In United States one in six people live in poverty but this doesn't stop Obama Administration to give $25 Millions to assist low-lying nations to adapt to rising ocean water levels

click here to read this on The Times of India

Hillary Clinton hopes US to do more on climate

AVARUA, Cook Islands: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced hope Friday the United States would act beyond its pledges on curbing emissions as she visited Pacific islands threatened by climate change.


Clinton, the first US secretary of state to take part in the annual Pacific Islands Forum, pledged $25 million in new assistance to help the low-lying nations of the region plan and adapt to expected rising water levels.

She said that the United States stood behind US President Barack Obama's promise in 2009 ahead of a UN conference in Copenhagen to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

SCANDAL: UNDP management played a key role in securing Iran and North Korea's votes for Francis Gurry of WIPO (it allowed internal cover up of shipments thru its China Office)

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE ON REUTERS

By Emma Farge

GENEVA | Thu Aug 30, 2012 11:06am EDT
 

(Reuters) - Four months after a U.N. agency's decision to send computer equipment to Iran and North Korea first stirred controversy, a feud has erupted between the body's director general and a suspended senior manager over misconduct allegations.

In a suit filed with a U.N. tribunal, the manager accuses Francis Gurry, the Australian head of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization, of pledging the equipment to the two sanctioned countries in exchange for their votes.

The suit also alleges Gurry earmarked posts for member states who backed him in his 2008 election and those whose votes he is trying to secure as part of his 2014 re-election bid.

WIPO is the U.N.'s richest body and is almost entirely self funded with annual revenues of over $300 million, mostly earned from patent application fees. It was created in the 1970s to promote intellectual property rights, particularly in the developing world, to further economic progress.

"The evidence suggests that the Director General has a track record of manipulating appointments to WIPO professional posts in exchange for votes," said the complainant's brief to the International Labour Organization's Administrative Tribunal (ILOAT) filed on August 20.

The lawsuit was filed by Swiss-based lawyer Matthew Parish, partner at Holman Fenwick Willan, on behalf of a senior WIPO employee, Christopher Mason. Mason contends he was unjustly suspended for corruption in May 2011, wrongly accused of an improper relationship with a contractor at a firm bidding for a WIPO contract.

Gurry denied the allegations, saying he made no deals with any country in exchange for its support. He said a document cited by the claimant, which appears to list political appointments, was fabricated.

"No job pledges were made in exchange for political support, and no such document was ever created or approved by me. I believe that any document purporting to list pledges must be a work of fabrication," he said in an emailed statement last week.

Mason's lawyer Parish said: "The commitments document has been widely circulated throughout the diplomatic community for many months and is an open secret in WIPO."

An International Labour Organization official declined to comment on the proceedings which she said were confidential.

SEEKING REVENGE OR JUSTICE?

Some diplomatic sources in New York, where the United Nations has its headquarters, dismissed Mason's suit as a publicity ploy by an employee intent on embarrassing his former boss. They said they considered it unlikely the equipment in question would breach U.N. sanctions, which are less stringent than those imposed by the United States and European Union.

U.N. sanctions primarily target Iran and North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. They also include a ban on arms exports and, in the case of North Korea, a ban on exports of luxury goods.
One diplomatic source familiar with the case said Mason may be motivated by a desire for revenge after his suspension.

Mason asked the WIPO Appeal Board to review his suspension in August 2011. The board found that the decision to suspend Mason from duty was "flawed" and recommended re-instatement and a moral injuries payment, a document of their conclusions dated March 2012 showed. Mason remains suspended, however.

Although the suit alleges that the transfers to Iran and North Korea were promised in return for their votes in Gurry's 2008 election, it contained no proof to support this claim.

The allegations of vote buying could not be independently verified by Reuters. WIPO records show that Iran and North Korea were among 83 countries on the WIPO committee that selected the director general in 2008 in a secret ballot. The Iranian and North Korean diplomatic missions in Geneva did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Nevertheless, Mr. Mason's supporters maintain that the suit's claims are credible. These supporters include some inside the organization who declined to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the press and said they feared management retribution.

Mason's sympathizers say further that the case offers a rare glimpse into what critics say is a widespread system of political patronage within the United Nations and raises broader questions about accountability at the world body.

