Open Sources: Ban Ki-Moon Reelected, World Yawns
Apparently, no other candidates were willing to sign all-important that “I bequeath my eternal soul” clause, so it was the kind of election that not even Ban Ki Moon could lose:
Ban has been criticized for his lack of charisma and his failure to decry human rights abuses in countries like China and Russia. But he has won praise for taking on climate change and nuclear disarmament and backing intervention in Ivory Coast and Libya.
I don’t know how this could have happened! I mean, I don’t know anyone who voted for him!
I guess this will be great news to two kinds of people — the kind of people who’d like to see the U.N. decline into irrelevance, and the kind of people who are confident they can control Ban Ki Moon.
I really don’t understand how North Korea gets away with breaking the basic rules of behavior, such as disclosing negotiations and then expecting people to keep right on negotiating. But then, it expropriates investments and people keep right on investing, and it breaks agreements and people line up to make new ones.
The North Korean regime’s ambitious project to build 100,000 homes in Pyongyang, which started in 2009, has been drastically downsized due to a lack of money and building materials. The regime has now cut the target to about 20,000.
Thankfully, the state found a way to meet the peoples’ more urgent needs:
Another project to re-pave and landscape the road to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where regime founder Kim Il-sung’s pickled body lies, was completed between January to April. Since last month, the regime has also been repairing the 23 m-tall Kim Il-sung statue.
For propaganda purposes, there is also a plan to build a 77-story apartment building for the privileged class in the newly designated Mansudae district which the statue overlooks, the government source said. The district combines the former Mansudae and Changjon junction areas.
So where do you suppose Jimmy will see the human rights violation?
Hmmm:
North Korea has created a special police squad and bought large amounts of riot gear from China in apparent preparation for any disturbances similar to those in the Middle East, a report said Tuesday.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the North had bought tear gas, helmets and shields through merchants in China’s northeastern city of Shenyang in recent months.
The development indicates concern at a possible popular uprising similar to the ones sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, the agency quoted a source as saying in a dispatch from Beijing.
The North has also created a special nationwide police anti-riot force, Yonhap said.
You mean to tell me that North Korea’s idea of riot gear no longer consists of ball ammo and sarin canisters? You could almost call that progress!
Hey, Adam, you left out the best part of that KCNA piece you linked:
Despite its oft-repeated ‘freedom of the Internet’, it has 13 mother servers of the Internet under its control. All other countries have demanded on several occasions the transfer of the U.S. control of the mother servers to the United Nations and other international institutions so as to ensure the practical freedom and security of the Internet. The U.S., however, has so far denied it.
Umm, say what?
The “13 mother servers” refers to the 13 root name servers, the machines responsible for converting tidy little top-level domains like .us, .com etc. into the gibberish that the hosts actually use. It’s more accurate to speak of 13 server clusters (there are far more than 13 physical servers), only three of which are actually run by the U.S. government; however, the Department of Commerce ultimately controls the root zone file. There are always calls from various quarters for the U.S. to transfer this control to ICANN — or for all such functions to be transferred to the International Telecommunication Union, or some other international organization — but the government has said more than once that they have no intention of giving it up, and opposition will remain fairly low-level as long as the U.S. doesn’t pull anything like, say, deleting the .kp domain (would anyone notice?). I’ve never heard any instance of “all other countries” demanding the U.S. hand over control, so I’m going to apply Occam’s razor and assume they just made it up.
The useless UN should be disbanded, IMO.
I’d just like to point out that the UN is not just its diplomatic arm and peacekeeping arm, but also myriad organizations of some usefulness like the WHO.
The UN World Tourism Organization is an abject failure, though. Despite millions of dollars spent, they haven’t brought the world even one new tourist.
They should have drafted Al Gore as UN Sec Gen.
Glans, in the middle of the last decade there was serious talk of having Bill Clinton in there as Secretary-General.
Apparently, though, the idea of having an American do the job smacks too much of US control over the agency, which seems to bend over backwards at times to poke the US in the eye to prove its independence.
And frankly, I’d be terrified to go on any tour created by Slick Willy.