republic, Guinea, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kyrgestan, Liechtenstein, Trinidad and Tobago and Turkmenistan.

Macedonia and Uganda’s U.S. ambassadors were invited, as were U.N. executives such as the head of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy and Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who recently took over as head of the U.N. human rights agency.

Dinner consisted of acorn squash soup, rolled loin of lamb with pistachio and cumin, seven-grain medley of rice and baby vegetables. Pineapple carpaccio and green-apple sorbet finished the meal.