What's New

Resources updated Monday, November 13, 2017

November 13, 2017

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, with Mexican president Enrique Pena-Nieto (File photo)

Report: Mexico Will Stop Voting in Favor of Palestinians at UN Article

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (File photo)

Sudan's ICC-wanted president is set to visit Uganda Article

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed

"Amina J. Mohammed, the U.N. deputy secretary-general, has ascended to the lofty pinnacle of global diplomacy on the back of her record as a champion of the environment and the poor. But in January, just weeks before assuming her current job, she spent her final days as Nigeria's environment minister doing something that has outraged activists. Despite a ban then in force on the export of rosewood, an endangered resource, she signed thousands of certificates authorizing the shipment of vast quantities of the wood.

The certificates 'came in bags, and I just signed them because that is what I had to do,' she recalled in an interview last month in her sprawling 38th-floor U.N. headquarters office in Manhattan overlooking the East River. 'I don't remember how many.'...

Mohammed's 11th-hour decision to approve the kosso shipments was first documented by a Washington-based environmental group and is now part of an inquiry by the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which Nigeria is a signatory...

The thousands of 'hand-signed permits violate both Nigeria's export ban' and provisions of the endangered species treaty, Alexander von Bismarck, the executive director of EIA, claimed in an interview with FP. 'More importantly, the laundering of Nigerian rosewood decimates millions of hectares of fragile forest and imperils the lives of millions of people.'..."

New Allegations Challenge the Environment Record of Top U.N. Official Article

A meat cleaver, knife, and copy of the Quran, found in the backpack of a Palestinian man, who said they were going to be used in a terror attack, November 9, 2017

Palestinian nabbed outside settlement with meat cleaver, Quran Document