China angry at Taiwan's move to join UN

File under: No shit!

And Republicans hate HRC. Shocker.

Via Financial Times.

U.S.: Iran cooperation insufficient

That's right. Just keep stacking up the reasons why we should attack.

And keep pushing them as hard as possible. Ya never know, they might just do something so outrageous the US and rest of the world will cheer you on when you do attack.

A senior U.S. envoy dismissed increased Iranian willingness to answer questions about its nuclear program as a smoke screen on Wednesday and said it would not prevent the U.N. Security Council from imposing additional sanctions on Tehran.

"Iran is clearly trying to take the attention from its continued development of bomb-making capabilities, and I don't think the Security Council will be distracted," said Gregory L. Schulte, the chief U.S. delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency. "We are continuing to move forward with other members of the Security Council on a third resolution."

Via Boston Globe.

This Is Disgusting

From a 2002 interview with Ariel Sharon. Do you believe in malevolence? Just asking.

"Oh," Sharon said, "we'll make a pastrami sandwich of them." I said, "What?" He said, "Yes, we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart".

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Top UN court rules Serbia did not commit genocide

This is really just an FYI. Although the decision wasn't unanimous, it was pretty lopsided.

The top U.N. court ruled on Monday that Serbia did not commit genocide through the killing that ravaged Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but said Serbia had failed in its obligation to prevent and punish genocide.

The International Court of Justice President Judge Rosalyn Higgins said: "The court finds by 13 votes to 2 that Serbia has not committed genocide".

(read more)

A related item.

US Iran intelligence 'is incorrect'

So they're cooking the intelligence again. Wow, talk about your déjà vu.

What baffles me is why all the smoke and mirrors? Bush will attack Iran if he wants to and really couldn't care less what America or the rest of the world thinks about it.

Much of the intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by US spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, diplomatic sources in Vienna said today.

The claims, reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war, coincided with a sharp increase in international tension as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was defying a UN security council ultimatum to freeze its nuclear programme.

That report, delivered to the security council by the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, sets the stage for a fierce international debate on the imposition of stricter sanctions on Iran and raises the possibility that the US could resort to military action against Iranian nuclear sites.

At the heart of the debate are accusations - spearheaded by the US - that Iran is secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.
However, most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.

"Most of it has turned out to be incorrect," a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations said.

"They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities.

"Now [the inspectors] don't go in blindly. Only if it passes a credibility test."

One particularly contentious issue was records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the CIA said it found on a stolen laptop computer supplied by an informant inside Iran.

In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to IAEA officials, who judged it to be sufficiently specific to confront Iran.

Tehran rejected the material as forged, and there are still reservations within the IAEA about its authenticity, according to officials with knowledge of the internal debate in the agency.

"First of all, if you have a clandestine programme, you don't put it on laptops which can walk away," one official said. "The data is all in English which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi. So there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer."

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US to take in more Iraqi refugees

File under big fat fucking deal.

The Bush administration will allow 7,000 Iraqi refugees into the United States and says it will pay more to help Iraq's Arab neighbours cope with the human tide fleeing the violence and economic hardship.

The move comes after the US came under heavy criticism for taking in only 202 Iraqi refugees in 2006.

The State Department also said on Wednesday that it would offer $18 million to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to help displaced Iraqis.

It is estimated around four million Iraqis have fled their homes and their country as violence continues.

Bush's decision to invade and occupy a sovereign (why isn't it spelled sovren so I don't have to always look it up?) nation has driven 4,000,000 (count the zeros) Iraqis to leave and he's willing to accept 7,000 (count the zeros) refugees into the US? What a wonderful king.

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White House Opens Doors to Iraq Refugees

File under: Its about fucking time. Bush is creating the refugee problem without doing anything to help them. Of course Bush blames the UN.

The Bush administration plans to allow about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the United States over the next year, a huge expansion at a time of mounting international pressure to help millions who have fled their homes in the nearly four-year-old war.

Of course, 7,000 and even 20,000 are inadequate. Because the number is much larger according to this and this.

Truth is there are many thousand Iraqi refugees and the US won't let them come in.

It boggles the mind how Bush can fuck things up and completely ignore the plight of the people he has screwed. NOLA? Just asking.

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Sudan blocks U.N. human rights mission over envoy

Sometimes politics just fucking piss me off, but that just may be me.

Granted genocide is a major accusation, but I'm sorry, 200,000 dead probably qualifies whether the UN agrees with me or not. What is the UN threshold for labeling actions in a country genocide? Just asking.

And I don't expect an answer.

Sudan will not allow a U.N. human rights team to visit unless they replace a member of the delegation who Khartoum says is biased, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

A six-member U.N. rights team was due to arrive this week in Sudan to investigate alleged abuses in Darfur. But the government has said they will not get visas.

"We have ... issues about one specific person in the delegation," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali el-Sadig said.

"Before coming to Sudan this person made comments which were totally not objective and so this person is unacceptable to us and must be changed before this delegation will be allowed to enter Sudan."

Another source in the Foreign Ministry said Sudan objected to the presence of Guyanese Bertrand Ramcharan, the former U.N. deputy high commissioner for human rights.

"He made comments referring to genocide and saying the government needed to do more right after he was appointed," the source told Reuters.

Sima Samar, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan, visited Darfur last August. The Geneva-based U.N. rights council has been criticised for its ineffectiveness on Darfur.

Washington calls the four years of rape, murder and pillage in Darfur genocide, a term Khartoum rejects and European governments have been reluctant to use.

A U.N.-appointed commission of inquiry found no genocide, but said heinous war crimes no less serious than genocide had taken place in Darfur. It also said individuals may have acted with genocidal intent.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is due to present its first case on Darfur this month. Experts estimate 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes.

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Here We Go Again

I may not be original, but I'm honest (sort of). This is stolen wholly from Lawrence of Cyberia.

[O]n 12 September 2002, two-thirds of the way through George W. Bush's virtual declaration of war against Iraq, there came a dangerous tell-tale code which suggested that he really did intend to send his tanks across the Tigris River. "The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people," he told us in the U.N. General Assembly. In the press gallery, nobody stirred. Below us, not a diplomat shifted in his seat. The speech had already rambled on for twenty minutes but the speechwriters must have known what this meant when they cobbled it together.

Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America "has no quarrel with the Libyan people." Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States "has no quarrel with the Iraqi people." In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he "has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan." And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said - absolutely none - with the Iraqi people.

So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it's flak jackets on...

-- Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, Chapter 12 paragraphs 1 & 2

Great ally ya got there, Bush

These are the dogs Bush decides to lie down with? Kewl. Perhaps you champion them because you would like the same protections.

The United Nations office in Afghanistan has voiced strong opposition to the Afghan parliament's approval of a bill granting immunity to war-criminals and exempting them from judicial proceedings.

The parliament, with a strong warlord presence and after a week of heated debates, approved a bill Wednesday that grants immunity to all individuals involved in atrocities in the past two-and-a-half decades, including the Taliban and war criminals from the country's 1992-1996 civil war.

No sane person thinks its right to excuse atrocities for Christ sake. Got it?

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Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Now who in the world would do something like that? Can you say ExxonMobil through the American Enterprise Institute? I new you could.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

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