InnerCityPress: Ban Ki-moon Crime Report Has Moonlighting, Pipe Attacks, Sex for Hire, Guns

By Matthew Russell Lee

Click here to read this @InnercityPress.com

 

UNITED NATIONS, August 22 -- Some say, with reason, that the UN was too weak in Srbrenica, in Rwanda and now with its observers fleeing Syria. 

  But Ban Ki-moon's report to the General Assembly on misconduct and criminal behavior paints a picture of violence and threats in the UN, with armrests torn off chairs, firings based on gun threats, physical assaults with pipes. Here are excerpts:

23. A staff member physically assaulted another staff member by detaching an armrest from an office chair and throwing it at the other staff member’s face, resulting in injury to the staff member’s right eye and forehead. Disposition: Dismissal. Appeal: None.

24. A staff member physically assaulted another staff member by hitting the other staff member in the head with a metal pipe, resulting in injuries to the staff member’s head. Disposition: Dismissal. Appeal: None.

26. A staff member on three occasions acted in a verbally disrespectful and disruptive manner by arguing with colleagues and supervisors; on one occasion the staff member destroyed property during an argument; on two occasions the staff member made threatening remarks about the use of guns in the workplace. The staff member admitted the conduct with regard to the first two incidents and apologized to the persons involved. Disposition: Separation from service with compensation in lieu of notice and with termination indemnity. Appeal: None.

  Having seen how the UN conducts its interviews, some of these admission may be dubious. But the descriptions continue, with sexual exploitation:

"A staff member attempted to obtain sexual favors from a job applicant, who was a beneficiary of assistance, in return for offering to provide assistance with the United Nations recruitment process. The staff member falsely suggested to the applicant that there was a problem with the application form, and invited the applicant to the staff member’s residence to review the application. In the context of the invitation to the applicant, the staff member made sexually suggestive remarks. Disposition: Separation from service, with compensation in lieu of notice, and without termination indemnity. Appeal: None."

  There were stolen laptops and hard drives, airplane tickets and even copper wire. Some were more sophisticated:

"A staff member created a false note verbale on official letterhead on their United Nations computer. The staff member forged the signature of another staff member, and sold the note verbale to another staff member in order for the latter to obtain a non-immigrant visa. Several false documents, such as fake diplomas, were found on the staff member’s United Nations computer."

  And now, we'll perform or try to perform some detective work. Ban Ki-moon reports:

"A staff member was employed by their government for one year while employed with the Organization, without the approval of the Secretary-General. A conflict of interest existed between the nature of the staff member’s outside activities and their status as a staff member. The time taken to conclude the investigation and subsequent disciplinary process were taken into account in determining the disciplinary measure. Disposition: Separation from service, with in lieu of notice and with termination indemnity. Appeal: Filed with the Dispute Tribunal, where the case remains under consideration."

  This double employment, unless occurring more than once, sounds like a case Inner City Press has asked the UN about, that of Jeffery Armstrong. 

  Since the UN's ODS system has problems with direct links, Inner City Press is putting the report online through its Scribd, click here and watch this site.

Commentary Magazine: Time for Ban Ki-moon to resign - he is incapable of managing the UN

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE ON COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

What is the UN Secretary-General’s Job?

  Michael Rubin | @mrubin1971

Several years ago, I took the opportunity to hear UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speak at a Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies graduation. The Secretary-General is not the most dynamic speaker and, if memory serves, his speech was basically pabulum, talking a great deal about meetings he had had; if there was a focus, it was probably on global warming. To be fair, while his predecessor Kofi Annan is a better public speaker, there is little substance to Annan’s speeches as well.

The problem with many of the UN Secretaries-General is that they have redefined their position to be that of the world’s diplomat, and have assumed a bully pulpit for which they have no right. When the UN was created, the purpose of the secretary-general, first and foremost, was to be the UN’s administrator. He was meant to make the organization’s bureaucracy function in a clear and efficient way.

By this standard, both Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan have been abject failures. Take the most recent scandal at the United Nations: The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) shipped hi-tech computers to Iran and North Korea in contravention of UN sanctions. That is a failure of administration at the highest level. In any normal organization, it would lead to the resignation not only of WIPO’s director, but also that of the UN administration, because it was the failure of the secretary-general’s oversight that allowed this transaction to occur.

