Civilization

ANSA:

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday hailed a United Nations committee vote calling for a moratorium on the death penalty - a cause for which Italy has long lobbied.

''The UN vote...is a great success for Italy and the cause of peace,'' Napolitano said after Thursday night's human rights committee vote.

''Now all that's missing is the final seal of the General Assembly,'' the president said.

The resolution, which calls for ''a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty,'' is expected to go to the 192-member Assembly in mid-December.

You think?

Associated Press:

The situation for Iraqi children is getting worse and, in some respects, it was better before the war began, a senior U.N. official said Monday.

"Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago," said Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Children's Fund. He said Iraqis no longer have safe access to a government-funded food basket, established under Saddam Hussein to deal with international sanctions.

Toole said conditions for women and children in Iraq had worsened significantly since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, which triggered a wave of sectarian violence and displacement that continues today.

Kill the messenger- particularly when it proves you wrong

Newsweek:

The most successful international team ever assembled to probe suspected WMD activities is shutting down this week—thanks to U.S. and British insistence. The team (the U.N. commission initially acronymed UNSCOM and then UNMOVIC) spent 16 years uncovering and destroying Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and missile weapons programs. The U.S. invasion of Iraq proved that the U.N.'s intel—overruled by the Bush administration—had indeed been correct: Saddam no longer had WMD. But late last month, the U.S. and British governments pushed through the U.N. Security Council a vote to halt funding for UNMOVIC.

The decision dismayed WMD experts. The action foreclosed discussions that were going on behind the scenes at the U.N. on whether UNMOVIC—or parts of it, such as its roster of close to 400 trained inspectors—should be retained to monitor biological and missile proliferation threats. "UNMOVIC is a unique resource," says Hans Blix, who led the Iraq inspections. "Once dispersed, that expertise will not easily be reassembled. But as ever, one has to understand the politics here."

Bush White House Upset By U.N. Human Rights Report on Iraq

Washington Post:

A new human rights report by the United Nations mission in Iraq described high levels of ongoing violence, an unfair and potentially abusive detainee system and a country suffering a "breakdown in law and order." The report upset the U.S. Embassy here, which characterized it as inaccurate and not credible.

The 30-page report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, an appraisal of human rights conditions from January through March, said the Iraqi government is up against "immense security challenges in the face of growing violence and armed opposition to its authority and the rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis."

For the first time, the United Nations did not include civilian death tolls, statistics that are usually provided to it by the Health Ministry and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. The data have become a key gauge of the level of violence in Iraq. In the last report, the United Nations said 34,452 Iraqi civilians had died violently in 2006, a number that the Iraqi government later said was exaggerated.

The report said the Iraqi government told the United Nations "that it had decided against providing the data, although no substantive explanation or justification was provided."

You know the drill. All these bad reports undermine the war effort. Nevermind that the war effort is causing all these bad reports.