The UN on Friday extended by a week its deadline for seeking approval of a new human rights council opposed by the US but backed by rights groups and a vast majority of the 191 member-states.
Simultaneously, the Human Rights Commission, which the council is supposed to replace, agreed to postpone by a week the opening of its annual session that was to start tomorrow in Geneva.
The actions came after human rights organizations mounted a lobbying effort in support of the proposed council and the EU sent Washington a pledge that its members would keep objectionable candidates off the new panel.
The commission has long been an embarrassment to the UN because its members included some of the world's most notorious rights violators. The council was proposed a year ago by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan with terms that would bar membership to rights abusers, but in the version that emerged this month those guarantees were watered down.
The US was the only country to declare it would call for a vote and vote no.
John Bolton, the US ambassador, said the measure should be renegotiated, but Jan Eliasson of Sweden, the General Assembly president, said that reopening the delicately balanced text would expose it to a "Pandora's box" of amendments from opponents and doom the whole project.
Gerhard Pfanzelter, ambassador of Austria, which occupies the EU presidency, said the EU effort could calm US concerns because the number of countries joining the Europeans in pledging to ban abusers from membership could end up approaching the 96 needed to approve candidates for the panel.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
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