For instance, the head of WIPO's staff council Moncef Kateb has complained of political appointments "that contravene the most basic principles of international public service, particularly that of its independence", according to a statement in 2010 before WIPO's Coordination Committee, a body that advises the director general.

Kateb declined to comment for this story because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
"It's totally unacceptable to have this type of deals and it corrupts the system," said Hillel Neuer of U.N. Watch, a non-governmental group that monitors the United Nations. "Regrettably, it is common. Governments jostle for their own interests and a lot of unsavory dealings occur."

Officials at the U.N. press office in New York did not respond to repeated email requests for comment.

The equipment in question, including servers, firewalls and computers worth roughly $200,000, was sent to Iran and North Korea, without the knowledge of other member states, according to a statement by Esther Brimmer, U.S. assistant secretary of state, earlier this month.

The 185-member agency says the transfers were legal and form part of a technical assistance program involving more than 80 countries to help them develop their patent offices.

U.S. SCRUTINY

The transfers of equipment by WIPO to Iran and North Korea are the subject of two U.S. government probes to establish whether they represented a breach of U.N. and U.S. sanctions aimed at curbing the development of nuclear technology.

The U.S. State Department said in July it was reviewing WIPO's dealings with countries that are under sanctions after media released documents showing WIPO had been involved in shipments to Iran and North Korea. The Department's initial conclusion is that there was no breach of U.N. sanctions because the items in question did not appear to be subject to a ban. The review is ongoing.
A U.N. Security Council diplomat said it was unlikely that its sanctions committees would take any action regarding the WIPO transfers of technology to Iran and North Korea for the same reason.
The U.N. panel of experts on North Korean sanctions said in its latest annual report that it was continuing to collect information on the WIPO case in relation to North Korea.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs is not yet convinced the transfers were legal, suspecting they may have involved banned items, a senior Congressional official involved in the investigation said. It is also reviewing a possible breach of the United States' own sanctions as some of the equipment may have been produced by U.S. computer maker Hewlett Packard Co, the official added.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Lawmakers on the bi-partisan House Committee raised concern about possible WIPO retaliation against whistleblowers in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on July 12 and in a letter to Francis Gurry on July 16, both seen by Reuters.

"I can't think of any action that has been taken against any whistleblower," Gurry told Reuters in July.
Email correspondence dated July 20 from Gurry to WIPO senior staff member James Pooley, seen by Reuters, indicated that the director general denied him permission to give evidence to the House Committee. Pooley declined to comment for this story because he is not authorized to speak to the press.

Members of the Committee said a second senior WIPO staff member was prevented from testifying at the committee hearing in a letter to Gurry dated August 1, forcing the cancellation of the session.
Asked in July about claims that witnesses were being blocked, Gurry said he would allow any "properly competent person" on the Iran and North Korea projects to testify.

Gurry said in a statement on the WIPO website on July 19 that supplies to sanctioned countries would in future need to be referred to legal counsel, which would consult the U.N. Sanctions Committee where necessary. WIPO has also commissioned an external enquiry to review the projects with Iran and North Korea, led by a Swedish police official and a U.S. attorney.

(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in New York; editing by Will Waterman and Janet McBride)

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Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves

Click here for the paper on Social Science Research Network

Rema Hanna

Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)

Esther Duflo

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD)

Michael Greenstone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); American Bar Foundation

April 16, 2012

MIT Department of Economics Working Paper No. 12-10

Abstract:     
It is conventional wisdom that it is possible to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in rural areas of developing countries through the adoption of improved cooking stoves. This is largely supported by observational field studies and engineering or laboratory experiments. However, we provide new evidence, from a randomized control trial conducted in rural Orissa, India (one of the poorest places in India) on the benefits of a commonly used improved stove that laboratory tests showed to reduce indoor air pollution and require less fuel. We track households for up to four years after they received the stove. While we find a meaningful reduction in smoke inhalation in the first year, there is no effect over longer time horizons. We find no evidence of improvements in lung functioning or health and there is no change in fuel consumption (and presumably greenhouse gas emissions). The difference between the laboratory and field findings appears to result from households’ revealed low valuation of the stoves. Households failed to use the stoves regularly or appropriately, did not make the necessary investments to maintain them properly, and usage rates ultimately declined further over time. More broadly, this study underscores the need to test environmental and health technologies in real-world settings where behavior may temper impacts, and to test them over a long enough horizon to understand how this behavioral effect evolves over time. 


