Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business

This SlideShare Presentation includes the presentation included in yesterday’s very interesting webinar run by Ogilvy’s Thomas Crampton and his colleague Brian Giesen. I was one of the minority who voted that Twitter was of most interest for creating buzz around events but that is clearly of particular interest for our industry.

United by a common goal, fallen UN staff aimed to help Afghans

Lawrence Mefful’s family and colleagues say it was typical of the United Nations security officer and devout Christian to put the well-being of others before his own safety.

General Assembly begins debate on UN rights probe into Gaza conflict

The General Assembly today began its debate on the report of the United Nations probe which found that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants were guilty of serious human rights violations during the Gaza conflict earlier this year.

UN agency airdrops food aid to over 155,000 hungry people in southern Sudan

The United Nations has begun to parachute food aid into isolated areas of conflict-ridden southern Sudan with the aim of reaching more than 155,000 people cut off from road access by heavy rainfall, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced today.

Today on New Scientist: 4 November 2009

Today’s stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: a surprisingly simple way to forecast the weather, what you need to know about the Copenhagen climate change summit, and a genetic test for the biological clock

Top UN official in Sudan hails return to civilian life of 15,000 former civil war soldiers

The top United Nations envoy to Sudan has praised the disarming, demobilization and reintegration so far this year of over 15,000 former combatants from the African nation’s north-south civil war.

Independent UN expert urges Mauritania to do more to end slavery practices

While noting the significant steps that have been taken in Mauritania to tackle slavery, an independent United Nations human rights expert today called for a comprehensive strategy to put an end to this scourge, warning of its impact on the country’s future.

Latin America making important progress towards development, UN official says

The head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has spotlighted the slow global progress towards reducing gender inequality and violence against women on the first day of a three-day official visit to Chile.

US House Rejects Goldstone Report

Wednesday, November 04, 2009
12:37 Mecca time, 09:37 GMT

US House rejects Goldstone report

The Goldstone report alleges that Israel used disproportionate force in its war on Gaza

The US House of Representatives has rejected as “irredeemably biased” the findings of a UN-sponsored report which says Israel committed war crimes during its military assault on the Gaza Strip.

The house on Tuesday voted 344 to 36 in favour of a non-binding resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his opposition to the report, which was written by a panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge.

The report accused Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group, which has de facto control of Gaza, of war crimes during the 22-day conflict in December and January.

But most of its criticism was directed towards Israel’s conduct during the offensive, in which human rights organisations say about 1,400 Palestinians - many of them women and children - were killed.

Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were also killed over the course of the war, Israel has said.

Steny Hoyer, the Democrat House majority leader, said it was important to adopt an official resolution against the Goldstone report as it “paints a distorted picture”.

It “epitomizes the practice of singling Israel out from all other nations for condemnation,” he said on Tuesday.

UN assembly pressure

The US house vote came a day before the United Nations General Assembly is expected to debate its own resolution endorsing the findings of the Goldstone report.

Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey, reporting from the UN in New York, said that while the majority of the assembly’s member nations were expected to vote in favour of the resolution, the US vote on Tuesday, although non-binding, was likely to dampen its impact.

“Remember - the key recommendation of Goldstone is to get a credible investigation into the alleged war crimes that the Goldstone commission found evidence of in Gaza, and the UN Security Council is the only body that can move forward and demand an investigation,” she said.

“The general assembly just does not have that power. Of course, on the security council, the United States is a veto-wielding member and, as the congressional vote underscores, the US is not going to be interested in moving forward in the security council to call for an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), or anyone else for that matter.”

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the UN, criticised the Security Council for so far failing to act “in triggering the mechanism that Goldstone wanted, the investigation, the monitoring and then reporting after six months before considering moving into the ICC”.

“The General Assembly, in a responsible way in the draft we have submitted by the Arab group, which hopefully in the next two days will receive large support, has taken some of the responsibility from the security council … and asked for the investigation to begin,” he told Al Jazeera.

The United Nations Human Rights Council, which sponsored the Goldstone commission, has already voted to endorse the report.

Bias claims

Steven Rothman, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, told Al Jazeera that the report was biased against Israel, even after the Goldstone commission’s mandate was expanded so that it could investigate war crimes alleged to have been committed by Hamas.

“The report was not written to talk about 12,000 rockets intentionally sent by Hamas to slaughter Israeli men, women and children, versus the Israelis trying in many respects to minimise the damage to Palestinian civilians,” he told Al Jazeera.

“So there have been completely different standards applied.”

But when asked if he had read the Goldstone report in full, Rothman said he had read only the report’s executive summary.

