UN brewing up new -- and expensive – global 'sustainability development goals'

Click here to read this in full at Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/10/03/un-brewing-up-new-and-expensive-global-sustainability-development-goals/

EXCLUSIVE: The United Nations is planning to create a sweeping new set of “sustainable development goals” for the planet that will likely require trillions of dollars of spending on poverty and the environment, a drastic reorganization of economic production and consumption -- especially in rich countries -- and even greater effort in the expensive war on climate change.

It’s an agenda that its prominent boosters have declared will make the next 15 years “some of the most transformative in human history,” although the exact nature of the goals themselves, and how they are to be achieved, is unclear.

UN Whistleblower Wasserstrom on TI Report: Total Lack of Institutional Accountability

Click here to read this in full at GAP: http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/44-2013/3009--un-whistleblower-wasserstrom-on-ti-report-total-lack-of-institutional-accountability


Noted Peacekeeping Mission Whistleblower Available for Comment

(Washington, DC) – Earlier today, Transparency International UK's Defence and Security Programmereleased a new report, Corruption & Peacekeeping: Strengthening Peacekeeping and the United Nations. Government Accountability Project (GAP) client and pioneer UN whistleblower James Wasserstrom is available to the media to comment on the report's findings that need additional focus, and make recommendations about how the international body can take steps to achieve real accountability.

Wasserstrom made the following statement:

Transparency International has done a fine job in highlighting many of the issues of corruption in UN peacekeeping missions. This report is just the latest strong piece of evidence in a string that proves the United Nations lacks basic measures of real accountability in its peacekeeping missions and institutional headquarters, and continues to pay nothing more than lip service to transparency and accountability. 

As one who has personally fought corruption in one such mission – the UN Mission in Kosovo – and paid the price for whistleblowing, I take an even firmer stance on the paramount issue of stemming wrongdoing in these critical tasks. The United Nations' failure over decades to seriously address its own obvious and long-standing deficiencies in fighting internal corruption is absolutely unacceptable. The band-aid approach to solving problems, all superficial acts for public consumption or appeasement of the international community, fall well short of real progress that achieves real accountability for international taxpayers and the billions they have provided to this just cause.

Wasserstrom is available to comment to members of the media on the report. Please contact GAP Communications Director Dylan Blaylock at dylanb@whistleblower.org, 202.457.0034 ext 137 or 202.236.3733 to arrange a phone interview. Please note that Wasserstrom is based in Asia.

UNDP becomes a parking lot for New Zealand's Labour MPs...(After all those great things Labour did in NZ now they can change the world ...as well)

Click here to read this article in full @ NZHerald:http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10866354 

Charles Chauvel. Photo / File

Labour MP Charles Chauvel is resigning from Parliament to take up a job with the United Nations in New York.

Mr Chauvel, a List MP, said he had resigned effective from March 11.

He will work for the UN Development Programme organisation former Prime Minister Helen Clark leads - as an advisor on Parliamentary Development and Democratic Governance.

Mr Chauvel said Ms Clark was not involved in his selection - "I don't think she even knows I have the job."

He said he had been a member of the UN Global Commission on HIV and the Law for the past two years and had found that work challenging.

"The new full-time role with the UN presents a similar opportunity to make a difference and I look forward to the challenges that it will present."

Former MP Carol Beaumont is next on Labour's list - followed by Kelvin Davis.

SYRIA SCANDAL: Did United Nations in Syria cleared this "dual-use" facility in Homs to become a UNFCCC vendor?

At the same time the Syrian regime of Bashir Al-Assad began the brutal repression that would quickly spin the country into civil war—and culminate with the use of chemical weapons against its own citizens-- Syrian officials were officially registering a deal with the United Nations agency sponsoring the world's largest carbon-trading scheme for an industrial complex known for years as a “dual-use” facility in the government's production of the same weapons of mass destruction.

Click here to read this story in full @ Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/09/23/un-emissions-trading-project-has-links-to-syria-chemical-weapons-arsenal/

Romano Prodi, another high profile Socialist on UN payroll - told to go to work in Mali or otherwise leave !

