The reality is that the core of this story is little accurate.  More on that in a second.

Climate change behind Darfur killing: UN’s Ban

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the slaughter in Darfur was triggered by global climate change and that more such conflicts may be on the horizon, in an article published Saturday.

“The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

“This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming,” the South Korean diplomat wrote.

Now take out all of the buzz words about climate change and man made global warming, and you find that the cause, according to the UN, is:  Drought.

I don’t doubt it.  For centuries all over the earth there have been droughts, and accompanying them is social upheaval.

The fact is that it is useless to make a case for global warming as the cause of Darfur because it again distracts from the solution in Darfur.

“But what to do about the essential dilemma: the fact that there’s no longer enough good land to go around?”

“Any real solution to Darfur’s troubles involves sustained economic development,” perhaps using new technologies, genetically modified grains or irrigation, while bettering health, education and sanitation, he said.

And there they get it right.  Social changes require sociological changes and economic solutions.  Not Carbon Credits.  not CO2 reductions and the Kyoto Protocol.

So let’s drop the grandstanding and all that, and deal with the real issues.  Let’s keep our eye on the ball.

Hugo Chavez, the Sheehan beloved leader of Venezuela has taken as his goal the task of warning the world about how evil President Bush is.

Like no one has taken that one on before him…(cough Michael Moore cough Alec Baldwin cough.

At any rate, his translated comments at the UN were a bit father over the top then a lot of people are comfortable with.

Chávez Calls Bush ‘the Devil’ in U.N. Speech

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela bitterly and sarcastically assailed President Bush before the United Nations General Assembly today, portraying Mr. Bush as “the devil” who thinks he is “the owner of the world.”

 “Yesterday, the devil came here,” Mr. Chávez said, alluding to Mr. Bush’s appearance before the General Assembly on Tuesday. “Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.”

Then Mr. Chávez made the sign of the cross, brought his hands together as if in prayer and glanced toward the ceiling.

The moment may not become as famous as Nikita Khrushchev’s finger-wagging, shoe-thumping outbursts in the General Assembly in the cold-war era, but it still produced chuckles and some applause in the assembly hall.

Rumor says that he accused Bush’s mom of wearing combat boots later on.

Honestly my first reactoin to this idiot is not outrage, but scorn.  Let me make a putz of himself.  It echoes my overall scorn for the UN as well.

But he has continued it elsewhere, in speeches madein New York.

Chavez extends anti-Bush tirade on visit to Harlem

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez launched a new personal attack on President George W. Bush, using a visit to a church to call the US leader an "alcoholic" and a "sick man."

A day after Chavez used the UN bully pulpit to call Bush "the devil" a "tyrant" who acts like he owns the world — prompting broad condemnation in the United States — Chavez was equally vitriolic as he spoke at the Olivet Baptist church in the New York neighborhood of Harlem.

OK, it is obvious I have no real love of the UN and the Security Council is a perfect example why.  A small number of members who have incredible power and influence, and an almost universal lack of object purpose and altruism.  They really are all in it to advance the needs of themselves, not to make the world more secure.

Including the US, lest I seem biased.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day.  In this case they jointly and unanimously voted to demand North Korea cease its missile program.

A worthy resolution.  That guy is one scary loose cannon.  Of course China who favors NK did manage to strip it of any abilty to enforce it, but it is a start.

U.N. passes resolution condemning N. Korea:  Council unanimously votes to demand nation suspends missile program

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Saturday condemning North Korea’s recent missile tests and demanding that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program.

The agreement was reached after a last-minute compromise between Japan, the United States and Britain, who wanted a tough statement, and Russia and China, who favored weaker language.

The deal culminated 10 days of difficult negotiations.

“The council has acted swiftly and robustly in response to the reckless and condemnable act of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” said Japan’s Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, Chintaro Ito.

In the final negotiations, the council was divided on one issue: if the resolution should be adopted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows for military force to make sure the resolution is obeyed.

China had threatened to veto any resolution that mentioned Chapter 7 and in the final compromise it was dropped. The resolution adopted Saturday by a 15-0 vote states that the Security Council was “acting under its special responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

It demands that North Korea “suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program,” and that Pyongyang re-establish a moratorium on missile launching.

I have not dealt with the situation in Israel and all the bombing and such in my blog.  Honestly, I have not had near enough time to gather the links and resources necessary to do the story justice.

Others like Sister Toldjah and Michelle Malkin have more then made up for my distraction.

But this story at Opinion Journal was noteworthy to me, not just in how it deals with the participants, but with the UN, and the International Community as a whole in their reactions as well as their involvement.

The powder keg over there is very worrisome, and has been for decades, but in the latest events, Iran And Syria are not helping, nor is the UN. 

Ask yourself a question:  Here you have Iran and Syria clearly meddling in the events, Iran is actively seeking a nuclear program, and Iran has openly hated Israel for years.

Is this not a scary situation?

In the only positive news I could find in this, at least the people suffering from BDS will now have a new reason to blame Bush.

States of Terror:  Syria, Iran and their proxies wage war on Israel.

Israel’s military invasion and naval blockade of Lebanon is being denounced in European capitals and at the United Nations as a "disproportionate" response to the kidnapping this week of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah. Israel’s decision late last month to invade Gaza in retaliation for the kidnapping of another soldier by Hamas was also condemned as lacking in proportion. So here’s a question for our global solons: Since hostage-taking is universally regarded as an act of war, what "proportionate" action do they propose for Israel?

In the case of Hamas, perhaps Israel could rain indiscriminate artillery fire on Gaza City, surely a proportionate response to the 800 rockets Hamas has fired at Israeli towns in the last year alone. In the case of Hezbollah, it might mean carpet bombing a section of south Beirut, another equally proportionate response to Hezbollah’s attacks on civilian Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.

I’m a little too busy to write much today, so I will be reposting some interesting tidbits from elsewhere.

First up is this article from Jay at Stop the ACLU.  I may add some comments inline later, but for now here it is untouched.

I have illustrated before how the ACLU undermines America’s sovereignty and Constitution when it tries to trump our national security with international law. However, I think that must be their goal.

Today the American Civil Liberties Union delivered a petition with more than 51,000 signatures calling for the enforcement of the universal prohibition against torture to the U.S. State Department delegation at the meeting of the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva. The ACLU has been monitoring the committee proceedings and providing information about U.S. sponsored policies and practices of torture and abuse at home and abroad. The U.S. delegation denied on Friday that incidents of detainee abuse are systemic.

"Instead of denying the systemic abuse of detainees confirmed by its own documents, the U.S. government must own up to the truth and take full responsibility," said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project who is currently observing the committee’s examination of the U.S. report in Geneva. "We hope that the Committee Against Torture will hold the government accountable for the torture and abuse of detainees both within the United States and abroad."

If anyone should be held accountable for crimes against humanity it should be the U.N. Gateway Pundit, illustrates this very well, here, and what a joke it is to be held accountable to them here.

For all the ACLU’s rhetoric about denial, they have absolutely no substantial evidence of any kind of systematic abuse. Still, the U.S. tried to appease them, banning the practice of water-boarding. This practice is not torture, and banning it is not admitting that we practiced it. However, to the ACLU this only brought more questions.

"That they’ve specifically dealt with it - even while saying that doesn’t mean it was happening previously - raises questions," said Jamil Dakwar, a field attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who has been monitoring the U.N. committee’s hearing into U.S. adherence to the U.N.’s Convention on Torture.