They aren’t saying it doesn’t happen, they are just saying that “Every incident of misconduct by the Blue Helmets diminishes public confidence in our work and weakens the institution of peacekeeping.” So keep your trap shut BBC!

Although the text refers frequently to protecting all religions, the only religion specified as being attacked is Islam, to which eight paragraphs refer.

Durban II will more than likely be a revisit to Durban I, which was a conference of hate

Delegates arriving this week for the official UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, commencing today in Durban, South Africa and the NGO Forum that proceeded it were greeted by an ugly, in-your-face display of anti- Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-U.S. rhetoric. Tragically, a conference intended to examine effective mechanisms to combat racism and promote understanding and awareness of this important global problem, instead became a conference of hate and exclusion.

It may have taken them seven years to catch on, but it looks like Canada will not be participating this year:

Canada has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference slated to take place in South Africa next year, the federal government announced Wednesday.
The so-called Durban II conference “has gone completely off the rails” and Canada wants no part of it, said Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity.

Kalin said his mission was to encourage American officials to abide by a set of UN principles on “internally displaced persons” that say “you must start with the most needy, you have to find ways to reconstruct housing that is affordable.”

Reports from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), provided to USA TODAY, show it has approved $4.5 billion worth of infrastructure projects in Louisiana and Mississippi. Only about $1 billion of that total has been spent.

Much of the rest is sitting in state accounts waiting to be parceled out to the local officials responsible for the rebuilding work, slowed by a complex tangle of local and federal rules.

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His name is Mark Siljander. He is a former Michigan Congressman and former US ambassador to the United Nations, and he is presently under indictment:

as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

His Reverend Moon connection:

One would think that the orthodoxies of the Christian Right would clash with the Unification Church of self-proclaimed messiah Sun Myung Moon. But amongst the strange bedfellows of politics, there are those who are somehow able to relate to both.

We contribute enough to the world, it’s time to start hitting up the receipients of the aid we spread around the world! Here is what transpired at the UN summit on global warming:

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled “A Global CO2 Tax.” Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm

Schwank said at least “$10-$40 billion dollars per year” could be generated by the tax, and wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.”

It appears to be the case:

UNDP says it suspended all its operations in North Korea when the Kim regime refused to cooperate in an investigation of UNDP funding and staffing methods in the country, as well as the unexplained presence of thousands of dollars of counterfeit U.S. money that was stashed in a UNDP safe in Pyongyang.

Nonetheless, according to the internal documents seen by FOX News, close to $2 million in UNDP money was disbursed to Mercy for a project clearly labeled “MCI-DPRK” (the acronym for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as North Korea is formally known), and numbered in the UNDP book-keeping system as 12431.

The payments stretch from 2004 to January 2007 — or just weeks after accusations were first raised by U.S. diplomats concerning the hard-currency UNDP payments to the Kim regime. More than $200,000 was released to the Mercy Corps project at the end of January 2007.

Idiotic:

The lawsuits threaten to delay or stop the two massive wind projects, which could place more than 600 turbines on 60,000 acres near Laguna Madre, south of Corpus Christi. Part of the wind projects would place about 250 turbines just east of a portion of the sprawling King Ranch.

The federal suit, filed in U.S. Western District Court in Austin, said the turbines could kill untold numbers of migratory birds and damage the bay. It seeks to overturn the decision by the Texas General Land office, which Patterson heads, to allow the projects to be built without environmental review or input from the public. The suit contends that the Federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 and the Texas Coastal Management Program require a permit process for any energy generation facility on the coast, including wind farms.

Ted Kennedy stopped this same thing in Hyanis Port, MA. People love to talk a good talk about the environment, but if it involves their backyard, look out!

By millions. I am relieved that the epidemic is not at the levels we were led to believe. I am angered that the UN is even involved in this. Yet again, they prove that they are a non-functioning body.

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

I am glad to see it is slowing, but we must still do everything possible to stop this disease!

Don Surber nails it when he puts this out there:

This is one more example of how corrupt the United Nations is. Ordinarily, I would give people the benefit of the doubt.

But this is the UN — a racketeer influenced corrupt organization — the Mafia on steroids, protected from prosecution by diplomatic immunity.

UPDATE 1: Gene commented about the navy’s approval of this deal. I found this 2004 article, and this one as well.

Here is a listing of newer articles on the subject
—————————————————————————————————————————
Thanks Ted for bringing this up. I’ll leave you with Lt. Col. Oliver North to explain why this is a bad deal:

In his 2004 State of the Union Address, President Bush said, “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.”

Members of both parties and Houses of Congress applauded. But if the U.S. Senate votes to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea — known as the Law of the Sea Treaty, or its appropriate acronym, LOST — he and his successors are going to need lots of permission slips.

NEW YORK – Oscar Wyatt, the 83-year-old Texas oilman charged with paying millions of dollars in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime to win oil contracts under the Oil-For-Food Program, will enter a guilty plea, WNBC.com has learned.