EXCLUSIVE: As the United Nations begins to gear up for its new session this month, there are signs that austerity is reaching even the highest levels.

Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission and onetime prime minister of Italy, is being, in effect, downsized as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s part-time special envoy for the vast and turbulent area of sub-Saharan Africa known as the Sahel, one of the world’s poorest regions.

Click here for this story in full at: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/09/03/un-downsizes-high-profile-special-envoy-amid-signs-donor-fatigue/?test=latestnews#ixzz2e4wokQaa

UN making money with carbon certificates - no one asks for accountability as to what does UN do with all this "surplus" ? !

The trust for the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, the operator of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas credit program, had an operating surplus of $82 million in the 18 months through June 30, as offset supply increased.

Fees and other income amounted to $141 million in the period, compared with expenses of $59.2 million, according to data in a statement on the website of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Bonn-based trust was holding $201 million, including funds carried over from the previous period, the UN said.

Click here for full story at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/un-carbon-credit-program-reports-82-million-surplus-to-june.html

UN needs to clean up and simplify its language for UN Climate Decisions - in order for people to understand it !

That’s the contention of a new paper from FIELD, the London-based Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development. The organisation, which tries to make international law processes more understandable and accessible, recommends that the 195 countries and other parties negotiating through the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) “consider an entirely new structure and style” for their decisions.

Click here for more on this story: http://www.trust.org/item/20130905161654-d6mw8/?source=hpeditorial

Another United Nations envoy to investigate Canada's treatment of Aboriginal Peoples

Click here for this in full @: http://www.saultstar.com/2013/08/10/un-to-investigate-canadas-treatment-of-aboriginal-peoples

Another United Nations envoy is headed for Canada to check up on us, and this time it will focus on the country's the treatment of Aboriginal Peoples.

Last year it was the UN's special envoy on food security, and Olivier De Schutter -- the UN special rapporteur on the right to food -- wasn't impressed. He concluded that Canada's "self-righteous" attitude belies a very real issue of food insecurity.

The report was widely dismissed and literally laughed at by Conservative cabinet ministers.

Though the relationship between Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the UN has been strained, Canada has granted permission for this latest special envoy, which will make three trips here and produce three reports on what it finds.

The Examiner: U.N. pushes the idea of Climate Change being the cause of Haiti's cholera !

Click here for this in full @: http://www.examiner.com/article/did-climate-change-contribute-to-haiti-s-post-quake-cholera-outbreak

August 7, 2013

On August 6, the Washington Post published details of Yale University’s most recent report slamming theUnited Nations for bringing cholera into Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

According to the Yale report, the lack of response on the part of the United Nations “violates obligations under international law by not providing a forum to address the grievances of cholera victims.”

Last month, a report authored by a group of former United Nations scientists used DNA testing to link the cholera bacteria responsible for the outbreak to UN peacekeepers from Nepal. The evidence, which offers strong support for the UN's culpability, caused international outrage and demands that the United Nations take responsibility for its unintentional infection of Haiti earthquake victims.

Mary Robinson says: "United Nations should treat Climate Change as a human rights issue" !

Opinion: Climate change as a human rights and justice issue

Click here for this in full @: http://www.lithuaniatribune.com/46843/opinion-climate-change-as-a-human-rights-and-justice-issue-201346843/

Global warming and climate change present humankind with one of the greatest challenges in the history of our species. While there is now broad acknowledgment of this fact, for those of us in the world’s most developed countries, our awareness is often abstracted: We see climate change as just an environmental problem that will somehow be solved, or our view is shaped by the kind of horrific disasters that make for sensational headlines and gripping news footage. Then we forget all about it until the next disaster flashes across our screens.

What shouldn’t be overlooked is that the effects of climate change are cumulative. They do not always take the form of extreme natural disasters. Climate change is already having a profoundly adverse impact on poorer communities around the world, as they experience, for example, a heavy rainfall that destroys a farmer’s entire crop during the normally dry season. The people most affected – women, children, and the most vulnerable – are the least responsible for causing climate change, and also the least able to cope.

United Nations wants to control Small-Scale Fisheries around the world !