Number of Pages in PDF File: 72

Keywords: indoor air pollution, human health, climate change, technology adoption
 
JEL Classification: O10, O13, O12, Q0, Q23, Q3, Q51, Q53, Q56, I15, I18
working papers series

Click here for the paper on Social Science Research Network

MIT study says: Hillary Clinton' stoves don't work !

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Smokeless Stoves, Girl-Friendly Schools, and the Bloc That Wasn’t

Academic economists usually air their new ideas first in working papers. Here, before the work gets dusty, a quick look at transition policy research in progress.

Smoking Break 
 
Looking for a cheap way to save millions of lives each year in rural parts of poor countries -- and prevent soil erosion and slow global warming at the same time? For some years now, development specialists have been touting the virtues of simple, cheap, high-efficiency cooking stoves that can reduce indoor air pollution from open fires -- one of the most prominent causes of respiratory illness and premature death in parts of Africa and Asia. What's more, along with protecting householders (especially children) from smoke inhalation, they cut back the use of brushwood that otherwise protects fragile soils from erosion and reduce total greenhouse gas emissions. (This is one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton, among others, has become a passionate advocate of  "clean cookstoves.").
But there's a catch: To get any benefit from these stoves, they have to be used. According to a scientifically controlled study by Rema Hanna (Harvard), Esther Duflo (MIT), and Michael Greenstone (MIT) that was conducted in a poor village in India, introduction of the stoves did reduce smoke inhalation in the first year. But in the three years following, the stoves ceased to make a noticeable difference. "Households failed to use the stoves regularly or appropriately," the economists report, and "did not make the necessary investments to maintain them properly." The sobering lesson, of course, is that engineering studies back home have limited predictive value on how technology will be used in real-world development settings. Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves. MIT Economics Department Working Paper. Download free here.

Forged in Adversity 
 
Non-specialists tend to assume that Eastern Bloc economies were one undifferentiated train wreck before the collapse of the Soviet empire. But in fact these newly freed economies had quite different characters in terms of social and human capital and traditions of entrepreneurship. And while none of them has had an easy time integrating with Europe, it shouldn't be surprising they've followed widely divergent paths in managing the transition. If you really want to understand what happened, you could spend a few months perusing the literature -- or you could cut a number of corners and read this splendid big-picture analysis of two decades of wrenching change written by Anders Aslund, who made his reputation predicting the economic implosion of the USSR long before it was fashionable.
Don't expect me to summarize the summary. But I can offer you a sneak preview: Those difficult decades left Eastern Europe in surprisingly good shape to recover from this last global recession. Indeed, Poland is now in a far better position to grow than the countries on the southern periphery of the Eurozone. Lessons from Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Peterson Institute Working Paper WP 12-7. Download free here.

Go Girl 
 
There's now a virtual consensus among development specialists that reducing gender inequality is critical to jumpstarting economic growth in the poorest countries -- and that the surest route to greater equality lies in education. But western educators learned decades ago that the culture of inequality deterring female empowerment is all too often reinforced in school. Among other problems, girls are inclined to defer to boys and therefore get less out of the classroom experience.
A group of researchers (Harounan Kazianga, Dan Levy, Leigh Linden, and Matt Sloan) working under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany have confirmed that what's true in Europe and America applies to ultra-poor Burkina Faso as well. They compared traditional primary schools with "girl-friendly" schools created under the BRIGHT program, which is funded by the U.S. government. (BRIGHT schools, by the way, are apparently co-ed, but go out of their way to make themselves attractive to girls by adding more and better trained female teachers, setting up separate bathrooms for girls, etc.) The results have been pretty spectacular, increasing girls' enrollment rates and raising test scores for both boys and girls. The Effects of "Girl-Friendly" Schools: Evidence from the BRIGHT School Construction Program in Burkina Faso. IZA Discussion Paper No. 6574. Download free here.
 
