Free Republic

Governments should have tougher rules for electronic cigarettes—banning their use indoors and putting them off limits for minors—until more evidence can be gathered about their risks, the U.N. health agency said Tuesday. In a bid to set public policy, the World Health Organization said the popular nicotine-vapor products, particularly the fruit, candy and alcohol-drink flavors, could serve as gateway addictions for children and adolescents. It recommended governments forbid or keep to a minimum any advertising, promotion or sponsorship in a market that has mushroomed to $3 billion last year and now includes 466 different brands. …

Racism is the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, and the principle behind racism in America is to distinguish the white race as superior to all other races. Sadly, Despite Thomas Jefferson’s “immortal statement” that “all men are created equal,” America was founded on racism and it is beyond refute it is still a country steeped in white supremacy. It is true the nation has made progress from its beginnings when African Americans were considered 3/5ths of a human being, Native Americans were slaughtered, Christianized, and herded on to reservations, and...

The European Union (EU) on Friday offered to take charge of Gaza's border crossings and work to prevent illegal arms flows, according to The Associated Press (AP). The EU is prepared "to play a strong role" in managing the crossings while assuring that Israel's security is guaranteed, said the 28-nation bloc's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton. The EU offered to reactivate and extend its monitoring of the Rafiah crossing with Egypt and other border posts, provided there will be a UN Security Council mandate for the mission and a sustainable cease-fire in place, according to AP. In addition, the EU...

U.S. civil rights advocates aired their concerns about the recent Michael Brown shooting to the United Nations in Geneva, according to a press call from the organizations on Wednesday. “This issue was front and center,” Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, explained during the call. According to Shelton, Trayvon Martin’s mother Sabrina Fulton and Jordan Davis’s father Ron Davis told their stories about losing their teenage children in shootings in each of the pre-briefings of the process. “I think that everyone was outraged and horrified to hear that, yet again, it had happened in St. Louis, Missouri,”...

Pope Francis formally asked U.N. agencies and the entire international community “to take action to end the humanitarian tragedy now underway” in northeastern Iraq. In a letter signed Aug. 9, but released by the Vatican only after it had been delivered, Pope Francis told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon immediate action was needed “to stop and to prevent further systematic violence against ethnic and religious minorities.” The papal letter was sent after militants of the Islamic State terrorist organization had captured Mosul in late July and Qaraqosh in early August, killing hundreds of people and forcing tens of thousands of Christians,...

People reading the title of this article should be excused for doing a double-take. To most of us the United Nations has been — especially in the last few decades — a debating society dedicated to the promulgation of anti-Semitism. It seems all the organization does is pass resolutions condemning Israel, that is when they’re not launching investigations of the same country via their Human Rights Council, a latter-day branch of the Wehrmacht, led by posturing Third World bigots, that usually meets at beachfront resorts. Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been a tiny bit perturbed of late by...

With the UN everything is possible and this Fox News report by George Russell certainly raises some questions. While controversy continues to swirl around the huge Hamas tunnel network in Gaza, an internal United Nations audit report reveals that a U.N. Development Program office that funds and monitors spending on construction in the territory allowed at least five non-staff contract employees to handle “core” procurement processes that only staffers are supposed to handle, including those for ordering up “significant” civil construction activities.At the same time, the office’s internal financial tracking system — a UNDP-wide system known as Atlas — was...

I wanted a transcription of this speech to use as a quote in the novel I'm writing. I've seen it a few times over the years, and felt it appropriate for my message. I searched the web, found the supposed text, and decided to compare the results with the video for accuracy. I was quickly surprised to find that much of the supplied text was different. The video was also intermingled with multiple edits - ie entire paragraphs missing. If you watch closely, you can see the edits. I decided to transcribe the speech myself. The results are below. I'm...

UN Seeks to Prosecute Israelis for "War Crimes" in Global Court The New American 04 August 2014 After the United Nations was caught last month giving rockets found at UN “schools” in Gaza to the terrorist group Hamas, the UN’s top “human rights” bureaucrat accused Israel of perpetrating possible “war crimes” — for, among other actions, refusing to share with Hamas its Iron Dome defense technology that protects Israeli territory and civilians from Arab missile attacks. The widely criticized UN official’s accusation, made in a press conference about the ongoing conflict, prompted a mixture of ridicule and outrage around...

