WASHINGTON - Unable to win Senate confirmation, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton will step down when his recess appointment expires soon, the White House said Monday.

Bolton’s nomination has languished in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a year, blocked by Democrats and several Republicans.

President Bush gave Bolton the job temporarily in August 2005, while Congress was in recess. But the appointment expires when Congress formally adjourns, no later than early January.
Source
More here, from the Washington Post

The UN says Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu will lead its fact-finding mission into Beit Hanoun where 19 Palestinians died in Israeli shelling on 8 November.

The mission aims to “recommend ways to protect Palestinian civilians against further Israeli attacks”, the UN says.

Israel has said the strike, which hit a civilian area in the Gaza Strip town, was due to a “technical failure”.

Mr Tutu - the winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against apartheid in South Africa - will present his findings by the middle of December, the Geneva-based council said.

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WASHINGTON (CNN)

This is probably not what President Bush had in mind when he stressed bipartisanship after the Democratic Party’s midterm elections sweep.

A key Senate Republican has joined Democrats in opposing one of Bush’s initiatives for the lame-duck Congress: John Bolton’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

With leaders from both parties promising a new bipartisan Washington, Bush began efforts to get two of his most controversial decisions approved before the Democrats take over.

Along with Bolton’s nomination, Bush said he would like to move forward on legislation to retroactively authorize the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.

Bush said he would like to see action on both issues before year’s end. The Democratic-controlled Congress begins its term in January.

But Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who was defeated in this week’s election, said he would block Bolton’s nomination.

Chafee, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that he did not believe Bolton’s nomination would move forward without his support.

“The American people have spoken out against the president’s agenda on a number of fronts, and presumably one of those is on foreign policy,” the Rhode Island moderate told The Associated Press.

“And at this late stage in my term, I’m not going to endorse something the American people have spoke out against.”

The committee, dominated 10-8 by Republicans, requires a majority vote to send the nomination to the Senate floor. A tie would be the same as a no vote.

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US VETO OF GAZA RESOLUTION CRITICISED

The Arab League has criticised the United States for blocking a UN Security Council resolution that sought to condemn Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

The US used its veto to halt the draft resolution, sponsored by the Gulf state of Qatar, that criticised the Israeli tank shelling of a home in Beit Hanoun on Wednesday in which seven children and four women were killed as they slept.

Amr Musa, the Arab League secretary general, said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the US move and said: “This veto will only increase anger.

“It is inexplicable that a veto can be used to protect Israeli actions against civilians.”

He said the Arab world would not accept peace with Israel unless it was “just and balanced.”

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ARABS LIFT PALESTINIAN FINANCIAL BLOCKADE

Arab countries have agreed to lift the financial blockade on the Palestinians after the US vetoing of a draft United Nations resolution condemning the recent Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary-general, said at a meeting of the organisation in Cairo on Sunday: “There will be no compliance with any restriction imposed … The Arab banks have to transfer money [to the Palestinians].

“Our message is loud and clear to those who take unfriendly positions against Arabs.”

The US and European-led imposition of economic sanctions, along with an Israeli refusal to release revenues it collects on the Palestinians behalf, have severely damaged the Palestinian economy and have led to protests by civil servants who have gone unpaid for months.

Arab banks have not transferred funds to the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority amid concerns of incurring US-led penalties.

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There will be no peace in the Middle East until this shit stops.

UNITED NATIONS - The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council draft resolution Saturday that sought to condemn an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and demand Israeli troops pull out the territory.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the Arab-backed draft resolution was “biased against Israel and politically motivated.”

“This resolution does not display an evenhanded characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously,” he told the Security Council.

By Doreen Hemlock
Havana Bureau
Posted November 9 2006

HAVANA · A record 183 countries of the United Nations voted Wednesday to condemn the U.S. embargo against communist-led Cuba, with one country abstaining and only three others joining the United States to endorse the tough economic sanctions.

Cuba called the vote a diplomatic triumph, marking 15 straight years that the U.N. General Assembly has rejected the embargo and urged Washington to lift it.

Indeed, Havana declared “double victory,” because an amendment proposed by Australia to condemn human rights violations in Cuba was rejected from the embargo resolution. Even so, Cuban leaders have said they expect no let-up in the sanctions, as long as George W. Bush remains in the White House.

Read more at the Sun Sentinel

Appoint him to another government job? How about you just fire his ass!!

Reuters
November 09, 2006
John Bolton’s troubled nomination as US ambassador to the UN is “going nowhere,” a key Democratic senator said today after Democrats scored big in mid-term elections.