Click here for this in full @: http://www.thecoaster.ca/News/Local/2013-08-06/article-3340086/Allen-attends-UN-meeting-on-small-scale-fisheries/1

Will study small-scale fisheries in Coast of Bays

Topics : 

United Nations , Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , Canadian Fisheries Research Network , Bays , Newfoundland and Labrador , Rome

Sharmane Allen, a former resident of Harbour Breton, found herself a long way from Newfoundland in May as she was in Rome, Italy attending consultations hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on small- scale fisheries (SSF).

Ms. Allen was asked to be part of a civil society delegation at the international meetings by the Canadian Fisheries Research Network and was a delegate with the World Forum on Fisheries People.

She said, “As a PhD student at Memorial University studying SSF in Newfoundland and Labrador, this opportunity was invaluable in many ways.

“The United Nations contends that if the world does not recognize the importance of SSF and protect their existence, the future of this sector is bleak as it is facing a number of common problems worldwide.”

W.P. The Insiders: Another UN global climate warming report, AR5, may fuel Democrats’ defeat

Click here for this in full @: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/08/05/the-insiders-another-un-global-climate-warming-report-ar5-may-fuel-democrats-defeat/

The Manhattan skyline — now. (Seth Wenig/Associated Press)

If you think your summer reading is deficient, maybe you could get your hands on an advance copy of the 2013 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its 2007 assessment report, AR4, weighed in at 20 pounds and was more than 3,000 pages long. I wonder if anyone in America, much less in the Obama administration, even read that report. And, apparently, this year’s report, which will be released in September, will be even longer and heavier.

The causes and consequences of global warming remain uncertain, but that’s not even the point. If all the dire predictions and the left’s wildest fantasies come true, it just might be President Obama’s failure as a diplomat that we’ll all reflect on as we’re standing in knee-deep water on the third floor of a high-rise in midtown Manhattan.

Study finds climate change is causing modifications to marine life behavior

Read this in full at: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-ucsb-climate-modifications-marine-life.html#jCp

Warming oceans are causing marine species to change breeding, feeding, and migration timing. Credit: University of California - Santa Barbara

Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface, yet our knowledge of the impact of climate change on marine habitats is a mere drop in the proverbial ocean compared to terrestrial systems. An international team of scientists set out to change that by conducting a global meta-analysis of climate change impacts on marine systems.

Counter to previous thinking, marine species are shifting their geographic distribution toward the poles and doing so much faster than their land-based counterparts. The findings were published in Nature Climate Change.

The three-year study, conducted by a working group of UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and funded by the National Science Foundation, shows that warming oceans are causing marine species to change breeding, feeding, and migration timing as well as shift where they live. Widespread systemic shifts in measures such as distribution of species and phenology—the timing of nature's calendar—are on a scale comparable to or greater than those observed on land.

Read this in full at: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-ucsb-climate-modifications-marine-life.html#jCp

UN accredits NGO whose head is ‘glad to be labeled anti-Semitic’

Click here for this in full @: http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-accredits-ngo-whose-head-is-glad-to-be-labeled-anti-semitic/

A United Nations committee dedicated to Palestinians’ rights accredited a nongovernmental organization headed by the former prime minister of Malaysia, a controversial figure who has said he is “glad” to be called an anti-Semite, sparking protests by pro-Israel groups.

At a session in New York last week, the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People officially granted accreditation to five civil society organizations, among them the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, which was founded by Mahathir Mohamad.

Mohamad, who served as Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981 until 2003, has repeatedly sparked controversy with his anti-Western and anti-Semitic comments. In a 2003 speech, he said that “the Jews rule the world by proxy” and get “others to fight and die for them.” During the same speech, he further stated, “They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these, they have now gained control of the most powerful countries.”

Chicago Tribune: Italian firm to provide surveillance drone for U.N. in Congo

Click here to read this in full @: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-congo-democratic-un-drones-20130801,0,2616946.story


UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Thursday it has procured an unarmed surveillance drone from Italian defense electronics firm Selex ES, a unit of Finmeccanica, that will be deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the coming weeks.

It will be the first time the United Nations has used such equipment and, if the trial use by peacekeepers in eastern Congo is successful, officials and diplomats also hope the drones could be used by missions in Ivory Coast and South Sudan.

