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Newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser at The Global Warming Policy FoundationA diplomatic cable published last month by the WikiLeaks website reveals that most of the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in India should not have been certified because they did not reduce emissions beyond those that would have been achieved without foreign investment. Indian officials have apparently known about the problem for at least two years. The revelations imply that millions of tonnes of claimed reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions are mere phantoms, she says, and potentially cast doubt over the principle of carbon trading. –Quirin Schiermeier, Nature News, 27...

HAVANA - Cuba on Wednesday cheered the new U.N. human rights watchdog's agreement to stop monitoring alleged abuses on the island, with Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque saying the decision left the United States "hanging and we yanked away the ladder." ADVERTISEMENT The U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva agreed Tuesday to discontinue investigations into the rights situation in Cuba and Belarus, but to continue monitoring Israel. The move drew immediate fire from the U.S., which has crusaded to focus attention on the human rights situation in Cuba. At a news conference, Perez Roque called the decision "a resounding, undisputed...

AN AUSTRALIAN former UN war crimes investigator has revealed documents exposing a UN cover-up of its inquiry into the events that triggered the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Adelaide lawyer Michael Hourigan says the UN shut down his investigation in 1997 into the shooting down of a plane carrying the extremist Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and the president of Burundi. The investigation implicated ethnic Tutsi rebel leader Paul Kagame, who is now the President of Rwanda. The 100-day genocide, in which Hutu extremists murdered Tutsis and moderate Hutus, began hours after the plane was shot down. Late last year, President Kagame was...

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking. No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in...

Iraq's interim trade ministry is investigating alleged corruption of up to $US40 million involving senior ministry officials, but has backed off initial claims that members of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) authority were implicated. Trade minister Ali Allawi said that he discovered a month ago that a contract for wooden doors worth about $80 million had been manipulated. Mr Allawi had said in an interview that members of the CPA were implicated but on Sunday night, following vehement CPA denials of involvement, said he was mistaken. He said a UN agency, not the CPA, continued to run a program...