Left: UNRWA photo, Jan. 27. 2015, of girl in Syria
Right: Same UNRWA photo, May 29, 2017, but now she's "Aya from Gaza" oppressed by Israel pic.twitter.com/RwMJwwXvpM— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) June 2, 2017
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For more than a year, a United Nations agency in Geneva has been helping North Korea prepare an international patent application for production of sodium cyanide — a chemical used to make the nerve gas Tabun — which has been on a list of materials banned from shipment to that country by the U.N. Security Council since 2006.
The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, has made no mention of the application to the Security Council committee monitoring North Korea sanctions, nor to the U.N. Panel of Experts that reports sanctions violations to the committee, even while concerns about North Korean weapons of mass destruction, and the willingness to use them, have been on a steep upward spiral.
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#Venezuela
Protesters killed: 37
Injured: 700
Political prisoners: 114@UN_HRC reaction:
Urgent sessions: 0
Resolutions: 0
Inquiries: 0— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) May 10, 2017
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U.N. Elects Saudi Arabia to Women’s Rights Commission, For 2018-2022 Term.
Turtle Swamp
The State Department said on Monday it was ending U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund, the international body’s agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries.
In a letter to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, the State Department said it was dropping the funding because the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
The cut marks U.S. President Donald Trump’s first move to curtail funding for the United Nations and is likely to raise further questions about how deep those cuts will eventually go throughout the organization, where the United States is the top donor.
Turtle Swamp
After years of being shuttled to the back of the proverbial bus, folks in the Jewish community, plus all who value freedom and decency, are breathing sighs of sweet relief. Say what you will about the administration of President Trump, its insiders have the Jewish state’s back.
With Haley’s ascent to the top of this country’s diplomatic heap, high-ranking UN officials and ambassadors are shaking in their Italian loafers.
Turtle Swamp
President Trump’s administration has told the State Department to cut more than 50 percent of U.S. funding to United Nations programs, Foreign Policy reported.
The push for the drastic reductions comes as the White House is scheduled to release its 2018 topline budget proposal Thursday, which is expected to include a 37 percent cut to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budgets.
It’s not clear if Trump’s budget plan, from the Office of Management and Budget, would reflect the full extent of Trump’s proposed cuts to the U.N.
[…] Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the alterations would spark “chaos” if true.
“[It would] leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” he told FP, pointing to how the U.S. provided $1.5 billion of the U.N. refugee agency’s $4 billion budget last year.
Oh boo hoo.
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Turtle Swamp
Turtle Swamp
“You’re going to see a change in the way we do business,” Ms. Haley said. “Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N., and the way we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure our allies have our back as well.”
“For those who don’t have our back,” she added, “we’re taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly.”
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All the right people are beginning to ask:
Congress is already setting the stage to cut off U.S. funding to the United Nations in the wake of a contested vote last week in which the Obama administration permitted an anti-Israel resolution to win overwhelming approval, according to congressional leaders, who told the Washington Free Beacon that the current administration is already plotting to take further action against the Jewish state before vacating office.
Other punitive actions by Congress could include expelling Palestinian diplomats from U.S. soil and scaling back ties with foreign nations that voted in favor of the controversial measure, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Free Beacon about the situation both on and off the record.
More.
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It will go down as one of the great failures of the Harper government that they did not resign Canada’s membership in the United Nations when they had the chance.
Furious Israeli politicians accused the UN’s cultural arm of anti-Semitism Thursday in the wake of a resolution approved by UNESCO that erases the Jewish connection the Jerusalem holy sites.
Lawmakers from both the right and left of the political spectrum said the decision, which refers to the Temple Mount and Western Wall only by their Muslim names and condemns Israel as “the occupying power” for various actions taken in both places, was ill-befitting of UNESCO.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the decision “absurd,” while President Reuven Rivlin called it an “embarrassment” for UNESCO. The Executive Board of UNESCO is next week set to approve the resolution, which passed Thursday at the committee stage.
Culture Minister Miri Regev slammed the resolution as “shameful and anti-Semitic,” and Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel called for Israel to increase the Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, a flashpoint site governed by a tense status quo, in response.
“To say that Israel has no link to the Temple Mount is like saying that China has no link to the Great Wall or that Egypt has no connection to the Pyramids,” Netanyahu said, adding that “with this absurd decision UNESCO has lost what little legitimacy it still had.”
Why Is There Always A Big Screen TV?
In Canada, the outcome of adopting the UN declaration may be less bloody, but it surely won’t be free from conflict. Until the Trudeau government came along, Ottawa’s major concern about endorsing the declaration was that it could be seen as giving First Nations (and possibly Métis people) the right to veto any development that affects them. Given how difficult it already is for ordinary industrial projects to navigate the objections of special interest groups, including First Nations, that’s an especially well-founded concern. The prime minister has already frustrated the energy sector by adding extra complications to the federal review process to indulge the green lobby. By endorsing the UN’s declaration, he may enhance his personal brand of being soft on issues where the Tories came off steely, but he will also certainly make it more difficult to get things built in this country.
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What caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic? The CDC museum knows but won’t say.

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Hates Israel, hates the west — he has all the right qualifications:
Pro-Palestinian legal expert Canadian Michael Lynk is the UN Human Rights Council's (UNHRC) new nominee to the post of special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. [...] He will then be tasked with examining allegations of Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
h/t Adrian
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The bureaucrats are always the last to know;
Six years ago, I became an assistant secretary general, posted to the headquarters in New York. I was no stranger to red tape, but I was unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic that govern the place. If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.
He leaves the rapes and killings for further on down the column.
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You remember UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a.k.a. the UN outfit with schools in Gaza that have doubled as rocket depots for terrorists attacking Israel. Opened in 1950 as a temporary jobs and aid program for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has become an ever-expanding fixture of the UN and the Middle East, a de facto patron of Hamas in Gaza, and welfare-dispenser for what is today a population of some 5 million “registered Palestinian refugees” — a project that down the generations has helped foster both a Palestinian culture of grievance and dependency, and money and jobs for UNRWA itself. At the UN, all other refugees come under the aegis of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which seeks to resettle them. Only the Palestinians have a dedicated agency that has turned refugee status into a bizarre form of hereditary entitlement.
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UN Watch’s Top 10 Worst U.N. Decisions of 2015
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US quietly maneuvers to cut UN dues
There is cautious hope among diplomats that the U.S. can chip away at least marginally at the U.N.’s “scale of assessments”– a dues system loaded in favor of many poor and not-so-poor countries that pay less than their fair share, and saddle the small number of rich countries — especially the U.S. — with the difference.
h/t peterj
Emulating A Corrupt, Third World Dictator To The End
Ding, dong. “There were no immediate details about where and when Strong died.”
Say, @SusanDelacourt – can you point me to obit mentioning Strong's ties to UN Oil For Food corruption scandal? #journalism #cdnpoli
— Katewerk (@katewerk) November 29, 2015
Background here.