Islamic Derivatives
 
For all the bad rap following the collapse of the financial bubble in 2008, financial derivatives remain indispensable in managing risk in modern economies (your economist-narrator said defiantly). But sharia law bars financial speculation just as it bans interest. And more often than not, the creation of a derivative -- say, a bet on the price of gold in six months -- requires that one party to the transaction have speculation in mind. Is there any way to make derivatives acceptable in financial systems governed by Islamic law?

According to Andreas Jobst (Bermuda Monetary Authority) and Juan Solé (Bank for International Settlements), the answer is a definite maybe. By their reading of the literature, sharia does offer significant wiggle room, allowing derivatives in a variety of circumstances. What's important now, the authors argue, is to codify acceptable practices in the relevant countries so that parties that do derivative contracts don't bear the risk that their agreements will be declared invalid when there are efforts to enforce them. Operative Principles of Islamic Derivatives -- Towards a Coherent Theory. IMF Working Paper WP/12/63. Download here free.

Spillovers from Microfinance
 
The idea that the introduction of formal ways to borrow and save can make a big difference in the poorest of places is now widely accepted. Indeed, tiny loans from both non-profits and profit-seeking businesses seem to be the fashion these days, financing everything from cell phones to farm equipment.
What's less clear, though, is their impact on the welfare of people other than the immediate beneficiaries. Jeffry Flory, an economist at the University of Chicago, examined one particular aspect of the question: The degree to which access to formal savings and credit served as a safety net in times of crop failures and other disasters. In a study of isolated villages in central Malawi, he found that a one percentage point increase in households with formal savings increased the number of households receiving inter-household gifts/loans by about three percentage points, along with the expected improvements in health outcomes.

A serendipitous finding, you say? Yes, but there is one catch: The obligation to support extended families and friends in hard time is, in a sense, a tax, and thus may well reduce the incentives to save and invest in just the sort of places that most desperately need it to grow.  Micro-Savings and Informal Insurance in Villages: How Financial Deepening Affects Safety Nets of the Poor, A Natural Field Experiment. Milton Friedman Institute Working Paper 2011-008. Download free here.

Trade and the Arab Spring
 
It's one thing to engineer a political revolution, and quite another to build a successful economy from the wreckage of autocracy and exploitation. Can the Arab Spring countries (Egypt and Tunisia for now, but who knows later on) find the means to become prosperous? Most relevant here, can the West make a difference in their fate?

Economists Thorvaldur Gylfason, Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso, and Per Magnus Wijkman explore one element: The potential for gains from greater economic integration, both within North Africa and between North Africa and Mediterranean Europe. They conclude that trade represents enormous untapped potential within the Arab Spring countries -- not an intuitive result, by the way -- and that Europe has the opportunity to use preferential access to its markets as a carrot to make economic reform easier. Solid potential. How Free Trade Can Help Convert the "ArabSpring" into Permanent Peace and Democracy. CESifo Working Paper 3882. Download free here.

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Helen Clark: Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

CLICK HERE FOR SPEECH AT UNDP WEBSITE

I congratulate our Korean hosts and the OECD for organizing the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness here in Busan.

We are here representing governments, multilateral organisations, civil society, the private sector, parliaments, research institutions, and more. We are a very large and diverse group of development actors.

In that diversity lies opportunity. Experience shows that there are many paths to development, but we come together to signal our shared resolve, across the disciplines, perspectives, and countries we represent, to meet the Millennium Development Goals, thereby empowering people to build better lives and laying strong foundations for sustainable human development.

As we prepare for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro next year, and as the 2015 target date for achieving the MDGs looms, the task before us is urgent.

That is why Aid effectiveness matters

Evidence suggests that having principles and targets for effective development assistance is important and has worked. More aid is now untied, action is better co-ordinated, and evidence is increasingly being used to gauge success .

From trial and error as well as from concerted efforts such as the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action, we have learned what matters in aid effectiveness.

It matters that development actors work in partnerships which reduce fragmentation, and that aid is transparent, predicable, adequate, and based on mutual accountability.

It matters that developing countries drive their own development with priorities defined by the needs and aspirations of their citizens.

Capacity development support matters a lot too. National authorities managing development assistance need the systems, know-how, and tools to make the best possible use of aid for stimulating inclusive growth, meeting the needs of marginalised groups, advancing human rights and gender equality, and adapting to and mitigating climate change.