Joseph Biden of Delaware is expected to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if Democratic control of the US Senate is formally confirmed.

“I never saw a real enthusiasm (for Bolton’s nomination) on the Republican side to begin with. There’s none on our side. And I think John Bolton’s going nowhere,” he told reporters.

Bolton, the controversial former undersecretary of state in charge of non-proliferation, was nominated by President George W. Bush to be UN envoy in March last year.

But after his confirmation was blocked in the Republican-led Senate, Bush made a recess appointment, which will last until the new Congress convenes in January 2007.

After Tuesday’s elections Democrats now control the US House of Representatives and probably the Senate as well.

Before voters cast their ballots, there was talk of Bush re’submitting Bolton’s nomination.

Another possibility was having Bush appoint Bolton to another US government job so he could still be paid but assigning him to work at the UN.

Senate Democratic aides said they did not know if such a move would be legal.

Source here

Three Palestinians have been killed in Gaza on the fifth day of Israel’s offensive in the territory.
Palestinian officials said the deaths came in separate incidents - bringing the toll since Wednesday to nearly 50.
Earlier, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert declined to say when the operation would end, but insisted Israel had no intention of reoccupying the Strip.
Israel says it is targeting militants but Palestinian officials accuse Israel of a “massacre“.
Israeli forces have made regular incursions into Gaza and the West Bank following the capture of an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid by Palestinian militants on 25 June.

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Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has called the operation a “massacre” and urged the UN Security Council to convene to discuss the issue.
At least 17 people died on Friday, including two women shot during the siege of a mosque in Beit Hanoun.
A PA employee told the BBC it was the worst Israeli incursion they had ever had into the town.
Ibrahim al-Za’anin, 55, said they had been without electricity or water since Tuesday night, and no longer felt safe in their own homes.

A senior UN official given Israeli permission to enter described the atmosphere as one of death, destruction and despair.

full article here

This detainee bill is going to come back to bite us in the ass…..over and over and over and over. It’s already begun!

UNITED NATIONS - Some countries try to rebut criticism of how they treat prisoners by saying they are only following the U.S. example on handling terrorism suspects, a U.N. human rights expert said Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the United Nations investigator on torture, told a news conference that “all too frequently” governments responded to criticism about their jails by saying they handled detainees the same way the United States did.

“The United States has been the pioneer of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world,” Nowak said. “Today, other governments are kind of saying, ‘But why are you criticizing us; we are not doing something different than what the United States is doing.’ ”

He said nations such as Jordan tell him, “We are collaborating with the United States, so it can’t be wrong if it is also done by the United States.”

Read more at the LA Times

Iraq’s prime minister has barred the Health Ministry from releasing alarming casualty figures that showed violence in Iraq was killing 100 civilians a day and provided a rare insight into the worsening sectarian conflict, according to an internal U.N. memo obtained Friday.

The memo from top U.N. envoy for Iraq Ashraf Qazi to several senior U.N. officials said Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s office had twice instructed the ministry not to release the numbers to the United Nations and that his office would now be responsible for releasing any such information.

The U.N. mission in Iraq had published the Health Ministry’s numbers in its bimonthly reports about the human rights situation in Iraq. The figures were seen as one of the rare reliable indicators of the civilian suffering in Iraq - and U.N. officials even suspected they have underreported the actual number of civilian deaths.

The figures gained widespread international attention in July, when they showed that some 6,000 Iraqi civilians had died over the previous two months, or about 100 people a day, the victims of assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and torture. In the next report, released in September, the civilian death figures painted an even grimmer picture, showing civilian deaths had risen to an all-time high of 6,599 for July and August.

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Many nations with the highest levels of hunger are also gripped by violent conflicts or civil wars, a report has shown.

Armed groups are using hunger as a weapon by cutting off food supplies, destroying crops and hijacking relief aid, the Global Hunger Index suggests.

The 119-nation study describes South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as the worst “hunger hotspots”.

The findings have been published to coincide with the UN World Food Day.

The five nations topping the index are all sub-Saharan African nations that are either emerging from long-running civil wars or are still involved in conflicts with neighbouring nations.

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Those 5 sub-Saharan nations are:
Burundi
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Democratic Republic of Congo
Sierra Leone

Global Hunger Index map, this one from UNICEF/2005

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was founded in 1945 and on October 16th of each year since attention is called to world hunger. FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy and to share knowledge and information. Of course this is the ideal that rarely reaches a fruition of offering food to extended bony hands.

