UN Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie is in Pakistan. And good for her. This calamity really needs to stay in the headlines.
While the embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have been the leading climate-related news the past couple weeks, of more importance to the international negotiations were two meetings at opposite ends of the globe.
The UN is slated to review progress on the MDGs "and other international development goals" during this month's high-level meeting in New York. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hopes the meeting "will not only result in a renewal of existing commitments but also can decisively galvanize coordinated action among all stakeholders and elicit the funding needed to ensure the achievement of the Goals by 2015." The issue of inefficient, inadequate funding capacity is a particularly crucial one.
MUNDRI, Sudan—Earlier this week, I flew to Mundri, in the fertile green state of Western Equatoria, to attend the United Nations Mission in Sudan’s unveiling of its first “county referendum base.” Per the request of the National Congress Party and the south’s ruling SPLM, the U.N. is upping its support and assistance to the referendum process. Part of this bigger effort is establishing a presence in each of the south’s 79 counties, a step that clearly shows the U.N.
Jordan used to be one of the freest countries in the Middle East. That’s changing fast. The government is pushing to expand control over the internet, and it has begun arresting people or making defamatory remarks about the king. It looks like the government of Jordan is expanding its efforts at control in several ways. Tighter censorship over what goes into the country, more monitoring of what is posted online, and prosecuting individual cases for their activities on the internet.
Ever since the United States submitted its first Universal Periodic Review report to the UN Human Rights Council a meme has been percolating, mostly on the right, that the Obama administration is trying to use the UN to undermine Arizona's controversial law that allows it to detain suspected illegal immigrants. We can thank Arizona governor Jan Brewer for this--she sent an angry letter to Secretary Clinton,
Over at Wired, Spencer Ackerman points to a WSJ report that the Pentagon is contemplating a five year, $1.4 billion military aid package to Yemen. That would be on top of a $155 million military aid package Yemen received earlier in the year, which, according to Ackerman includes such goodies as: Innovation is the word of the year in international relief and development. Here are four recent innovations we've seen in disaster response--and their potential downsides. 1. Plumpy’nut The big news out the UN today is that top UN Human rights official Navi Pillay announced she will delay the release of a controversial report about Rwanda's actions in the Congo (then Zaire) from 1993 to 2003. The so-called Mapping Report is an attempt to document alleged atrocities that occurred during the DRC's long civil war, of which DRC's neighbors played a lead role.