General Assembly President expresses concern at Swiss ban on minarets

The President of the General Assembly today added his voice to a chorus of United Nations concern over the weekend referendum in Switzerland which outlawed the erection of new minarets.

Ban names Ibrahim Gambari as new head of joint UN-AU force in Darfur

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seeks to appoint veteran Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari, who has most recently served as his top envoy to Myanmar, as the new head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, it was announced today.

UN assisting Iraqi leaders trying to resolve election law deadlock

The United Nations mission in Iraq is trying to help the country’s leaders resolve differences over national elections that have delayed holding the poll by its constitutional deadline of January.

Today on New Scientist: 2 December 2009

Today’s stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: how to scrape the Earth’s barrel of oil dry, how our brains build social worlds, and why a split personality is good if you’re a router

Flip-flopping Ashton

New EU Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton has faced MEPs today for an informal grilling. It is not her official European Parliament confirmation hearing - that will come later in January.

Interestingly, Lady Ashton is described as “dodging a hail of bullets” by the Times for her failure to answer in any detail, questions on issues of foreign policy such as Turkey’s EU accession bid, the Honduran Presidential election, Georgia, EU policy on the Arctic, etc.

This policy tapdancing earned a rebuke from the German Liberal MEP Alexander Lambsdorff who said: “I do have to say we want more specific answers from you when you come back to us in January.”

She responded: “At my hearing there will be more considered policies…This is brand new. I do not have an office, I do not have a Cabinet, I do not have a team. I inherited a blank piece of paper and at the moment I have written one or two small things on it.”

Hmm… brand new? Nothing but a blank piece of paper? That’s not what you said when you were nursing the Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords.

Responding to concerns about the unclear remit of the post and the general ambiguity of the Treaty, Baroness Ashton of Upholland told the Lords in April 2008, “Noble Lords have rightly indicated that the high representative brings together the current high representative introduced in Amsterdam [Treaty] and the Commissioner for External Relations. As I said it is an important move.”

She added, “The proposal is that we have a high representative who becomes the vice-president of the Commission with very specific functions. That is a defined role within the treaty which is vested in one person.”

So… the EU’s new Foreign Minister, who once said that the job would simply bring together two existing roles, and would have very specific functions, is now admitting that her job description is so ill-defined in the Treaty that within two weeks of her appointment, she still has no real idea what her job either means or will entail and the Treaty provisions are in fact a blank cheque… which is exactly what we have said would be the consequence of so much of the vague and ill-thought out language in the Lisbon Treaty.

We also came across this other rather telling tidbit from the Noble Lady in the same Lords session from 2008: “The new title makes it absolutely clear that the high representative will represent the agreed views of member states. He will not in any sense be a Foreign Minister.”

Yet less than two weeks ago, in a press conference following the announcement of Cathy Ashton’s new job, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “The Secretary of State of the United States should call Cathy Ashton, because she is our Foreign Minister, if I may say so.”

How quickly they change these people change their tune.

UN efforts to boost military confidence in Cyprus have not borne fruit, says Ban

Although the situation in the buffer zone separating the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides of Cyprus has remained calm, efforts by the United Nations peacekeeping mission on the Mediterranean island to further talks on military confidence-building measures have not borne fruit, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said.

Climate research head steps down over email leak

Phil Jones has announced he will stand down while an independent review investigates allegations of professional misconduct

Lebanon: UN-backed probe into Hariri killings ‘proceeding at full pace’- prosecutor

The prosecutor of the United Nations-backed court set up to try suspects in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and other killings has arrived in Lebanon on a seven-day visit, stressing his commitment to carry out his work with total independence.

It’s going to get a whole lot worse

In a speech yesterday David Cameron cited Open Europe’s recent report which showed that the UK has spent more than £35 billion complying with EU employment, health and safety law in the last decade.

What he didn’t mention, is the report’s even more important findings that if the problem of EU regulation isn’t tackled, EU social and employment laws will cost a further £71 billion over the next decade, even in the highly unlikely event that no more regulations are added to the rulebook in this time.

In our view, the Conservatives should negotiate a blanket opt-out from all the social and employment related articles in the EU treaties, and bring control over these laws back to the UK, where we can scrap, amend or fine tune them to the needs of our own economy.

Watch it live: dissection of famous brain

In what must certainly be the world’s first live, webcast brain dissection, scientists today will cut thin sections from a human brain