The same is true with Kofi Annan. There has seldom been a statesman who enjoys such a reputation as an elder statesman but whose record rests on failure. As director of the UN’s peacekeeping operation, Annan’s indecisiveness enabled the Rwanda genocide to develop and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, a casualty count for which Annan has apologized. As director of peacekeeping operations, Annan also presided over the failure to protect the safe haven in Srebrenica in 1995, in which 7,000 men and boys were slaughtered by Serbian fighters. It was as secretary-general, however, where Annan truly failed. He ignored his primary responsibility as administrator-in-chief in order to traipse around the globe at donor expense, giving speeches and collecting laurels. By doing so, he presided over the worst corruption scandal to hit the United Nations, one for which he has never truly paid the price.

The United Nations has an important role. Having a place to convene enemies and combatants is a valuable enabler of diplomacy. If the UN secretary-general is unable or incapable of managing UN affairs, however, then either it is time for the UN secretary-general to resign or it is time to shrink the UN and its myriad agencies back to a manageable size. Rather than sweep the WIPO scandal under the rug, perhaps it’s time to erase this notion of a world diplomat and instead return the secretary-general to his original purpose as an administrator and facilitator.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE ON COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

If you know how to rap and are from South Korea (i.e. Ban Ki Moon) than you qualify for World Bank Prez

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS ARTICLE ON BBC NEWS

World Bank nominee Jim Yong Kim showcases rapping talent

President Obama has announced that he is nominating a Korean-born American academic, Jim Yong Kim, to be the new head of the World Bank.

President Obama also listed Dr Kim's many extra-curricular talents including basketball and golf.

After the announcement, footage emerged of the new nominee starring as a rapper in an "Idol" competition last year at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College, where he is president.

Read More

• Surprise US World Bank candidate

Scientists who invented GLOBAL WARMING will be immune from any prosecution - UN will give them full diplomatic immunity-privileges

Mammoth new green climate fund wants United Nations-style diplomatic immunity, even though it’s not part of the UN

By George Russell

Published March 22, 2012

| FoxNews.com

CLICK HERE FOR THIS STORY ON FOX NEWS

EXCLUSIVE: The Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year to lower global greenhouse gases, is seeking a broad blanket of U.N.-style immunity that would shield its operations from any kind of legal process, including civil and criminal prosecution, in the countries where it operates. There’s just one problem: it is not part of the United Nations.

Whether the fund, which was formally created at a U.N. climate conference in Durban, South Africa last December, will get all the money it wants to spend is open to question in an era of economic slowdown and fiscal austerity. Its spending goal comes atop some $30 billion in “fast start-up” money that has been pledged by U.N. member states to such climate change activities.

A 24-nation interim board of trustees for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is slated to hold its first meeting next month in Switzerland to organize the fund’s secretariat and to get it running by November, as well as find a permanent home for the GCF’s operations. The board expects to spend about $6.7 million between now and June of next year.

But before it is fully operational, the GCF’s creators—194 countries that belong to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and who are also U.N. members—want it to be immune from legal challenges and lawsuits, not to mention outside inspections, much like the United Nations itself cannot be affected by decisions rendered by a sovereign nation’s government or judicial system.

Despite its name, the UNFCCC was informed in 2006 by the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs that it was not considered a U.N. “organ,” and therefore could not claim immunity for its subordinate bodies or personnel under the General Convention that has authorized U.N. immunity since the end of World War II.

A UNFCCC resolution granting similar immunities would need to be “accepted, approved or ratified” by each individual member of the Kyoto Protocol before it took effect, the U.N. legal office advised. Even if UNFCCC members decided to ask the U.N. General Assembly to grant them similar immunity it would require each U.N. member state to make changes in domestic legislation, the opinion declared.

Click here for the legal office communication.

The immunity that the UNFCCC wants also governs where the Green Climate Fund can make its home. Among other things, the GCF board is charged to consider whether any would-be hosts have “the ability to provide privileges and immunities to the Fund as are necessary for the fulfillment of its purposes, and to the officials of the Fund as are necessary for the independent exercise of their official functions.”

In other words, without offering immunity, you cannot host the Green Climate Fund.

Click here for the resolution launching the fund and seeking immunities.

Countries interested in hosting the Green Climate Fund have until April 15 to let the board know. The U.S. is not considered likely to be one of them.

