Friday, April 27, 2012

FREE-MONEY: - UN launches interest-free loan scheme to expand CDM carbon trading mechanism

UNFCCC-logos11
CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ON CARBONPOSITIVE.NET


The UNFCCC has launched a pioneering interest-free loan scheme to support Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in some of the world's least developed countries.


Under the new scheme, launched at the African Carbon Forum last week in Ethiopia, underdeveloped countries and those with fewer than 10 projects registered under the CDM will be eligible for interest-free loans supported by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Risoe Centre, and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS).
Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC executive secretary, said that the loans would help expand the carbon trading mechanism, adding that the new financing would be offered at an opportune time given that from next year the EU is expected to limit the number of CERs it buys from industrial gas projects in China.
"The CDM Loan Scheme is a chance to improve the access to and spread of the CDM, particularly in Africa," Figueres said at the African Carbon Forum, last week.
The loans will support the design, validation and registration of projects under the UN-approved CDM carbon offset scheme. After the project is validated and registered as a CDM project, it can then generate certified emission reduction credits that can be traded in carbon markets.
To access loans, projects will have to meet a number of criteria, including a high probability of registration and a reasonable expectation of generating at least 7,500 certified emission reduction (CER) credits per year for projects in least developed countries (LDCs) and 15,000 CERs per year for projects in non-LDCs.
Applications are now being accepted for the first round of reviews, which will end in June.
The UN's CDM allows countries to meet their emissions reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol via third party investment in independently approved emissions reduction projects with the return of carbon credits for sale on the carbon market. Over 4,000 projects in around 70 countries are approved under the scheme, which aims to funnel green investment into developing economies.

UN Plan For Running The World: Global Carbon Taxes, Global Safety Nets And A One World Green Economy

CLICK HERE TO VIEW FULL STORY ON WWW.RIGHTSIDENEWS.COM

Did you know that the UN has a plan for running the world and it is right out in the open?  It is called "sustainable development", but it is far more comprehensive than it sounds.  The truth is that the UN plan for running the world would dramatically alter nearly all forms of human activity.  A 204 page report on "sustainable development" entitled "Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy, A United Nations System-Wide Perspective" has been published in advance of the upcoming Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro.

Detentions display UN's impotence in Ethiopia








ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Ethiopia's government has held one United Nations employee in jail without charges for well over a year, while another is facing prosecution under a notorious anti-terrorism law.

By William Davison, Correspondent / April 25, 2012

Ethiopia's government, a favored and oft-praised Western partner, has held one United Nationsemployee in jail without charges for well over a year, while another is facing prosecution under a notorious anti-terrorism law...

Saturday, April 21, 2012

UNDP Ethics Scandal: Elia Armstrong hired at UN-DESA without a competitive process at a D1 post


UN-DESA calls it a "temporary job"the one awarded to Elia Yi Armstrong, the current Ethics Director of UNDP. No selection was necessary, and sources at UN-DESA say that the process was already pre-arranged since last September 2011.

Elia Yi Armstrong, who came to UNDP from UN-DESA, held her old job at DESA a P5 post for almost 3 years. She was supposed to return to her post as P5, as per UN rules. But being a Korean (South) and an accomplished pianist (her BA is in Piano Pedagogy/Music) she deserves a D1, barely 4 years into her P5 (including the years at UNDP as Ethics Director).



Friday, April 20, 2012

UN Floats Tax Hikes For Industrialized Countries


CLICK HERE FOR FOXNEWS STORY 

EXCLUSIVE: Development conference to make expensive changes in the way the world does nearly everything

What UNDP and British Government/DFiD doesn't want you to know about DR Congo and past expenditures of UNDP in that country's elections

La gouvernance

L’objectif principal des interventions du PNUD dans le domaine de la gouvernance est la mise en place à terme d’un système de gouvernance stable et légitime favorisant le développement humain durable.

En tenant compte des Objectifs du Millénaire pour le Développement (OMD) et des défis prioritaires déterminés par le Document Stratégique de Réduction de la Pauvreté (DSRP), le programme « gouvernance » vise à assister le gouvernement dans l’atteinte des objectifs globaux de développement suivants :

A. Améliorer les performances de l’administration et les institutions publiques
B. Améliorer l’accessibilité et la qualité des services publics
C. Assurer la transparence et la reddition des comptes dans la gestion de la chose publique
D. Renforcer la participation citoyenne

Pour la période 2006-2007, les interventions du PNUD/Kinshasa s’articuleront autour de quatre axes stratégiques appelés aussi sous-programmes. Chaque sous-programme est développé dans le but de contribuer principalement à un des quatre objectifs globaux de développement défini plus haut.

