Lebanon: senior UN official assures new unity Government of full assistance

United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon Michael Williams met with Prime Minister Saad Hariri today, reassuring him once again of the world Organization’s readiness to lend assistance to the new unity Government in all fields through all its various agencies whenever requested.

Today on New Scientist: 7 December 2009

Today’s stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: the power of same-sex liaisons, the race to publish the first results from the LHC, and a disappearing ice bear

Sudan: UN envoy calls on parties to abide by peace pact in wake of political violence

The top United Nations envoy in Sudan has voiced his concern over the detention and alleged beating of some prominent Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) leaders, opposition supporters and civil society activists during demonstrations earlier today, noting that they could impact negatively on the 2005 peace pact that ended the country’s north-south civil war.

Campaign against EU ban on herbal medicine

Today, a campaign to ’save herbal medicine’ was launched. Campaigners are calling on the Government to prevent herbal medicines disappearing from the high street when an EU ban comes into place in April 2011.

Save Herbal Medicine fears that much of the herbal medicine trade will be lost if EU legislation comes in, which states that only “statutorily regulated” professionals, such as doctors, would be able to prescribe the alternative remedies.

The EU Directive will restrict herbal medicines that can be supplied over-the-counter to licensed “traditional” medicines used to treat “mild and self-limiting” conditions.

Save Herbal Medicine is calling on the Department of Health to produce a statutory register for herbalists who meet certain standards, so that they would fall within the EU law.

It wants all herbalists who meet agreed standards of education and training, adhere to a strict Code of Ethics and Standards and who are properly insured, to be recognised.

The website notes:

“Please be clear, this issue is NOT about whether herbs work or not, the evidence is out there for all to determine this for themselves (we have links to resources on this web site), this is about YOUR FUNDAMENTAL BASIC HUMAN RIGHT to have a CHOICE. As things stand right now, your right to choose from a range of choices DISAPPEARS in April 2011.”

See here for more: http://www.saveherbalmedicine.com/

Landmark UN climate change conference kicks off in Copenhagen

The highly-anticipated United Nations climate change conference kicked off in Copenhagen, Denmark, today with countries issuing urgent calls for action to curb global warming.

Darfur: security situation worsens after attacks on UN-African peacekeepers

The security situation in the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur has deteriorated in the wake of attacks that claimed the lives of five peacekeepers, the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in the area (UNAMID) reported today.

Iranian police use teargas and batons in clashes with protesters

Senior UN humanitarian official starts visit to Zimbabwe

A senior United Nations official today begins a three-day mission to Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian situation and meet with Government officials, aid workers and donors to map out how the UN can support humanitarian and early recovery activities in the Southern African country over the next year.

Agreement on Iraqi election law means polls can go ahead in February - UN official

The head of the United Nations mission in Iraq today congratulated the Council of Representatives on finalizing the country’s election law, making it feasible to hold parliamentary polls next February.

Is Russia behind the Climategate hackers?

Tony Halpin in Moscow

The Russian connection to the controversy over the leaked e-mails raises suspicions of a state-sanctioned attempt to discredit the Copenhagen summit involving secret service espionage. But it could as easily have been the work of freelance hackers hired by climate-change sceptics.
Hackers for hire are a common phenomenon in Russia, where programming skills are high and many under-employed computer experts are eager to make money. A shadowy organisation called the Russian Business Network is notorious as a provider of internet services for global cyber-crime.
Unscrupulous businesses hire hackers to attack the websites of rivals, while criminal gangs make use of their skills in credit card fraud and identity theft.
A third possibility is that disgruntled or mischievous students involved in the climate-change debate accessed the servers after a suggestion that the files hacked from the University of East Anglia had been uploaded from a server in Tomsk. The formerly closed Siberian city is now one of Russia’s leading centres for studying climate change and hosted an international conference on the subject last year for young scientists.

Tomsk students were involved in an attack on a website sympathetic to Chechen militants in 2002 that drew praise from the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
The Kremlin was blamed when government websites in Estonia and Georgia were crippled by so-called distributed-denial-of- service attacks launched by computer hackers.
Security experts in Russia say that the FSB routinely makes use of “hacker-patriots” when it wants to break into computer systems or damage websites belonging to groups critical of the state. This allows it to deny the involvement of its own computer experts at the FSB’s Centre for Information Security.