United Nations in North Korea hit hard by Syria conflict - - no one wants to give money for Kim Jong-un

The World Food Programme (WFP) has revealed that food support for North Korea hit a two-year low during the month of August. According to WFP, cited by Radio Free Asia (RFA), food aid to North Korea this year has shown a declining trend since February: more than 3000 tons in January; 6000t in February; 4000t in March and April; 3000t in May and June; 2900t in July; and 2050t in August, the lowest amount of food aid given since 200t in August of 2011.

Click here for this story in full at: http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00100&num=10929

Al-Shabaab say: UNDP is a western spy agency

Aid ban still in place in Somalia, Islamist militants say

(CNN) -- Islamist militants in Somalia have reversed a pledge to allow foreign aid agencies to operate in famine-struck regions in the nation.

''The lift of ban on aid agencies doesn't include the agencies that we banned earlier in areas we control because those agencies don't do relief work, they are spies and work on political agendas'," Al-Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamud Raage said Thursday on the militants' radio station, Al Furqaan.

His announcement reverses his pledge this month that militants would allow aid groups to operate in areas under their control.

Al-Shabaab originally banned foreign aid organizations from providing aid in southern Somalia in 2009, describing them as Western spies and Christian crusaders.

The ban included the United Nations Development Programme, World Food Programme and CARE International. The World Food Programme has said that a new dialogue -- but not negotiations -- is under way with the group.

Raage accused the groups of having a political agenda in declaring a famine in Somalia.......

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY ON CNN.COM

Mitchell rejects allegation that UK aid is going to Islamists

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS ON SPECTATOR.CO.UK

Yesterday, Andrew Mitchell was the toast of the broadcasters. They have turned on him to an extent today. The news that portions of the £52.25 million given in emergency aid to the starving masses in the Horn of Africa will be distributed in areas controlled by al-Shabaab has forced Mitchell onto the defensive. “We shall have no dealings with al-Shabaab,” he said, and then added that the aid will reach its intended recipients by means other than collusion with the jihadists.

This is an embarrassing moment for Mitchell and, of course, it is vital that money and supplies do not fall into the hands of well-fed fighters. However, it is worth pointing out that Mitchell has always intended to distribute aid in al-Shabab controlled areas of Somalia. In a speech made last year in which he recast the role of DfID as an agent of soft power, he insisted that aid must be used to improve stability in the area, arguing that western generosity would deprive the extremists of their anti-western memes. Food, education and opportunity would replace poverty, ignorance, and Kalashnikovs. So even in this minute of emergency, Mitchell is pursuing long-term policy goals, for better or worse.

As the euro fails, Brussels turns on us to save itself

The eurozone crisis and the ambitions of the European Commission will cost us dear, says Daniel Hannan.

By Daniel Hannan
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK (CLICK HERE FOR THE STORY)

Angela Merkel: 'If the euro fails, then Europe fails.' Photo: Bloomberg

Politicians sometimes use the word "crisis" vaguely. Crisis is, appropriately, a Greek word. It means a moment of decision, a crossroads.

The EU faces now a crisis in the most exact sense. There are two ways in which it can treat the economic cancer that has taken hold in Greece, and which now threatens to metastasise across the Mediterranean. One is through amputation. Greece could be allowed to leave the euro and devalue, thereby pricing itself into the market and winning time to carry through economic reforms.

Another version of amputation, runs the rumour in Brussels, would be for Germany and its neighbours to create a new, hard currency among themselves, bequeathing the legal carcase of EMU to southern Europe. The effect would be the same: Greece and the other Club Med states would benefit from an immediate economic stimulus, and northern taxpayers would be excused having to fund a bail-out.

Most Eurocrats, however, regard amputation as a final resort. Instead, they prescribe a lengthy, debilitating and uncertain course of chemotherapy. The 16 members of the eurozone are putting up vast sums in what are euphemistically called loans, though few expect them to be repaid. German taxpayers, who were assured when the euro was launched that such aid would be illegal, are understandably furious.

Even angrier are the people of Ireland. Unlike Greece, Ireland has tightened its collective belt, with everyone from the Taoiseach to welfare recipients taking cuts. Irish voters now learn that, had they been less self-denying, they might have qualified for a bail-out of their own. Worse, they find themselves, as eurozone members, having to join the rescue consortium. At a time when their public-sector workers face pay reductions of between 5 and 20 per cent, the Irish must borrow an extra 800 million euros to send to Greece.

EU leaders know that they won't get away with this again. It will be politically impossible to ask the voters of Germany, Ireland or anywhere else to fork out for a second rescue package. So they are devising a mechanism where such fiscal transfers will happen automatically. On Friday, the European President, Herman Van Rompuy, will chair a meeting of EU finance ministers aimed at establishing what he calls "European economic governance".

Part of this governance involves creating a reserve account: a European Debt Agency, or European Monetary Fund. Part involves the harmonisation of financial supervision: a process especially damaging to Britain, and one which began last week with the almost unanimous approval of a new scheme to regulate investment funds, which are overwhelmingly based here.

Above all, though, Eurocrats want more moolah. Although Brussels has considerable executive, legislative and judicial power, it lacks fiscal clout. The EU budget accounts for 1.24 per cent of Europe's GDP, the US federal government for around 35 per cent of America's. The key ambition of most Euro-enthusiasts is to make themselves financially independent of the national governments through what they call "own resources": that is, money levied directly by Brussels. Own resources already exist, in that the EU automatically receives a component of VAT revenue from its member states, but almost every Euro-integrationist regards the amount as insufficient.