Liste des projets par ligne de service

Appui au Renforcement des Capacités Institutionnelles des Partis Politiques
  • Appui au Renforcement des Capacités Institutionnelles des Partis Politiques en RDCEtat : en cours
    Le projet cherche à contribuer à jeter des bases favorables à l’émergence d?un système politique représentatif, où les partis politiques remplissent leurs fonctions démocratiques en constituant des relais par lesquels les intérêts de la population s’exprimeraient dans la sphère publique.
    Lieu:Ensemble du territoire national
    Période:Mai 2006 - Juillet 2008
    Chargé de Programme:clara.alemann@undp.org
    Budget Total:600.000 USD
    Sources de financement :PNUD, UNDEF
    PublicationFiche du projet

Projet d’Appui au Cycle Electoral en RDC (PACE)
  • Projet d’Appui au Cycle Electoral en RDCEtat : en cours
    Suite à l’assistance électorale fournie à travers le projet PNUD/APEC entre 2005 et 2006 dans le cadre de la mission intégrée des Nations Unies, le présent projet représente la nouvelle étape de l’intervention du PNUD en matière d’assistance électorale, essentiellement consacrée au renforcement des capacités de la CENI.
    Lieu:Ensemble du territoire national
    Période:10/2007 au 12/2011
    Chargé de Programme:Aissata Dei aissata.de@undp.org
    Budget Total:296 988 683 USD
    Sources de financement :
    PublicationFiche du projet














At UNDP - the humanitarians make more money than Wall Street Traders or Investment Bankers (great world we live in)

Helen Clark
UNDP Administrator

$450,730
(it includes base salary, post adjustment, + perks)

Rebeca Grynspan
UNDP Deputy Administrator

$393,210
(it includes base salary, post adjustment, + perks)

2017: Papandreu the whore of Greece asking support for his candidacy as Secretary-General at UN

The man who destroyed Greece, and who's family is directly responsible for all the pain and suffering the Greek people are now enduring, the head of Socialist International and head of Greek Socialists PASOC - wants to be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As happens all the time, failed politicians are always parked at the U.N. Now confidential sources inside the International Socialists say that Papandreu is rallying support and is already looking pas-Ban Ki-moon at 2017.

The United Nations have already been a total failure under the South Korean regime of Ban Ki-moon, imagine now Papandreu at the helm of the U.N.. Same sources say that a very powerful non-for-profit Institute close to Democratic Party in US is behind the scenes orchestrating the support.

Will see what will happen !

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

FoxNews: UN computer shipment to North Korean regime violates US manufacturer’s ban

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ON FOXNEWS

By

A United Nations agency that quietly shipped computers and computer servers to North Korea several months ago apparently was violating restrictions on the equipment’s use imposed by Hewlett-Packard, the U.S.-based maker of the computers and computer servers, which bars any HP equipment from being sent to the communist dictatorship as part of its supplier agreements.

Those agreements oblige distributors to comply with U.S. export laws, which also forbid electronics exports to North Korea, in support of UN sanctions that were levied in the wake of the regime’s illegal explosion of nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.

“HP is thoroughly investigating the matter,” a corporate spokesperson told Fox News in a statement Monday. “Compliance with U.S. and international trade laws is a high priority for HP. HP investigates any credible breaches of contractual obligations by our partners and resellers.”

The company’s export ban applies to suppliers regardless of where they are located and whether they are international organizations.

In addition, two former members of a UN-appointed panel of experts monitoring the North Korean restrictions have told Fox News that they found the technology transfer by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization “horrible” and “egregious” in the words of one -- “somewhat incompetent and possibly shady,” in the words of the other, in light of the sanctions the UN and its members are supposed to be enforcing.

News of the under-the-radar computer shipment -- and now, the revelation that it was delivered in violation of the manufacturer’s rules -- comes on the crest of heightened tensions between the UN Security Council and the nuclear-ambitious, rogue North Korean regime.

Hours before HP delivered its statement to Fox News, the Security Council had “strongly condemned” the government of newly installed leader Kim Jong Un for its latest provocation, a failed ballistic missile launch that North Korea said was intended to put a satellite in orbit.

The rest of the world viewed the launch as a test of the nation’s ability to deliver nuclear warheads, and a “severe violation” of the previous UN sanctions that ordered the regime to cease and desist its nuclear military ambitions. Even North Korean supporters China and Pakistan joined in the condemnation.

The Security Council -- currently headed by U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice – is to announce additional sanctions covering new “entities and items” within the next two weeks.