Conakry — Medical teams struggling to curb Ebola in West Africa have been discouraging bush meat consumption, believed to have caused the outbreak, but some rural communities dependent on the meat for protein are determined to continue their traditional hunting practices. While meat from wild animals such as fruit bats, rodents and forest antelopes have largely disappeared from market stalls in main towns like Guéckédou (in southern Guinea and the epicentre of the disease) or the capital Conakry following campaigns to avoid contamination, it is still being eaten in remote villages despite the risks. "Life is not easy here in...

Israel knows that the leaders of the terrorist group Hamas are headquartered the Shifa hospital in Gaza: It was Israel that build the hospital – including the bunker in the basement that Hamas uses as its headquarters. The Israelis are so sure about the location of the Hamas bunker, however, not because they are trying to score propaganda points, or because it has been repeatedly mentioned in passing by Western reporters—but because they built it. Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital—which is one among several...

The United Nations Security Council met once again Thursday on the crisis in Gaza. This time it heard “humanitarian” briefings from Under Secretary-General for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Valerie Amos, and the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Pierre Krahenbuhl.

The United Nations' human rights chief expressed concern on Thursday at what she said were plans by the U.S. government to deport tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who entered the United States in recent months. Navi Pillay-Wanker, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged Washington to protect the child migrants and investigate dozens of reports of abuse against them by U.S. officials. "I am particularly concerned because the United States appears to be taking steps to deport most of these children back," Pillay-Wanker told a final news briefing in Geneva before completing six years in office on Aug. 31....

As legend has it, Groucho Marx sent the Friars Club a telegram that read, “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” At least the Friars Club had standards. What to make of the United Nations? It has a single criterion for membership: existence. Admittedly, this is an unattainable standard for such fictional realms as Westeros, Erewhon, Kreplakistan, and numerous locales from the TV series MacGyver (Gnubia, Kabulstan, et al.). But if you’re a nation-state that actually exists, you’re a shoo-in, like Kate Upton trying to get...

GENEVA, July 23 (Reuters) - The United Nations on Wednesday launched an international inquiry into human rights violations and crimes that may have been committed by Israel during its military offensive in the Gaza Strip. The U.N. Human Rights Council condemned the Israeli assault which it said had involved "disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks", including aerial bombing of civilian areas, collective punishment, and the killing of more than 650 Palestinians. At the end of an emergency session, the 47-member forum adopted a resolution presented by Palestinians by a vote of 29 states in favor, 1 against (the United States) with 17...

Navi Pillay said Tel Aviv's two-week onslaught on Gaza - which has cost more than 650 Palestinians lives - would be thoroughly investigated. Ms Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the attacks have destroyed houses and hospitals and killed civilians. "These are just a few examples where there seems to be a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes. "Every one of these incidents must be properly and independently investigated." According to Gaza officials, 475 houses have been destroyed and 2,644 damaged, while 46 schools, 56 mosques...

While the world is sizzling and percolating in conflicts and wars, and U.S. is roiling in manufactured crisis after crisis, real or imagined emergencies, overwhelmed by the constant invasion of illegal immigrants, The Washington Post writes on the front page, “Thinking inside the box on D.C. housing costs,” living in repurposed dinged freight shipping containers. Two days before, Deborah K. Dietsch featured “Thinking big in a small way.” (Michael Laris, July 21, 2014)

Things that shouldn’t be there have a way of turning up at the omnipresent installations of the world’s largest bureaucracy known as the United Nations. Back in the days when Kofi Annan was UN Secretary General, it was black boxes from crashed planes unearthed from filing cabinets at UN Manhattan headquarters.

The Palestinian refugee issue has been around since 1948. UNRWA, the United Nations institution dedicated to their preservation, has been in existence since 1950. With the recent re-approval of UNRWA’s mandate for more than three years, it is worth asking: how long have Western policy makers understood that UNRWA was a tool for Palestinians and Arab states to perpetuate the “refugee crisis” and that Palestinians would never accept anything except repatriation to Israel, an attitude that guarantees hostilities in perpetuity? The answer is, since the beginning. That is why after more than sixty years, British diplomatic documents on UNRWA and...

Israel agreed Wednesday to halt its airstrikes on Gaza for five hours in order to allow humanitarian aid, following a request from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. It was not immediately clear when the cease-fire would begin. A senior Israeli official who spoke to Reuters said a time for the 6-hour window has not yet been decided, but Israeli Brig Gen. Yoav Mordechai told the BBC that it would occur starting at 10 a.m. local time Thursday. The cease-fire request came from U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Robert Serry, Haaretz reports. After news of the cease-fire...