UNICEF has arranged a world record breaking queue for the toilet to raise awareness of World Water Day and the need for clean water across the globe.
The United Nations Children's Fund reported that 756 people queued up for the commode in the Belgian capital of Brussels.
I think anyone who's been to a crowded outdoor event might feel like a line queue of 756 people is nothing. But for many in the developing world, access to clean water, or to decent facilities, is not even available, queue or no queue.
As for these patient folks, after all that waiting, they didn't even get to use the toilet -- it was a fake.
image from flickr user gavinandrewstewart under a Creative Commons license>
In Mexico today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States and Mexico have a shared responsibility for combating organized criminal groups in Mexico. The demand for drugs here in the United States -- and the supply of weapons from the States to Mexico -- are contributing to instability south of the U.S. border.
As it happens, Susan Ginsburg of the Migration Policy Institute is an expert on guns smuggling. She explained how, exactly, guns purchased in the United States end up in the hands of Mexican organized criminal groups.
Her recommendations include fairly small-bore changes to existing gun laws in the United States. No doubt, however, these changes would be opposed every step of the way by the National Rifle Association.
In January, a Somali national working for the UN's World Food Program, Ibrahim Hussein Duale, was shot and killed. Murdering aid workers is, unfortunately, not uncommon in Somalia; what would be more unusual is for the perpetrator to be brought to justice. And even more unusual would be if the party dispensing justice were itself an extremist militant group with a history of killing UN aid workers. Yet...
An Islamic court in southern Somalia on Tuesday sentenced a man who had killed a United Nations aid worker to pay the victim’s family 100 female camels as compensation. The defendant pleaded guilty to the murder of a senior World Food Program official. The trial took place in a region that is under the control of the Shabab, a hard-line Islamist group, and its allies.
I suppose it's also unusual that payment in 100 female camels is the method of meting out justice, but that is no small sum. And this is a group that routinely kills UN aid workers that we're talking about.
(image from flickr user Somali Nomad under a Creative Commons license)
Ban Ki Moon and Gordon Brown talk to reporters after a meeting at the United Nations. The Secretary General outlines four steps that the G-20 can take to help low and middle income countries cope with the crisis. Meanwhile, PM Brown says the era of the "Washington Consensus" is firmly over. Watch.
From Ban:
I outlined to the Prime Minister the four areas where I believe G-20 countries need to show strong leadership: First, G-20 countries should commit to sustaining an international stimulus package, on top of their own national stimulus packages. This international stimulus needs to be of a very substantial size, commensurate with the challenge.
It needs to comprise aid for the poorest and most vulnerable countries, long-term public lending from the multilateral development banks, and liquidity support not only to least developed countries but also middle income developing countries.
This comprehensive package will be possible if existing commitments are met, including those made in Gleneagles to increase aid, and new resources are also mobilized.
Second, we agreed on the need to stand firm against protectionism and reinvigorate the Doha trade round so that it delivers real benefits for developing countries.
Third, we agreed that G-20 leaders must support a greening of the global economy, including in poorer countries, and that they should commit themselves to sealing a deal at climate talks in Copenhagen in December this year.
Finally, we discussed how to reform global rules and institutions so that they reflect today's economic and political landscape.
I am hopeful that the London Summit meeting can send a signal of solidarity and hope to all peoples and countries of the world.
Tomorrow, the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency will select a new Director, to replace Mohamed ElBaradei, who is concluding his third term in the position. None of the candidates has as much of a public profile of ElBaradei, who has won a Nobel Peace Prize and was often a controversial figure for opposing the Bush Administration’s more hawkish approach toward Iran’s nuclear program. But then, at the start of his tenure 12 years ago, neither did ElBaradei, really. Funny how leading the world's nuclear regulator will do that to someone.
The election tomorrow will likely come down to the Japanese ambassador to the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, and his South African counterpart, Abdul Samad Minty. The vote will likely be tight, with Amano expected to attract Western support and Minty to get much from developing countries. Amano is said to be in the lead, but perhaps with not enough votes in the 35-member body to claim the required 2/3 supermajority. Japan exerts no small amount of clout, as they are the IAEA's (and the UN's) second-largest contributor and evidently "take UN appointments very seriously" (as if South Africa doesn’t?).