The latest UN-North Korea standoff underlines the strange nature of the earlier computer shipment to Pyongyang carried out at the behest of WIPO.

Fox News brought the cash-for-computers incident to light after WIPO’s director general, Francis Gurry, held a closed-door meeting with concerned diplomats, including a U.S. representative, in Geneva on March 29.

Click here for for the original report.

The diplomats, in turn, learned of the shipment after WIPO’s staff council voiced concerns about it.

The cash-for-computers deal was orchestrated in a way that made its discovery difficult. Procurement and payment for the WIPO goods was arranged between WIPO’s Geneva headquarters and a shipper in China, facilitated by UN offices in Beijing. The deal apparently bypassed UN offices in North Korea.

Those offices operate under a special oversight regime established after a major scandal in 2008 over financial and technology transfers in North Korea, to ensure that money and goods do not end up in the regime’s nuclear programs.

Click here for original report.

WIPO’s payment of $52,638 to a Chinese supplier and installer for the computer shipment, however, did not go through. It was blocked at the beginning of March by Bank of America, the host bank for UN accounts in China, on grounds that the money transfer for goods shipped to North Korea was a possible violation of U.S. Treasury rules.

The computer equipment itemized in WIPO’s work plans for the installation was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard.

In a legal memorandum delivered to the diplomats in Geneva, WIPO said the shipment was nothing more than “part of WIPO’s technical assistance program” with North Korea, which is completely above board and consisted of “general computer technology” that “does not violate any UN Security Council sanctions.”

The memo acknowledged that payment for the shipment had been stopped due to U.S. laws “enacted in part to implement” the binding UN sanctions.
But it also declared that WIPO, “as an international organization, is not bound by the U.S. national law in this matter” and was still looking for ways to pay for the shipment.

The agency has since said it found a way to pay for the goods through other channels that did not involve U.S. banks.

The WIPO legal memo made no mention of contact with or notification of UN sanctions committees that monitor the restrictions on North Korea before the shipment was delivered.

The most recent Security Council resolution, passed in June 2009, specifically calls on “all States, relevant United Nations bodies and other interested parties, to cooperate fully” with the sanctions committee and its panel of experts, “in particular by supplying any information at their disposal on the implementation of the measures imposed by resolution 1718 (2006) [the previous sanctions measure] and this resolution.”

According to George Lopez, a professor of political science at Notre Dame University, who served on the North Korea sanctions panel of experts from November 2010 to July 2011, WIPO’s lack of communication with the sanctions committee is a puzzle.

"Were I still on the panel of experts,” he said, “I am sure some of us would insist that the UN secretariat issue a memo to all agencies reminding them that no movement of goods or individual experts into a sanctions state should occur without some exchange of ideas and views with the panel and/or the UN sanctions committee for that case.”

Lopez also pointed out that the UN sanctions against North Korea prohibit the shipment of “luxury goods” to the regime and even if they did not qualify in any other way, the computers sent to Pyongyang fit that description.

“The Japanese have actually arrested and indicted people who have illegally exported computers to the DPRK in at least two instances,” he said, citing reports of a shipment to a North Korean computer center believed to be a focal point for hacking attacks on South Korea.

According to Victor Comras, member of a UN panel of experts from 2009 to 2010, “something is not kosher when a UN agency takes advantage of being immune to knowingly violate U.S. laws.”

“They are walking through the cracks and loopholes of the sanctions regulations,” he told said. “There should be some recognition that international organizations themselves are obliged to follow the rules.”

“It clearly has hurt the credibility of the U.N. and its sanctions. To what end?”

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter@GeorgeRussell

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

PJMEDIA-Rosett Report: Guess Who’s Buying Flowers for Pyongyang (With Photos)




CLICK HERE FOR CLAUDIA ROSETT STORY ON PJMEDIA.COM

At the best of times, North Korea’s regime ranks among the most vile on the planet, and this past week has not been the best of times. The totalitarian Kim dynasty carries on, and on, from grandfather to father to son — a brutal regime sustained by proliferation, extortion, and counterfeiting rackets abroad, and grotesque repression at home. This is the regime that targeted an estimated one million or more North Koreans for death by famine in the 1990s, and continues to eradicate dissent by means of such atrocities as incarcerating hundreds of thousands of people in Stalinist prison camps, as described in the recently updated report on “The Hidden Gulag.”