In conflict-affected countries, capacity building and development are particularly important. For security and enduring peace, countries need effective national justice and security systems, dispute resolution mechanisms, and the ability to meet the most urgent needs of their citizens.

Through its multi-stakeholder dialogue the UN’s Development Co-operation Forum is helping countries distil and apply best practices. In doing so it is helping to address the “unfinished business” of aid effectiveness, as well as to fulfill our collective commitment to achieve MDG 8 and establish global partnerships for development which address the challenges countries face in a rapidly changing world.

Meeting needs in a changing world

In that world the tremendous progress in many countries, from reducing poverty to improving school enrolment and child health, demonstrates that the MDGs are achievable. Two-thirds of developing countries are on target or close to being on target for all the MDGs.

Yet, the global challenges do make our task more difficult.

The lingering global economic crisis, financial instability, high food prices, climate change, and increasing numbers of natural disasters have left the world’s poor more vulnerable. Increasing inequalities, between and within countries, also create cycles of poverty, violence, and instability.

Aid is not a panacea for overcoming these challenges, but used in catalytic ways, it can help address them. Those ways can include helping to grow capacity to trade, attract investment, levy taxation, and access climate finance and to put those capacities at the service of sustainable human development.

Emerging economies are making ever more significant contributions to global development. Increasing numbers of citizens and civil society groups are making their voices heard, and contributing to the development of their communities.

These trends present us with new optimism, energy, and opportunity. Here in Busan, we need to agree to harness this energy and pursue the opportunities before us. I make three proposals:

1.The gap in the financing needed to meet the MDGs needs to be closed.

In these difficult times, there is more reason than ever to invest in inclusive growth and equitable approaches to development.

2.To maximize the impact of these investments, we need to agree on actions which will improve the quality and reach of development assistance.

From its work supporting development co-operation, the UN has seen how mutual accountability frameworks, with clear targets and regular reviews, can help. In Rwanda, for example, targets have been agreed to assess the government’s efforts to implement its national development strategy, and donors’ efforts to improve aid quality. The framework is embedded in Rwanda’s national aid policy, and is endorsed by all providers.

3.To keep pace with changes in development co-operation, we must shift from a focus on aid effectiveness to development effectiveness.

For development partners that will mean more coherence in their own policies, from trade to agriculture, migration, and development assistance.

For all of us, it means going beyond aid to maximize the use of all available resources of development finance. That also means working through partnerships which bring together diverse actors.

The UN Secretary General’s ‘Sustainable Energy for All’ initiative is a good example of bringing a wide range of stakeholders together with its alliance of traditional donors, multilateral organisations, emerging economies, the private sector, and grassroots organizations.

To keep pace with a changing world, we need to make forward looking and principled changes in the ways we work.

Through its convening power, the UN offers a platform for the wide range of development actors to learn continually from best practices, and improve on our collective efforts to achieve a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable future. A bold and practical agreement in Busan can bring us all a step closer to reaching the goals we share. Over the next three days, the United Nations development actors present look forward to working with you to take best practice in development co-operation forward.

It’s Clinton v. Ros-Lehtinen

Editorial of The New York Sun | October 16, 2011

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/its-clinton-v-ros-lehtinen/87525/

It looks like the efforts to reform U.S. funding of the United Nations are turning into a significant showdown between two of the most powerful women in Washington — President Obama's state secretary, Hillary Clinton, and the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. This came into focus during a hearing Thursday at which the Foreign Affairs Committee approved — by a wide margin and over Mrs. Clinton’s objections — a bill that would give America much more say over what, if any, United Nations programs it underwrites.

The bill, which is being pressed by Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen, has emerged as the most serious and radical reform effort directed at the U.N. since the institution was incorporated in the late 1940s. Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen began the hearings with an opening statement in which she spoke of the U.N.s bid, in the middle of a fiscal crisis in Washington, for a bigger budget. She quoted the Obama administration’s own envoy to the U.N. budget process as saying, that the budget presented by the U.N. “does not represent a break from ‘business as usual,’ but rather a continuation of it.”

