In a candid session on energy and the environment at the Clinton Global Initiative yesterday, the world’s lead climate negotiator Christiana Figueres explained why her organization, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), had made so little progress in establishing international climate protection regulations.
How one small border town is a bellwether for the way relations between north and south are headed as the South Sudan independence referendum approaches.
An audio transcript of a press conference in which our friends at the UN Foundation preview next week's UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals.
A political milestone has just been marked in Guinea: the campaign for the first round of the presidential election was launched yesterday, the first free and open competition for the country’s top leadership post since independence in 1958. The first round of the election is scheduled for June 27, with a potential second round slated to occur 2 weeks later, should no absolute majority emerge from the first round of voting.
The elected president of Nigeria, Umaru Yar’Adua, passed away last night. Yar’Adua had not been seen in public since he fell ill last November and was subsequently transfered to Saudia Arabia for medical treatment.
The news today brings us two optimistic articles on the African economy.
Last week, the board of the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) decided to remove Equatorial Guinea - still merely a candidate for full membership - from the group for failing to meet the deadline to have audits of their industries independently verified. The EITI, launched in 2003, is a joint effort by companies, governments and civil society to instill transparency and promote good governance in the extractive industries sector.
With the security climate in Somalia showing no signs of improvement, hundreds of thousands of Somali citizens have been displaced since early 2010. The UNHCR estimates there are currently 1.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Somalia, and this trend is on the increase. The ongoing fighting in Mogadishu and other locations has caused nearly 170,000 residents to flee since the beginning of the year, according to the UNHCR.