Both Amano and Minty seem qualified to take up what is really a very difficult position -- one that, all things considered, ElBaradei handled very well. The IAEA General's position is, rather awkwardly, simultaneously political and apolitical. As a monitoring body, the IAEA undertakes a scientific and investigative role, eschewing any particular agenda. As South Africa's Minty admitted, though, given that it reports to the Security Council, which then takes action based on its information, the IAEA "by its very nature has a political role." And its elections seem just as political.
UPDATE: Results are in...and still no winner.
(image of Yukiya Amano, 2005)
Mike Gerson thinks that "Bashir change" might be a better answer than "regime change" to get aid flowing in Sudan again. Pending a tyrant's change in heart, this seems like a fig leaf.
Martin Bursik, the Czech Republic's deputy prime minister, urges the EU -- of which his country is currently president -- not to worry about the infamously climate change-denying pronouncements of the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus. His position on the issue, Bursik points out, brings no clout whatsoever -- which this card-carrying Green party member actually does, as the president of the EU's environment council (even if his country's government just collapsed.
In Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills argue the counter-intuitive proposition that "Congo does not exist." Maybe not, but I don't think a bunch of "Congwanda"-type entities will dissuade neighbors from violating its sovereignty and plundering its minerals, either.
North Korea is upset that the UN Security Council is more than a little curious about the "satellite" that the country plans to launch in a couple weeks.
"It is perversity to say satellite launch technology cannot be distinguished from a long-range missile technology and so must be dealt with by the U.N. Security Council, which is like saying a kitchen knife is no different from a bayonet," state media quoted a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
Well, except that the rocket being used to launch the satellite -- the Taepodong 2 -- is the same that is used to launch missiles. Missile launching, of course, falls directly in the purview of current UN Security Council sanctions on the DPRK. So it seems like the Foreign Ministry spokesman's analogy was a little off; unless North Korea makes it a habit of attaching kitchen knives to a rifle body, then it seems that what differs here is more like what kind of bullet is being used.
This seems like at least a legitimate concern for inquiry by the Security Council. And North Korea's bluster about ending the six-party talks in the face of a Council response certainly isn't in the interests of peace. Given the high priority of sustaining these talks, though, coupled with North Korea's allies on the Council and the obstinance with which it has pursued its missile program, there do not appear to be many sticks in the offing.
One strategy that might not be a good idea: Japan shooting down the rocket, creating a bunch of debris that it won’t know what to do with. North Korea has promised this would be "an act of war," and the Japanese foreign minister has rather disturbingly admitted that "Our country has not done this before. We don't know how or where it will fly."
Let's hope that it is just a DirecTV satellite, after all.
(images from flickr users IceSabre and idua_japan, respectively, under a Creative Commons license)
Local media is reporting that former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark will head the United Nations Development Program. TV NZ says this is "the most powerful position held by a New Zealander on the world stage for more than a decade."
UNDP is the world's main coordinating body for economic development. They have programs on the ground in 166 countries, and the UNDP country head usually serves as the coordinator of all international economic development projects in the country. Outside the UN, UNDP is probably best known for publishing the Human Development Report.
Helen Clark will be the first female head of UNDP, which is significant because empowering women in the developing world is among UNDP's most important missions. Here's hoping for a renewed and sustained focus on the so-called "girl-effect."
Congressman Ed Royce has certainly latched onto Dambisa Moyo's new aid-indicting book (even if he spells her name wrong). I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with Royce's cry of foul on this one though:
Congress may be gearing-up for a rewrite of the foreign aid law. Rewrite supporters are certainly correct that our foreign aid system is broken. They point to the mushrooming number of objectives, priorities, and directives that slice the foreign aid pie. Yet those saying the system is broken are usually also campaigning to double foreign aid. As Moyo points out, "calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year." President Obama's budget proposes to double foreign aid spending over five years. Double down on a broken system? That doesn't square.
Reforming foreign aid and increasing foreign aid are not mutually exclusive propositions. Even granting an Easterly-like critique of the negative ramifications of aid (which, Paul Collier would argue, is "something of a sideshow" to the real questions of African underdevelopment), I can't concede that scrapping the whole system would be a good idea. Western assistance is certainly not a long-term solution for Africa, but deployed correctly, and with sufficient attention, it can help alleviate the predicament of the millions of people on the continent living in poverty.