According to law enforcement sources, Wyatt will plead guilty to wire fraud and other federal charges. He is on trial in federal court in Manhattan.

At the time of Wyatt’s indictment in October, 2005, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said, “The Oil-For-Food Program was designed to provide humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people; these defendants undermined those relief efforts to line their own pockets with oil profits.”

He talked about nukes, Jews and occupation! I’ll get the transcript for you as soon as it is available…What was your take on his speech?

Reaction from the AP:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Tuesday that “the nuclear issue of Iran is now closed,” and indicated that Tehran will disregard U.N. Security Council resolutions imposed by “arrogant powers” and demanding suspension of its uranium enrichment.

Instead, he said, Iran has decided to pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program “through its appropriate legal path,” the International Atomic Energy Agency which is the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.

Transcript from WaPO:

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): They use various pretexts to occupy sovereign states and cause insecurity and division, and then use the prevailing situation as an excuse to continue their occupation.

For more than 60 years, Palestine, as compensation for the loss that they incurred during the war in Europe, has been under occupation of the illegal Zionist regime.

tsk tsk! Video here. AP says “Rudy would have seized the opportunity to toss in a “Cuba libre” for good measure.”

They days of the dictatorship of Fidel Castro are numbered.

UPDATE: The source says regardless of the NYPD’s rejection of the request for a Ground Zero tour, Iran’s president and his entourage will be accompanied by a Secret Service protective detail, a detail provided to all heads of state when they visit the United States.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani released the following statement on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

“Under no circumstances should the NYPD or any other American authority assist President Ahmadinejad in visiting Ground Zero. This is a man who has made threats against America and Israel, is harboring bin Laden’s son and other al-Qaeda leaders, is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents and is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. Assisting Ahmadinejad in touring Ground Zero - hallowed ground for all Americans - is outrageous.”

Senator Hillary Clinton released the following statement:

Michelle talked about it briefly last week, but has much more about a corruptocrat at the U.N.

U.S. authorities arrested a U.N. translator on suspicion of visa fraud on Monday, accusing him of using U.N. letterhead to bring foreigners into the United States for non-existent conferences.

Vyacheslav Manokhin, a Russian translator of documents at the New York headquarters, was arrested on Monday along with Vladimir Derevianko, who is accused of scheming with Manokhin to prepare false documents submitted to U.S. immigration officials, federal prosecutors said.

A third man, Kamiljan Tursunov, is accused of paying $15,000 for a fraudulent visa. He also faces conspiracy and fraud charges, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan said in a statement.

Tursunov already had been in custody for failing to appear at an immigration proceeding.

Think I’m joking?  LGF calls them “Rotten to its core”

Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which includes “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; and “Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” No other situation in the world is singled out — not genocide in Sudan, not child slavery in China, nor the persecution of democracy dissidents in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the council will entrench its one-sided investigative mandate of “Israeli violations of international law”—the only one not subject to regular review after a set term—by renewing it “until the end of the occupation.”

According to Nato that is:

NATO took command and co-ordination of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August 2003. ISAF is NATO’s first mission outside the Euro-Atlantic area. ISAF operates in Afghanistan under a UN mandate and will continue to operate according to current and future UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. ISAF’s mission was initially limited to Kabul. Resolution 1510 passed by the UNSC on 13 October 2003 opened the way to a wider role for ISAF to support the Government of Afghanistan beyond Kabul.

Kos doesn’t seem to grasp that.   I guess we shouldn’t let facts get our way!  Look what he has to say here about religion and politics:

The Bible is a wonderfully liberal text. And when it’s sincere it doesn’t come across so grating, so imposing. Compare Obama’s talking about religion to Bush’s “favorite philosopher” b.s. 

I’m a bit apprehensive about believing this, as the deal hinged on aid, and I agree with Bolten that this is rewarding bad behavior.  Here is the deal in a nutshell:

Under the deal, the North would receive initial aid equal to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil for shutting down and sealing its main nuclear reactor and related facilities at Yongbyon, north of the capital, within 60 days, to be confirmed by international inspectors. For irreversibly disabling the reactor and declaring all nuclear programs, the North will eventually receive another 950,000 tons in aid.

One million tons of oil would be equivalent to more than two-thirds of North Korea’s entire oil consumption in 2004, according figures in the CIA Factbook. Hill said the aid package was worth about $250 million.

** See Update courtesy of reader Gary 

So we are being told by the spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has been on the job for less than a month, but with a 26-word announcement Friday he did more to reform that international body than anything ever attempted by predecessor Kofi Annan.

“The Secretary-General will call for an urgent, system wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programs.” So said Mr. Ban’s spokesman after the Secretary-General met with Ad Melkert, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program. The key word here is “external.” Concerns about corruption in the U.N.’s Oil for Food program bubbled for years before Mr. Annan finally agreed to set up the independent Volcker Commission.