"Unarmed UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) will allow our peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to monitor the movements of armed groups and protect the civilian population more efficiently," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters.

"The selected vendor is the Italian company Selex ES. The UAV is known as the Falco and is designed to be a medium altitude, medium endurance surveillance platform capable of carrying a range of payloads including several types of high resolution sensors," Nesirky said.

Fox News: UN's messy, billion-dollar peacekeeping air charter business hugely unfavorable to US

Click here to read this in full @: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/01/uns-messy-billion-dollar-peacekeeping-air-charter-business-hugely-unfavorable/

Four years after United Nations auditors declared that the U.N.’s  billion-dollar program for moving people and equipment on peacekeeping charter flights was a  mess, the world organization still spends too much to rent airplanes and helicopters, still favors a few suppliers of equipment over those who might want to bid for the work, and still doesn’t have the tools to keep track of its sprawling and overpriced system.

Moreover, an examination by Fox News of U.N. procurement records shows that the results of the deeply flawed air charter system are hugely unfavorable to the United States, which pays by far the largest chunk of the U.N.’s peacekeeping budget.

A follow-up audit to the one released in 2009 also shows that  U.N. agencies largely failed to do what the watchdogs recommended in order to fix the system, although the U.N. is apparently scrambling to straighten out some of the problems now. Result: many of the same bad practices are still occurring.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/01/uns-messy-billion-dollar-peacekeeping-air-charter-business-hugely-unfavorable/#ixzz2b0Yrct1X

Climate innovation debate: What’s the future for carbon trading systems, around the world?

Click here for this in full @: http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/news/76233/Climate-innovation-debate-What’s-the-future-for-carbon-trading-systems,-around-the-world

A focused panel of experts from business, academia and politics will consider how different regional carbon trading systems should be modified in order to enable them to effectively combat climate change. The debate, to be held on 24 September, is organised by Climate-KIC, which is part of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).

The European Commission and Parliament have been struggling to find a solution to plunging carbon prices, with a compromise deal being struck only as recently as June and many publicly questioning the future of the system.

Advocates, however, have called for the success of carbon trading to be determined based on the level of carbon reduction, rather than the price of carbon. Research has been published to suggest that the market-based approach of Europe’s carbon trading system is still delivering results.

Meanwhile, international policy makers are looking to adopt local versions of Europe’s carbon trading system. Climate-KIC will now bring together a panel of experts to discuss the future of carbon trading, and its effect on long term climate change mitigation and adaption.

UN reliance on private military security companies growing, lacks transparency

Click here to read this in full @: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/panel-un-reliance-on-private-military-security-companies-growing-lacks-transparency/2013/08/01/f904d50e-fb16-11e2-89f7-8599e3f77a67_story.html

UNITED NATIONS — An expert panel called Thursday for more transparency surrounding the deepening reliance of the United Nations on private security companies for services from armed guards to police training.

The Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, an independent panel mandated by the U.N. Human Rights Council, held a series of meetings and debates this week as part of its ongoing investigation into a practice that is drawing increasing scrutiny. The five-member group plans to present a report next year.

Ban Ki-moon appoints Ibrahim Thiaw of Mauritania as Deputy Executive Director of UNEP

Click here for this story in full @: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45556&Cr=unep&Cr1=#.Uf5YDZUnIeM

Ibrahim Thiaw. Photo: UN Multimedia

2 August 2013 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the appointment of Ibrahim Thiaw of Mauritania to be the Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations agency that is the Organization’s voice on environmental issues.

Mr. Thiaw will succeed Amina Mohamed of Kenya as Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“His professional career spans the full spectrum of practical work at national and regional levels to leading global programmes and experience of United Nations inter-agency and intergovernmental processes,” Mr. Ban’s spokesperson’s office said in a statement announcing the appointment.

China launches its first carbon trading scheme: Report

China launches its first carbon trading scheme: Report
Economic Times
Because of its reliance on coal and heavy industry, China has emerged as the top producer of climate-changing carbon emissions, ahead of the United States, though its per capita emissions remain far below the US. China has no targets to reduce absolute ...