With the late Kim Jong Il now exalted as “general secretary for eternity,” his son, new ruler Kim Jong Un, has just reaffirmed the regime’s “military first” policy, and celebrated the advent of the 100th birthday of Kim Junior’s dead totalitarian grandfather, Kim Il Sung, by conducting a ballistic missile test — which North Korea’s propaganda organs dutifully translated for us as being an attempted satellite launch. There are signs that another North Korean nuclear test may be right around the bend, and this one may be uranium-based, which would be potentially more helpful to North Korea’s business pals in Iran than North Korea’s previous plutonium-based tests, in 2006 and 2009. North Korea’s regime collaborates with Syria and Iran on weapons development. And for its record of kidnapping alone — many of its victims never returned or even fully accounted for — North Korea deserves to be put back on the U.S. government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Yet, even beyond Tehran and Damascus, Pyongyang’s regime has its fans, and receives its share of tribute, including floral wreaths and letters, which the state’s Korean Central News Agency loves to report. For instance, KCNA tells us this week that the communist parties of Peru and Norway sent delegates, bearing gifts, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Kim Il Sung (what the gifts are, KCNA does not explain).

Curious to see who else was sending tribute to the Kim dynasty during this fraught week, I was scrolling through the KCNA site, and lo! What to my wondering eyes should appear but a KCNA report that on Friday — the same day as the missile test (which United Nations sanctions forbid) — “The dear respected Kim Jong Un received congratulatory letters from the offices of the World Food Programme and the United Nations Development Programme.”

Congratulatory letters? For what?

KCNA does not elaborate. To be fair, we can reasonably assume that the World Food Program and UNDP were not congratulating Kim on the missile launch (which was in any event not a successful launch, though such are the hazards of missile tests). And, of course, this is a report from KCNA, a state propaganda organ, prone to such paroxysms as its description Friday of Kim Jong Un as “a great statesman of literary and military accomplishments, who is possessed of outstanding wisdom, distinguished leadership ability, matchless pluck and noble revolutionary comradeship.” It would be unwise to trust entirely to KCNA’s reports.

Except I can find no account of either the World Food Program or the UNDP hustling to deny any such congratulatory letters. If they would like to do so, I would cheerfully write that up. In the meantime, here they are, both these august UN agencies, described by KCNA as orbiting the firmament of Kim Jong Un, the man of matchless pluck and noble revolutionary comradeship. Were they perhaps congratulating him on pioneering a third generation of totalitarian dynastic rule in North Korea? Or applauding the accomplishments of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, in founding this family enterprise?

It gets worse. Scrolling further down the KCNA roster of Friday’s doings in North Korea, there’s a more detailed account of UNDP “staff members” laying “a floral basket before the equestrian statues of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il.” Apparently, after the UNDP staffers laid the floral basket before the statues of the two dead totalitarians, they “paid tribute,” according to KCNA.

Tribute? What does that mean? Did they bow? Toss coins? Drop off a few dual-use items, of the kind the UNDP got caught in 2007 importing into North Korea? Both these UN outfits have a troubling record in North Korea. The UNDP pandered so shamelessly to Kim Jong Il — dispensing cash, buying him dual-use equipment, and storing counterfeit U.S. $100 banknotes in its office safe — that in 2007 it was forced by the revelations of the Cash-for-Kim scandalto close its Pyongyang office for a while. And according to a report this past December by George Russell of Fox News, the World Food Program “may be helping the Kim regime stay afloat” — allowing the North Korean regime to insert itself as overpaid middleman in the supply chain of relief cargoes, with numerous “lapses” and “anomalies” turning up once the aid arrives in North Korea.

Whatever the World Food Program and the UNDP just wrote, or did, to congratulate Kim Jong Un, or pay tribute to his monstrous ancestors, one might have hoped the UN officials running these organization would have more sense. No doubt while operating in North Korea the UN comes under constant pressure from the regime to bow down, pay tribute, and thank the Kim dynasty for the privilege of sending other people’s money and goods its way. But surely we should also expect from the UN at least some slight grip on a basic moral compass.

For that matter, both the World Food Program and the UNDP are entrusted with taxpayer dollars meant to provide resources for helping hungry and impoverished North Koreans — not to be spent buying flowers and writing letters to glorify mass-murdering tyrants. Would the UN condone sending flowers to honor the memory of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao?

And if the KCNA reports were dead wrong, if the World Food Program sent no such letter, if the UNDP did not purchase flowers and pay tribute to Kim Il Sung, it should not require the questions of a reporter to persuade them to issue a public denial of these KCNA stories. They should be calling press conferences at their headquarters, in Rome and New York, to explain they would never engage in such acts. Swathed as they are in diplomatic immunity, they might even try calling a press conference to this effect in Pyongyang — provided they’re not too busy penning love notes and buying bouquets for this third generation military-first regime still starving its people while readying its next nuclear test.