“What are we paying for?” Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen demanded. Then she ticked off the scandals: “A UN Human Rights Council that includes such gross human rights violators as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and its vice-chair, Cuba. Two years after the Administration joined the Council, the Council still has undergone zero fundamental reforms, continues to pass resolution after resolution condemning Israel, and its permanent agenda item on Israel remains in place. We’re paying for the Durban process, which has been hijacked to spread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic venom.”

Continued she: “Then there’s the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, recently chaired by North Korea. So serial proliferator North Korea presided over the UN’s disarmament body, and Iran, a regime which stones women to death, is a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. We’re paying for a U.N. that just appointed as the head of its Kosovo mission an individual involved with the infamous Oil-for-Food scandal, and a U.N. that goes after whistleblowers while protecting the corrupt.”

Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen disclosed that Secretary of State Clinton sent a letter at the outset of the hearings Thursday coming out directly in opposition to the bill. “The Secretary claims, if we move to a system of voluntary funding, it will hurt our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, because other member states won’t do the ‘burden-sharing’ to pay for UN missions in those countries,” Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen said. “Does the Administration have such little faith in our allies and in our diplomacy — which they pride themselves on — to think that they would not share the burden of fighting Islamist extremists unless the UN forced them to? And given that the U.S. paid billions and billions of dollars to the UN last year, I think it’s clear who is actually carrying the burden without any say: the U.S. taxpayer.”

The ranking member on the Democratic side of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Howard Berman, offered a substitute bill designed to gut Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen’s reform. Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen argued that, among other flaws, Mr. Berman’s measure would mean “ no consequences if any UN body upgrades the Palestinian status.” In the event, the committee turned aside Mr. Berman’s substitute measure and Mrs. Clinton’s objections and passed the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act by a comfortable margin.

In the full House, the bill has something like 125 sponsors. They are, at least at the moment, all Republicans, according to a dispatch of CNS News. Even if the measure clears the House, it will still have a hard time in the Senate, which is controlled by the Democrats. Mrs. Clinton’s letter to the committee warned that if, by some miracle, the measure does pass, she’ll urge President Obama to veto it. This strikes us as an opportunity for the Republicans to bring the issue of the United Nations into the presidential campaign now under way and so that the American people can let the dictators, kleptocrats, and anti-Semites in the United Nations know where America stands.

How About Inviting North Korea’s Senior Envoy to Defect?

by Claudia Rosett @ PajamasMedia.Com

The U.S. administration has just invited a senior North Korean official, Kim Kye Gwan, to come to New York to talk about ending Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Or, as these things tend to play out in the meta-world of North Korean nuclear shakedowns, to talk about holding further talks to talk about ending North Korea’s nuclear program.

As it happens, we’ve been here before — with the same North Korean senior official, Kim Kye Gwan. In 2007, it was the Bush administration that invited Kim Kye-gwan to come talk nukes in New York. Kim spent a lively four hours dining and drinking at the Waldorf with the U.S. envoy of the hour, Chris Hill. That was followed by U.S. concessions and gifts to North Korea which included free food and fuel, arrangements to return to Kim Jong Il some $25 million in allegedly tainted North Korean funds frozen in Macau, and the removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring states. North Korea’s regime responded by stalling, stonewalling, cheating and ultimately walking away from the denuclearization deal; then conducted a second nuclear test in 2009 and in 2010 unveiled a uranium enrichment facility which it had previously denied.

The Obama administration, to its credit, has so far refrained from being suckered into another of these North Korean shakedown routines. But that could all be about to change, with Kim Kye Gwan preparing to enjoy another round of American hospitality in the Big Apple.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said, “We are open to talks with North Korea, but we do not intend to reward the North just for returning to the table.” Too late. For North Korea, a United Nations-sanctioned erstwhile pariah of the so-called international community, it is already a reward to have America dignify Vice Foreign Minister and former nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan by inviting him for an encore in New York. And with the State Department saying America is looking for signs that North Korea is serious about returning to the negotiating table, a negotiation of sorts has already begun — in which America is already at a disadvantage. North Korea’s negotiators are masters at taking whatever they can get, and then welshing on whatever they have promised.