According to an official of the U.S. Treasury, which strongly supports the existence of the GCF, the full extent of the immunities still remains to be worked out by the fund board, although the wording of various UNFCCC resolutions indicate that immunities like those held by the U.N. are clearly envisaged.

Even beyond the U.N., immunities from outside inspection and legal action have become a hallmark of international organizations, whose members often consider them a necessity to keep their operations, and their officials, from facing harassment in national courts. Among others, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), an organization initially sparked by Bill Gates, has been granted such immunities under U.S. law, according to the International Organizations Immunities Act. The World Bank, among other development finance institutions, also enjoys immunities.

Critics of such immunities, on the other hand, say that they are a barrier to proper external oversight of vast amounts of international spending, a potential facilitator of corruption, and a dangerous weapon against the protection of property rights and other civil rights of those affected by the institutions’ actions.

“Immunities amount to a veil of secrecy,” says Bea Edwards, executive director of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based whistleblower protection organization.

“They are an immunity from external audit or oversight. They build in a structural conflict of interest at any immune institution for any internal oversight mechanism.”

Those differing views could be even strongly felt in the years ahead due to the sweeping environmental actions that the GCF intends to finance and foster in its bid to forge a new, global “green economy” to forestall hazardous “climate change.”

For one thing, there is the hoped-for size of the GCF: $100 billion in annual spending would be more than well more than double the amount ($44 billion) spent in 2010 by the World Bank , heretofore the world’s largest development institution. The scope of the climate fund’s ambitions is also likely to vary widely across much of the developing world—where oversight is already weak, and national governments, which would execute most of the GCF’s projects, are often spectacularly corrupt.

For another, private investors as well as public-private partnerships, in addition to governments, could be contributing resources through the GCF, meaning that private interests could also benefit from the cloud of secrecy that immunities would place over the fund’s operations.

(Under U.N. immunity rules, property and funds “administered” by a U.N. agency “in furtherance of its constitutional functions” count as its own.)

That cloud of secrecy and privilege—at least, as codified by the U.N., is formidable.

According to the U.N.’s convention on privileges and immunities as applied in 1947 to U.N. “specialized agencies,” their property and assets “shall enjoy immunity from every form of legal process,” except when waived. And even then, waivers can never apply “to any measure of execution,” meaning whatever was done with them.

U.N. premises as well as property and assets, are immune from “search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative judicial or legislative action.” All archives and documents, including even those “held” by the agencies, are considered “inviolable.”

Such agencies can move money, gold or any kinds of funds outside of any national regulation; are exempt from taxes, customs duties and import or export restrictions.

The same bulletproof status goes for their officials.

In the case of something like the GCF, this is “an issue of extending privileges and immunities to property rights,” in the opinion of Allan Meltzer, a distinguished professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. “And these privileged people will not necessarily protect the property rights of others,” he adds.

A consultant at various times to the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and Congress, Melzer also chaired a Clinton-era congressionally-mandated advisory commission on International financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Says he: “Rather than extending immunities, we should be emphasizing the rule of law. If we want to do environmental things, we should do them above board, not in secret.”

Judging from the course it has set for itself, the masters of the Green Climate Fund evidently disagree. However, questions sent last week, and again early this week, by Fox News to the CGF regarding its operations and immunities had received no reply before this article was published.

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

Click here for more stories by George Russell.

CanadaFreePress: UN is Fleecing US and the EU Carbon Tax

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS ON CANADA FREE PRESS

Politicians in America and the current administration are fleecing the American public with their Green Environmentalist Agenda 21 driven by the United Nations and its bureaucrats

- Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

The EU charges a carbon emissions fee, an “extra terrestrial tax.” This is viewed by non-European governments as an attack on sovereignty. China’s airlines have refused to comply. “Some non-European airlines may have to choose whether to obey the law of their land or that of Europe.” Companies refusing to comply would be fined and denied the right to land in the 27 countries that are members of EU.

The European Court of Justice has already rejected the legal basis of a challenge raised in London by North American airlines. Carriers have until April 30 to calculate their damaging annual emissions and to buy polluting rights for 2012. Delta Airlines has already added a surcharge to passenger tickets. The scalping of the developing world continues. Each flight will cost us an additional $32 of a round-trip long-distance ticket. The financial gains are substantial for the bureaucrats since 655 million people flew to Europe last year.

