World leaders must do everything in their power to end the AIDS pandemic by 2020, the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said at the U.N. Summit on AIDS in New York.

“Today, we gather to end AIDS,” Ban said as the United Nations General Assembly opened on Wednesday.

The three-day summit is being held as the world marks the 30th anniversary since HIV was first discovered. Ban told delegates gathered from across the world that AIDS must end: “That is our goal – zero new infections, zero stigma and zero AIDS-related deaths.”

Ban urged: “If we are to relegate AIDS to the history books we must be bold. That means facing sensitive issues, including men who have sex with men, drug users and the sex trade.”

Pointing towards the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, the U.N. chief called on the world community to unite in “global solidarity as never before” so that there would be universal access to AIDS treatments by 2015.

[Continues at Christian Post]

The UN refugee agency is to start an emergency airlift of tents to the West African nation of Benin this week, amid the worst flooding there in decades.

Some 3,000 tents will be flown in from Denmark to provide shelter for some of the estimated 680,000 people affected.

Two-thirds of Benin has suffered from months of heavy rain, and about 800 cases of cholera have been reported.

It is the worst flooding to hit the country — one of the poorest in the world — since 1963.

Areas previously thought not to be vulnerable to flooding have been devastated and villages wiped out.

“There are huge areas that are covered in water so people are living on the tops of their houses, because people try to stay near their homes,” Helen Kawkins of the Care aid agency told the BBC.

Read More on BBC News

Mr. Burns:

Bad news for super-villains everywhere. Tim Wall writes in Discovery News:

Blotting out the sun has been the dream of many arch-villains, including The Simpson’s Mr. Burns. Their schemes may soon be foiled by the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity.

Super villains aren’t the only ones who want to shade the Earth from the sun. Blocking some of the sun’s rays could slow climate change by reducing the amount of sunlight warming the Earth, say some researchers, such as Roger Angel of the University of Arizona.

The Convention may consider banning or limiting research into space sunshades. Some question their wisdom. A space sunshade would have a rapid effect on global warming and provide time to develop more permanent measures, they say. The technique has already received serious attention from NASA and other organizations.

But others, such as the ETC group, an environmental and social advocacy group, fear simply blocking the sun is a bandage, meant to cover up the problem, and allow humans to continue using fossils fuels. Another fear is that geoengineering, as techniques like this are called, could have unforeseen consequences on the weather, ecosystem and agriculture.

Read More in Discovery News

The United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.

She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before — and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.

During a talk Othman gave recently to fellow scientists, she said: “The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials.

“When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person.”

Read More: News.Com.Au

After a year of humiliating setbacks, United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of his top lieutenants — the top brass of the entire U.N. system — spent their Labor Day weekend at a remote Austrian Alpine retreat, discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of the world’s agenda.

Details concerning the two-day, closed-door sessions in the comfortable village of Alpbach were closely guarded. Nonetheless, position papers for the meeting obtained by Fox News indicate that the topics included:

• how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;
• how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”;
• how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in the police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries;
• how to capitalize on the global tide of migrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance framework”;
• how to make “clever” use of new technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society,” meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.

As one underlying theme of the sessions, the top U.N. bosses seemed to be grappling often with how to cope with the pesky issue of national sovereignty, which — according to the position papers, anyway — continued to thwart many of their most ambitious schemes, especially when it comes to many different kinds of “global governance.”

[continues at Fox News]

The U.N. Economic and Social Council voted Monday to accredit the U.S.-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission after strong lobbying by the Obama administration.

Obama, in a statement issued by the White House, welcomed the vote as an “important step forward for human rights.” With the group’s inclusion, he said “the United Nations is closer to the ideals on which it was founded, and to values of inclusion and equality to which the United States is deeply committed.”

The group will now be able to attend U.N. meetings, submit statements and collaborate with both government and U.N. agencies on human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, commission officials said.