Hunger is not adequate to describe the ravages of starvation. We all have the extreme images in our minds of stunted bodies, of leathery brown flesh stretched taunt over bone, bellies distended, wasted muscle that cannot support scant weight, vacant eyes that reflect dying brains. This is not merely hunger; this is death by degrees for want of the smallest amounts of nutrition.

The UN World Food Programme statistics are staggering. There is enough food in the world to feed the world, yet:

800 million people are hungry
200 million children under the age of 5 are underweight
Every 5 seconds a child dies from starvation

Africa, particularly central Africa, is for the most part where the images like the one above are produced. Insects, drought, floods, war war war, separate generation upon generation from the basic necessities to sustain a healthy body. Even when the conditions are favorable, AIDS has decimated families and left children to fend for themselves without the knowledge or stamina to farm. When farming is possible, hunger is often held at temporary bay by eating the seeds intended for the next growing season.

The UN WFP has produced this inter-active map to show the extent of hunger in the world. Here are some of the WFP projects.

Most shameful is the fact that we need look no farther than our own wealthy country to find hunger. America’s Second Harvest has completed an authoritative and comprehensive national study on hunger and the various agencies that work to meet the need. This map will direct you to individual state programs.

If you want to offer time or money to help the global devastation of hunger, a simple Google search will take you to a wide range of opportunities too numerous to include here. However, I will highlight two large organizations that I champion: Oxfam and Heifer International. HI is a favorite because it offers a unique and inexpensive way to help and the satisfaction of your dollars providing honeybees or sheep or chickens or a goat to help lift a family or a community from poverty…well, it’s a damn good feeling.

Unexploded Israeli bombs and devices dropped during Israel’s war on Hezbollah have killed 21 and injured more than 100 Lebanese civilians.

The unexploded bombs, mostly sub munitions, landed indiscriminately in civilian areas, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Sunday.

The OCHA said it had recorded 608 areas where cluster munitions landed, “with more locations being identified every day”.

UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland in August said it was “completely immoral … that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict when it was clear a UN resolution was about to bring about a ceasefire”.

Lebanese police said that 21 people had been killed by the bomblets, including 16 civilians and five army bomb-disposal experts, since the 34-day conflict ended on August 14.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the Israeli army fired at least 1.2 million rockets into Lebanon during the conflict.

The cluster bombs used by Israel contain hundreds of bomblets which are dispersed over a large area. Those that do not explode on impact turn into lethal anti-personnel mines.

Cluster munitions are controversial, as human-rights groups say they cause indiscriminate civilian casualties over large areas.

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This is a small snippet of the Senator’s speech to the 2006 Voter Values Summit. If you have the stomach for it, you can read more here. (this is a great site btw)

And so - get the scene now - back, that was, the ilk, the, the idea of this is that the, the, the climate is changing, it’s going up, and it’s due not to actual causes but due to the release of CO2 and what they call anthropogenic gasses. Man made gasses. The motive of this is to try to shut down this machine called America, stop building, stop - y’know - driving around and all these things and so - ah, anyway - we were just about to sign the Kyoto treaty when I became chairman of the committee that Gil talked about in his introduction, its called Environment and Public Works. Now, in this committee we have jurisdiction over this, uh, all these areas, so I thought “we need find out what the truth is about the Global Warming.

So the question above about Senator Inhofe above is a rhetorical one. He is a crazed lunatic to say the least.

Bush will kill me: Chavez

From correspondents in Caracas
September 24, 2006 06:30am
Article from: Agence France-Presse

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez accused his American counterpart George W. Bush overnight of ordering his assassination for calling the US leader the devil during his speech at the United Nations this week.

“The devil appears very sulphurous, and a few people say that he has given the order to kill me,” Chavez said during a speech before scientists in western Venezuela.

“Many concerned friends have called me, (saying) that because I said ‘devil’ over there (at the UN), they have sentenced me to die. They will not kill me, I have much faith in life,” Mr Chavez added.

The leftist Venezuelan leader called Mr Bush “the devil”, “a liar” and a “tyrant” during his speech at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, one day after the US President spoke from the same podium.

Mr Chavez again showed a copy of Hegemony or Survival overnight, a book by US academic Noam Chomsky that he had first held up during his address to the UN assembly.

He said he had to wash the book “with holy water because I put it in the same place that the devil put his papers.”

NEWS.com.au has this article

Hugo, might not hurt to keep your back to the wall… and make sure those doors and windows are locked!