But if the State Department is determined to entertain Kim yet again in New York, there might be a way to redeem the situation. Upon Kim Kye Gwan’s arrival, U.S. officials ought to offer him five little words, and nothing more. Quite simply: “Would you like to defect?” It’s unlikely Kim would say yes. But if he does, that would be a lovely diplomatic coup, and an excellent start to the next round of “talks” with North Korea. And if he doesn’t, it’s still the kind of message that might provoke some useful cogitation among his colleagues back in the gloomy confines of Pyongyang. Haggling with the North Korean regime is a routine that by now fits the definition of insanity. Inviting Pyongyang’s envoys to come to New York, as long as they then stay there for good, might sound crazy. But something in this routine needs to change. Why not give it a try?

Why was President Obama last to speak up on Libya?

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President Obama's full remarks on Libya

President Obama speaks from the White House on the civil unrest in Libya threatening the rule of longtime strongman, Moammar Gaddafi.

» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

ONCE AGAIN, an Arab dictator is employing criminal violence in a desperate effort to remain in power - and once again, the Obama administration has been slow to find its voice. This time, the tyrant is one of the Middle East's most evil men - Moammar Gaddafi, whose regime has staged spectacular terrorist attacks against Americans in addition to brutalizing its own people. Having apparently lost control of most of the country, Mr. Gaddafi has unleashed an orgy of bloodshed in the capital, Tripoli, using foreign mercenaries and aircraft to attack his own people. Like Saddam Hussein, he has retreated to a bunker, and he has vowed to fight to "the last drop of blood."

Governments around the world have been condemning this appalling stance and the terrible slaughter it has caused. The European Union has agreed in principle to impose sanctions, and the Arab League has said Libya will be excluded from its meetings. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi all condemned the regime's violence. Said French President Nicolas Sarkozy: "The continuing brutal and bloody crackdown against the Libyan civilian population is revolting. The international community cannot remain a spectator to these massive violations of human rights."

By late Wednesday only one major Western leader had failed to speak up on Libya: Barack Obama. Before then, the president's only comment during five days of mounting atrocities was a statement issued in his name by his press secretary late last Friday, which deplored violence that day in three countries: Yemen, Libya and Bahrain. For four subsequent days, the administration's response to the rapidly escalating bloodshed in Libya consisted of measured and relatively mild statements by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Administration officials explained this weak stance by saying they were worried about U.S. citizens, hundreds of whom were being extracted by ferryWednesday afternoon. There were fears that the desperate Mr. Gaddafi might attack the Americans or seek to take them hostage. But the presence of thousands of European citizens in Libya did not prevent their government's leaders from forcefully speaking out and agreeing on sanctions.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Obama finally appeared at a White House podium. He said "we strongly condemn the use of violence in Libya," but he did not mention Mr. Gaddafi or call for his removal. He said the administration was preparing a "full range of options" to respond but didn't say what those might be; he made no mention of the no-fly zone that Libya's delegation at the United Nations has called for. He stressed that the United States would work through international forums - and said Ms. Clinton would travel to Geneva for a meeting of the notoriously ineffectual U.N. Human Rights Council, which counts Libya as a member.

Mr. Obama appeared eager to make the point that the United States was not taking the lead in opposing Mr. Gaddafi's crimes. "It is imperative that the nations and the peoples of the world speak with one voice," he said. "That has been our focus." Shouldn't the president of the United States be first to oppose the depravities of a tyrant such as Mr. Gaddafi? Apparently this one doesn't think so.

U.S. Footing $100M Bill for U.N. Security Upgrade

click here for story on FOXNEWS

By George Russell

Published February 09, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Months after top New York City officials expressed intense behind-the-scenes frustration at the security vulnerabilities at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, the U.N. is now planning to spend $100 million -- donated by the U.S. -- on the upgrade.

That has created a new controversy: critics want to know why the U.S. is footing the entire bill, and why that money is not being credited against U.S. dues for the following year.

“If the U.S. overpays the U.N., those funds should be returned in full to the U.S. Treasury,” declared Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “To allow the U.N. to redirect those U.S. taxpayer dollars for unrelated projects is unjustifiable.” Moreover, she says, “by allowing the U.N. to reap the U.S. surplus as a slush fund for construction, the State Department wants to stick U.S. taxpayers with 100 percent of the cost, instead of the 22 percent that the U.S. would be responsible for under normal procedures.”