The United Nations is pushing for a global deal through its International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It does not matter that global warming has been debunked, the EU and UN coffers must be replenished by hapless developed world citizens and the wealth must be spread to developing nations in the name of “social justice.”

The media did not report on the temperature rise in the U.S. during the time period when no airplanes flew after the 9/11 attack, proving that pollution from airplanes does not increase temperatures, on the contrary, it provides a level of cooling protection. (Lord Monckton)

Never mind that the United Nations no longer lives up to its charter of world peace and is indoctrinating children and the population into the green sustainability hoax. UN wants more than the $516.3 requested from the United States for its regular budget and more than the $2.182 billion requested for the peacekeeping budget.

In 2009, U.S. contribution to the UN octopus was $6.347 billion. US have provided aid to UN since 1945, currently giving 22 percent of UN’s operating budget and 27 percent of its peacekeeping budget. (OMB)

Aaron Cantor, USAF (retired) perfectly encapsulated the peacekeeping mission of the United Nations “Ready, Aim, Flee.”

The Congressional Research Service revealed that we are giving hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid to some of the world’s richest countries while borrowing billions from them. More specifically, we gave $1.4 billion to 16 foreign countries that hold at least $10 billion in Treasury securities. China received $27.2 million, India $126.6 million, Brazil $25 million, and Russia $71.5 million.

Palestinians receive $400.4 million in economic aid, $100 million to support the Palestinian Authority police training, $61.5 million in emergency humanitarian aid after Israel’s “assault on Gaza,” an actual retaliation for all the rockets fired randomly from Gaza into Israel.

Fritz Vahrenhold and his geologist colleague, Sebastian Luning, work for the German utility company RWE. They published a book last month, “Die Kalte Sonne” (“The Cold Sun”) in which they claim that important research about climate change was hidden and “cries of an impending catastrophe are misleading.” “The world is not facing a climate catastrophe.” The authors are dismissing the “CO2 lie” – it is not greenhouse gases that cause problems, it is the sun that determines climate change.

The most relied upon source of information on the topic is the climate report produced by the United Nations, more specifically the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). The report, produced by civil servants and not researchers, is full of misinformation and doubts. Yet countries around the world are basing their policies and fundamental changes of their citizens’ lives on a bogus report produced by bureaucrats.

Many climate researchers question the quality of computer models used to forecast climate change. “Knowledge of the effect of particle from industry, heating, and auto emissions as well as from oceans, volcanoes and from the soil is very low, according to the IPCC report. These particles serve as seeds for clouds, and some estimates suggest that an increase in the cloud cover by just one percent could offset a doubling of the CO2 in the air.”

Making matters worse, a trading scheme is now part of European Union laws. The EU is trading on emissions that would limit the release of “harmful greenhouse gases.” Prices for CO2 certificates have dropped constantly to about half, around $10.60 per metric ton, in spite of the closure of eight German nuclear power plants in 2011 and the increase in demand for coal power. The CO2 trading system is not working and is producing nothing but deceptive hot air because politicians decide the amount of CO2 that industries in the EU may emit way into the future.

Why are CO2 certificates so cheap? Other than the obvious that people understand it is a fleecing scheme, Germany for one spends billions on renewable energy. “With CO2 certificates so cheap, generating power from environmentally harmful fuels becomes even more than a good deal - which explains why brown coal consumption increased by nearly 4 percent in 2011, bucking the general trend.” Emissions trading is not stopping climate change, but actually speeding it up. (Alexander Jung)

Politicians in America and the current administration are fleecing the American public with their Green Environmentalist Agenda 21 driven by the United Nations and its bureaucrats. Do we want to become subservient to the laws of the European Union and United Nations or follow the supreme law of the land, the U.S. Constitution?

Race 4 World Bank Prez: Jeffrey Sachs calls Amb. Susan Rice an "Obama insider" - forgetting he is a UN insider serving as Under-Secretary-General

Jeffrey D. Sachs ‏ @JeffDSachs

• · Open

@hlkalin So far this is still an insider's game. It needs to be opened up. Senator Kerry has taken himself off the list.

undpwatch ‏ @undpwatch

• Close

@JeffDSachs @hlkalin if u call @AmbassadorRice an insider - than u should accept u r @UN insider since u serve as #USG, right?#UNreform