The abhorrent -- not just "controversial" -- law that the Afghan government passed, and President Hamid Karzai signed, then sent back to the Justice Ministry for review, will evidently be amended. Karzai spoke with Afghan women's groups yesterday, and his excuse -- that he "did not know all the contents of the law" -- seems disturbingly underwhelming, even if the statute was written in "complicated Islamic theological language." Surely Karzai did notice the rocks and insults hurled at Afghan women who did protest the law, and it will at least a welcome development when (or if) the law is wholly repealed.
Russia Today has an interview with Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who is perhaps most remembered for not having enough time to look for weapons of mass destruction leading the weapons inspections team in Iraq prior to the invasion. Here he talks non-proliferation and urges moving beyond a Cold War mentality (calling the "League of Democracies" a "useless idea"). Candid about the flaws and benefits of the UN, he calls the body a "village council for the world" and argues that it is not an outdated institution.
Kenneth Anderson thinks not:
Among the interviews I participated in as one of the experts on the Gingrich-Mitchell UN reform commission back in 2005 was one with a senior WHO official. I asked him - this was not long after SARS in Hong Kong - whether he thought it would be helpful if the WHO were able to have a mandate from the Security Council treating pandemics or epidemics that might be a serious concern (like SARS or swine flu) as something susceptible to Security Council orders that mandated implementation of recommendations of WHO. Shouldn’t WHO be able to appeal to the Security Council or the political bodies of the UN in order to be able to have the greatest legitimacy to order forcible measures to prevent the spread of a serious epidemic disease?
His look was one of utter consternation and horror, and he asked me please not to propose such an idea under any circumstances. (And I’m not proposing that here, because I think he’s right.)
In his view, the success that WHO had with SARS, in getting Hong Kong and China generally to go along with what were, from a political standpoint, draconian and costly measures, was entirely a function of the whole crisis not being politicized. (Update: I mean here once past the refusal of authorities in China even to recognize what was happening - which, certainly, can be understood as far more important than what happened next.) Of course, in one sense it was political - shutting down HK internally and cutting it off via the airports to the rest of the world - but these measures were proposed and undertaken by reasonably non-political technocrats on an issue that involved, on the one hand, purely medical issues but which also required very difficult and, because of all the contingencies, never fully provable, estimations of cost and benefit from various public health measures. How long HK and China would have sustained such measures is unknown. But whatever that period of time was, in this functionary’s view, the legitimacy needed to sustain these policies - costly in direct and indirect terms - was of a kind dependent on it being seen as apolitical in some important sense. Not all senses, obviously - economic costs weighed against public health unknowns being political always - but not in the sense of the Security Council trying to make it into a matter of international peace and security.
Read the whole post.
President Obama says "If there is ever a day that reminds us of our shared stake in science and research, it is today." Watch.
Today is the final day of the controversial Durban Review Conference on anti-racism, and, as I've discussed a bit before, so begins the campaign to shape the conference in the public memory. As with "Durban I," and as in the run-up to this week's summit in Geneva, the voices intent on smearing the conference will likely be louder, more strident, and more tendentious in arguing their already foregone conclusions. What I've noticed, though, is that this is exactly what the almost two-year campaign of denigrating the Review Conference has been -- an effort, not at all apolitical, to ensure that, before it even started, the conference would be branded in the public mind as irredeemably racist, hate-mongering, and anti-Semitic.
I am not exonerating the conference of its flaws, nor watering down the distastefulness of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inexcusable attempt at provocation. Certain participants still -- foolishly -- used their brief time at the podium to slander Israel. But all in all, as, again, this Zvika Krieger dispatch for The New Republic demonstrates, the reality for those expecting a virulent anti-Semitic hatefest was underwhelming.
As I've said, and as Zvika too pointed out, much of this has to do with explicit steps taken by the conference's organizers: they did not hold a separate NGO forum, the locus for the majority of attacks in 2001; they moved the conference's venue to Geneva, where cracking down on extremist NGOs would be more effective; and they learned their lessons, and came to agreement over a legitimate compromise document early in the process.
Secretary of State Clinton.
Remember: during the campaign, President Obama pledged that as president he would commit the United States to ending deaths from malaria by 2015.
A number of news organizations are reporting on a leaked UN document that puts the death toll from fighting in Sri Lanka at close to 6,500 since January, with approximately 14,000 wounded. The victims are ethnic Tamils trapped between the LTTE insurgent group and a Sri Lankan government hell-bent on delivering one final blow to the murderous LTTE. According to the leaked UN document, an average of 35 civilians have been killed a day since January. In April the average death toll jumped to 116 civilians killed everyday.
This, ladies and gentleman, is the first man-made humanitarian crisis of the Obama era. It ain't pretty.
New anti-malaria vaccine: good.
Possibility of 10,000 30,000 42,000 1,042,000 bed nets being donated to Nothing But Nets on this World Malaria Day: good.
Dangerous new malaria strain found on the Cambodian-Thai border: bad. But also makes the first two all the more important.
Ashton Kutcher isn't cool just because he's one of the few stars in Hollywood who played high school football. And he isn't cool because he recently promised to ding-dong ditch Ted Turner's house. He's cool because he just donated 10,000 nets at $10 a piece to stop the spread of malaria in Africa. Kutcher did it to celebrate becoming the first person to reach 1 million followers on Twitter, which inspired CNN to donate 10,000 nets, which got Oprah Winfrey to pitch in 20,000 nets. Perfect with World Malaria Day Saturday, April 25. But what if all million of Kutcher's Twitter-ers gave a net? That would be a million more lives saved! Now Turner has posed a challenge: If 10,000 more people join the Nothing But Nets campaign—the program I helped found with the United Nations Foundation—he's going to have Kutcher and his wife, Demi Moore, over for lunch If that happens, I'll donate 2,000 more nets myself. And do the dishes.
Here's how you can make it happen.