Ros-Lehtinen is leading a charge in the House of Representatives Wednesday, with a bill that demands the U.N. refund not only the $100 million but the entire $179 million overpayment collected from the U.S. for the United Nations Tax Equalization Fund (TEF), an obscure financial device used to reimburse U.S. citizens who work for the U.N. for U.S. income taxes they pay. (The U.S. is the only major country to levy income taxes on U.N. salaries.)

Ros-Lehtinen calls the refund demand “a small step toward restoring sanity to our U.N. policy and government spending.”

Few expected the bill, which required two-thirds approval, to pass — and it didn’t, failing 259-169. But it is an early salvo in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s online YouCut campaign to get public backing behind the Republican push to cut the mammoth U.S. deficit. Voters pushed the measure to the head of the queue in an online poll used to set YouCut’s weekly priorities.

There was at least one additional problem with the proposed measure: the $100 million in security money is no longer in the TEF, a senior State Department official told Fox News. It has already been moved by the U.N. into a separate security account. The remainder of the TEF balance will apparently be spent as U.N. financial rules say it should be, as a credit against U.S. dues for U.N. membership next year. According to the U.N., a previous U.S. overpayment was used exactly in this fashion, in 1997.

CLICK HERE FOR THE U.N. FINANCIAL RULE

While the battle over funding the U.N. grows heated, New York City officials are relieved that something is finally going to be done about some of the U.N.’s glaring vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks.

Among other things, the U.N. complex Conference Building, which houses the Security Council, hangs directly over the East Side’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt highway, while an exit ramp from the same thoroughfare curves around the south end of the complex, near the U.N. library. On the west side of the complex, U.N. buildings are only a few yards away from busy First Avenue.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have long been frustrated by the U.N.’s inaction at dealing with the security issues, even as the U.N. complex has been emptied of many occupants while it currently undergoes a $1.8 billion facelift.

As Fox News reported last September, Bloomberg personally wrote to Secretary of StateHillary Clinton about the issue, and other officials bluntly expressed similar concerns to the State Department, which is the official U.S. interlocutor with the U.N. But the behind-the-scenes dialogue about security improvements was apparently never-ending—with one big issue being who was going to pay for any changes.

The decision to use TEF money apparently solves that problem, at least from the U.N.’s point of view, and a senior State Department official made clear to Fox News that the U.S. government was willing to go along.

“In this case the United Nations notified the State Department that it intended to use [TEF funds] for security enhancement,” said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy. “Since the money was already in their hands, the U.S. had no objection to the use in the upgrade.”

So why is the U.S. picking up the entire tab, rather than the 22 percent share it is paying for the overall U.N. renovation?

“This is being done at the same time as the U.N. renovation, but it is a separate project,” Kennedy told Fox News. It is considered separate because there are “other ways to do the project” that would not involve the U.N. at all, such as closing major New York City thoroughfares. But that, Kennedy said, was “not feasible.”

For its part, the U.N. explained both the security upgrades and the bill-paying by carefully putting the ball back in the U.S. court. In response to questions from Fox News, a U.N. spokesman said that “the present discussion about additional security upgrades reflects heightened security concerns by the Host Country [the U.S.] and U.N. security authorities. The U.S., under its Host Country obligations, is funding these new security upgrades.”

What will the money be used for? State Department officials were understandably reluctant to provide much detail. In talking points provided to Fox News, one official said it would be used in part to “reinforce and reconfigure U.N. headquarters facilities.”

In a letter sent earlier this year to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, the State Department indicated that changes are planned for First Avenue and the Conference Building, with additional measures still under consideration.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LETTER.

While no-one is likely to object to the security changes, the U.S.-U.N. deal on the financing of the changes is unlikely to satisfy U.N. critics like House Foreign Affairs chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen.

“The U.N. and the [Obama] Administration are treating this overpayment like found money, but it’s not,“ she had already declared in a press release, pointing to the U.N. rule that says the money should be used as a payment against next year’s U.S. dues. “The $179 million extra that the U.S. paid into the UN Tax Equalization fund should be refunded to the American people immediately.”

Brett Schaefer, a U.N. expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agrees.

“The fact that the U.S. has failed to make such a simple request is a disservice to the American taxpayer.”

New York City officials, however, are likely to weigh that against a feeling that something finally is being done to end a bureaucratic impasse that threatens the city.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.