“I did not read the 400 or 500 pages, but I read the executive summary designed for members of congress and other world leaders to read, and I found it terribly, terribly biased and one-sided,” he said.

But Brian Baird, a Democrat congressman for Washington state, said that the resolution failed to “accurately characterise” the Goldstone report and made no attempt to reflect the situation on the ground in Gaza.

“My belief is that it is incumbent on all of us who care about justice and peace in the region to look equally, with an equally critical eye, and all sides of this argument,” he told Al Jazeera.

“One of the important elements of working towards peace and justice is that if someone of the calibre of Justice Goldstone, with the deligence and thoroughness of his investigation, … reports on the kind of events that occured that merits further consideration.

“The resolution before us in the House would block that.”

Goldstone clarifications

The result of Tuesday’s vote had been widely anticipated.

In January, as Israel bombarded the Palestinian territory, the House had overwhelmingly backed a resolution “recognising Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Israel”.

The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had lobbied strongly for the latest resolution and said it “strongly applauded” the House’s action on Tuesday.

Goldstone last week sent a letter to the US House of Representatives saying that the text of the US resolution had “factual inaccuracies and instances where information and statements are taken grossly out of context”.

He offered several rejections and clarifications of the ideas expressed in the resolution.

In response to Goldstone’s criticism, three parts of the resolution were amended on Tuesday to clarify that Goldstone had sought an expansion to the commission’s mandate so that his team could investigate claims that Hamas had violated international law during the Gaza war.

The Goldstone report, which accused Israel of using “disproportionate force” and of deliberately targeting civilians, called for independent investigations to be held into Israel’s and Hamas’s conduct during the war.

The report called for the cases to be referred to the ICC in The Hague if Israel and Hamas do not investigate the war crimes allegations against them within six months.

Hamas has agreed to hold such an investigation, but Israel has not.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Repatriating EU social policy

Ahead of David Cameron’s announcement on Conservative policy on Europe, Open Europe has today published the first in a series of papers about what a future Conservative government should prioritise, now that the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified.

In about two hours time Cameron is expected to announce that he will seek to ‘repatriate’ social and employment legislation from the EU, and promise a referendum on any future transfers of power. Open Europe argues that, if the Conservatives are serious about repatriating powers to member states, then social and employment policy is exactly the right place to start.

However, in order to achieve a strong negotiating mandate and fully address the current problems with EU social policy, the Conservatives must announce a referendum on reform of the status quo. A referendum on future transfers of power will do nothing to address the substantial costs already arising from EU legislation, nor the lack of democratic accountability in this area.

EU social and employment laws have had a massive impact on the UK economy, accounting for 25 percent of the total cost of regulation in the UK over the past decade. Looking ahead, UK laws derived from EU social legislation will cost the British economy more than £71 billion between 2010 and 2020, even if no new laws are passed in that time.

In the briefing paper, Open Europe sets out how the Conservatives should go about achieving repatriation in practice. This includes seeking a strong mandate from voters to strengthen the UK’s negotiation position in Brussels, through a referendum on reform.

The potential election of a new Conservative government will coincide with the opening of EU budget negotiations, where discussions will be held about how much each country should pay into the EU over the period 2014 to 2020.

The UK has a veto over these negotiations, and should be prepared to use it to fight for a package of reforms which must be fleshed out between now and the election. A major feature of such a package should be repatriation of social policy.

This package of reforms should be put to the British people in a referendum, with a question along the lines of: “Are you in favour or against withholding agreement to the EU budget until the European Reform Package has been adopted?”

Open Europe Research Director Mats Persson said:

“Given the substantial economic impact of these laws, the Conservatives are absolutely right to make EU social policy a priority. There is a strong practical, economic and democratic case for repatriating powers in this area.”

“If the Conservatives succeed in bringing back powers over these policies, it doesn’t mean scrapping every workplace right going - it means giving Westminster back the power to keep, scrap or amend these important laws to better suit the UK’s individual economic circumstances. This would cut costs and bring these decisions much closer to the people - where they belong.”

“Employment policy is best decided nationally, where it reflects different traditions and labour market models, which have evolved as a result of decades of democratic discourse in individual countries. The Conservatives would not be alone in Europe in arguing that centralised rules for such fundamentally different labour markets just don’t make sense.”

“That said, they will need a powerful mandate for negotiation in Brussels, and holding a referendum on a list of reforms, such as repatriation of social policy, is by far the best way to achieve it. UK voters must get a say on the future of the EU - a mere ‘manifesto mandate’ simply will not cut it.”

Click here to read the briefing:
http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/eusocialpolicy.pdf