The 54-member council, known as ECOSOC, approved the U.S.-based group’s application for consultative status by a vote of 23-13 with 13 abstentions. Many of those voting “no” – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China – cited procedural reasons.

But the U.S. government and 14 members of Congress who supported the organization’s application said they believe it had not been approved previously because the group promotes gay rights.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, which has offices in South Africa, Argentina and the Philippines, has been trying since 2007 to get consultative status with ECOSOC, which serves as the main U.N. forum for discussing international economic and social issues.

Story continues at Washington Post …

European criticism of the World Health Organization’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic intensified Friday with the release of two reports that accused the agency of exaggerating the threat posed by the virus and failing to disclose possible influence by the pharmaceutical industry on its recommendations for how countries should respond.

The WHO’s response caused widespread, unnecessary fear and prompted countries around the world to waste millions of dollars, according to one report.

At the same time, the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations relied on advice from experts with ties to drug makers in developing the guidelines it used to encourage countries to stockpile millions of doses of antiviral medications, according to the second report.

The reports outlined the drumbeat of criticism that has arisen, primarily in Europe, of how the world’s leading health organization responded to the first influenza pandemic in more than four decades.

Read More in the Washington Post

Photo: Severin Nowacki (CC)

Sounds like something a comic-book super-villain would do, and Bill Gates certainly has the money to be one. Ben Webster writes in the Times:

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.

Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.

Read More: Times

The announcement by the United Nations this week that it will license the minting of silver and gold bullion coins bearing the UN logo may be the button that launches metal prices into orbit.

In its wide-ranging report this fall, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that the system of currencies and international banking practices within today’s economies were inadequate, and responsible for the present economic crisis. The report advocates that the present monetary system, wherein the dollar acts as the global reserve currency be re-examined “with urgency”.

The UNCTAD Report was the first time a major multinational institution had forwarded such a suggestion or measure, although a number of countries, including Russia and Brazil have supported replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China’s central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan has mentioned that the dollar could become a basket of currencies instead.

Read More on Current

A British nuclear expert who fell from the 17th floor of a United Nations building did not commit suicide and may have been hurled to his death, says a doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination.  Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna.  An initial autopsy concluded that there were ‘no suspicious circumstances’. But it is understood that Mr Hampton’s widow Olena Gryshcuk and her family were deeply unhappy with that verdict.

Now a doctor who undertook a second post-mortem examination on behalf of the family believes she has found evidence that Mr Hampton did not die by his own hands.  Professor Kathrin Yen, of the Ludwig Institute in Graz, Austria, which specialises in traumatology research, said she had more tests to complete on Mr Hampton, who had a three-year-old son with Ms Gryshcuk.  But she said one possible theory was that Mr Hampton was carried to the 17th floor from his workplace on the sixth floor and thrown to his death.

Professor Yen used new forensic techniques to detect internal bruising caused by strangulation which would not be visible to the eye.  She said: ‘In my opinion, it does not look like suicide. My example is that somebody took him up to the top floor and took him down.  ‘At the moment I don’t have the police reports. We did a CT scan. From the external exam, I saw injuries on the neck but these were not due to strangulation.’

It is expected to take three weeks for blood test results to come back. Austrian police said they believe Mr Hampton committed suicide.  He had been working for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) at the UN building.

[Read the full story at The Daily Mail]

A man impersonating the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders managed to dupe his way into the UN headquarters in New York and shake hands with a senior official.

Dressed in the fast food icon’s familiar white suit and black bow tie, the actor evaded tight security to gain access to the restricted areas of the complex.  He even posed for a photograph with Ali Treki, the new president of the UN General Assembly, before the alarm was raised and he was ejected.  A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, yesterday said that an investigation had been launched into the security breach, which was dreamed up by KFC as a promotional stunt.

“It should not have happened – that I will stress, and very strongly,” Michele Montas told Canwest News Service, the Canadian news agency.

[Article continues at: The Telegraph]