How to get the money? Some federalists dream of a pan-European income tax, to be levied by MEPs: the policy of, for example, the European People's Party. Other ideas include a levy on emails and a duty on international phone calls. Several member states like the idea of carbon taxes, or other green imposts.

In the present mood, there is especially strong support for a tax on financial transactions. Most EU financial transactions, of course, take place in London, which makes the scheme attractive on the Continent. Rather as happened with the Common Fisheries Policy, Britain would find itself disproportionately filling a pot from which others could draw.

Until now, our decision to keep the pound has sheltered us from the worst of the storm. (Isn't it time, by the way, that those who supported euro membership in the 1990s apologise to William Hague? His determination to see the single currency working "in good times and in bad " suddenly seems eerily prescient.) Being outside the eurozone, however, won't shield us from the negative consequences of Mr Van Rompuy's economic governance. EU supervision of financial services, a larger Brussels budget, a Europe-wide tax on banking transactions: these things will fall more heavily on Britain than on the states that abandoned their currencies.

What we are seeing, 11 years after the launch of the euro, is a vindication of what opponents of the single currency – and, indeed, its more honest supporters – argued all along, namely that you can't have monetary union without political union. If a state can't accommodate an economic shock in its interest rate or exchange rate, it will need to be bailed out. Common taxes mean common government – or, as Romano Prodi, the former head of the European Commission, put it last week, "fiscal federalism".

The EU has a way of thrusting itself uninvited into our affairs. Most ministers would gladly do without the distraction, but the ambitions of Brussels directly threaten the coalition's newly agreed domestic programme. Last week, for example, Nick Clegg spoke about the need to diffuse and democratise power in Britain, starting with a Great Repeal Bill. I cheered him lustily, having proposed precisely these things two years ago. The trouble is that his agenda will run up against the brute fact of the supremacy of EU law.

You can't decentralise power in the UK while centralising it in the EU. You can't object to the quango state while submitting to the biggest quango of the lot, namely the unelected European Commission. You can't ask for across-the-board budget savings while increasing our net contributions to Brussels by 60 per cent. You can't strengthen parliamentary control over the executive when orders-in-council simply implement EU rulings. You can't, in conscience, give people a referendum on how to elect their MPs while denying them a referendum on whether those MPs are sovereign.

When the Lisbon Treaty was adopted, many thought that the EU would try to digest it before consuming additional powers. But the crisis in Greece has whetted its hunger anew. Satisfying that appetite will be expensive for all of us.

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP and writes every day at

Aid to Gaza is inadvertently fuelling the conflict

By Daniel Hannan Politics

TELEGRAPH.CO.UK (CLICK HERE TO GO TO STORY)

Most of us weren’t present during the attack on the flotilla in the Eastern Mediterranean, and we should wait until all the facts are known before rushing to judgment. As often happens in these situations, both sides have hastened to fit events into whatever preconception they already had: either that Israeli commandos were defending themselves against Islamist radicals who had deliberately sought to provoke the use of force, or that there was an act of Israeli state terrorism against unarmed civilians. All we can say for certain at this stage is that something went horribly wrong.

We can, though, add one more observation. The current approach to Gaza — the approach supported by the UN, the EU and, indeed, Israel — is inadvertently fuelling violence. The priority of all the players, including Israel, is to “avert a humanitarian crisis in Gaza” by pouring aid into that unhappy place. In doing so, though, they have helped to create the perfect terrorist habitat.

The thinking is that paramilitarism can be killed with kindness; that the grievances of Gaza can be buried beneath an avalanche of euros. This policy is demonstrably failing. Palestinians are the most heavily subsidised people, in per capita terms, on the planet. Far from de-escalating the conflict, aid on such a scale has driven out enterprise and self-reliance and encouraged cronyism, resentment and rage.

Israel’s intention is clear enough: it wants to “reward” Fatah, by loosening restrictions on the West Bank, while “punishing” Hamas by blockading Gaza. But this policy is having the opposite effect, identifying Fatah in the eyes of many Palestinians with an enemy power. When I raised this issue with Israeli officials earlier this year, they told me that they were mitigating the policy by allowing through humanitarian convoys. This, I replied, was precisely the problem.

What Gaza needs is not aid but trade: the creation of a functioning society based on secure property rights and free commerce. Now plainly this isn’t going to happen immediately. Israelis point, with justice, to the decrease in cross-border terrorist attacks and suicide bombs that followed the sealing of the frontier. Lifting all restrictions tomorrow would lead to an influx of Iranian rocketry.

In the long run, though, Israel must work towards the establishment of a stable state as its neighbour. Palestinians are an enterprising people who, in other Arab countries, generally form the professional and mercantile classes. In Gaza, however, a combination of failed leadership, external blockade and infusions of aid have destroyed civic society. If there were a propertied bourgeoisie in Gaza, its members would be intolerant of freelance rocket-launchers operating from their facilities and attracting reprisals. If there were Gazan businessmen, they would want to remain on good terms with their customers, including their Israeli customers.

Which is why the focus of the international community should be on integrating Palestine into the world economy — a process which must involve a progressive easing of commercial frontier controls (no one is suggesting lifting all security checks in the current climate). It won’t be easy. But it is surely better than carrying on as we are now, with a whirling entropy in Gaza that draws in resources and spews out bombers.