Betty E King, named US ambassador to the UN and international organizations in Geneva
Updated 15 February (photo added) Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The US Mission in Geneva announced late Friday that Betty E King was confirmed 11 February as the new US ambassador to the UN and international organizations. King was nominated to the post in late October 2009 and the confirmation came in a voice vote in the US Senate. Details about when she will take up the post are not yet available. King led an unofficial delegation to the preparatory meetings for the Durban Review Conference in 2009, in addition to the items listed by the US Mission as part of her biography.
Background, GenevaLunch
Visa goes to Rio
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The International Olympic Committee in Lausanne and Visa International have extended Visa’s sponsorship agreement to 2020, the two announced 27 October. Visa was one of the founding members of the worldwide TOP Olympic Games partners programme in 1986. The agreement means that Visa is the only official payment services card accepted by the Olympic Games.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Betty E King of New York has been nominated by US President Barack Obama to be the new US ambassador in Geneva, to the United Nations and Other International Organizations, the US Mission in Geneva has announced. Her nomination will need the approval of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee (background story on the process, GenevaLunch). The process can take two to three months.
A two-year drought across the countries of Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa is taking its toll on the most vulnerable people: subsistence farmers and pastoralists. In Kenya’s northwestern Turkana region, the worst drought in 40 years is forcing people to sell weakened animals at below market rates in order to survive. Others are moving into emergency feeding centres.
The UN’s World Food Program is feeding one in six Kenyans, almost 4 million people, and says it needs $300 million to feed them for the next six months. Ethiopia’s government has launched an international appeal for $175 million in aid to head off the crisis. AllAfrica, BBC, Wall Street Journal
IOC President Jacques Rogge, © 2009 IOC All rights reserved
Copenhagen, Denmark (GenevaLunch) – Jacques Rogge, the president of the Olympic Committee, was re-elected president of the Movement by a vote of 88-1 today, 9 October for a final four-year term. Rogge said his main priority will be to concentrate on the new Olympic Youth Games, which kick off in Singapore in the summer of 2010, followed by the Youth Winter Games in Innsbruck in 2012.
Rogge has been president since 2001. He competed in the sailing events at the Games in Mexico City in 1968, in Munich in 1972, and in Montreal in 1976.
Title: Mentorship cafe, GWIT event
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Meet mentors from NGOs and corporate world, senior women managers, while you move among 3 tables
Start Time: 18:15
Date: 14 Oct 2009
End Time: 21:30
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Monday 14 September that an “intolerable” number of displaced people continue to live in camps”, and added that in the case of Sri Lanka “internally displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment”. Some 280,000 civilians are interned in government-run camps waiting to be screened. In a reply to the council, Sri Lanka’s minister of disaster management and human rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, said that “this is furthest from the truth “, and pointed out that the civilians will be allowed to leave the “relief villages and welfare centers once they are screened”. The government is worried that former Tamil Tiger fighters may flee disguised as civilians. Samarasinghe said that almost 170,000 people had been registered and that 45,000 had been cleared to leave the camps or had already left.
The UN’s head of political affairs, Lynn Pascoe, arrived in Sri Lanka for two days of talks with the government on the slow pace of releasing Tamil civilians from camps where they have been held since the end of the war in May against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatist group. The BBC quoted Pascoe as saying, “We’re very concerned about the pace of progress,” before leaving New York. BBC, Bloomberg
Viral Flu, © 2009 Novartis AG
Basel and Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss drugs maker Novartis said 5 August it had begun trials of a swine flu vaccine on humans in Germany, the US and the UK. If the trials are successful, the vaccine could be approved by regulators using a fast-track approvals process in Europe and the US. Large-scale production would then be ramped up in time for the northern hemisphere’s flu season in autumn.
All major drugs manufacturers are racing to finish human trials in order to begin production of a vaccine. Australian drugs manufacturers announced last month that they had begun human trials.
Fast track procedures take into account strain changes
The WHO (World Health Organization) says that fast-track procedures worked out by regulators in many countries are based on existing procedures for approving seasonal flu vaccines, which take into account small changes in the flu virus, so-called “strain changes.”
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - An empty desk in Geneva is receiving more than normal attention: that of the US ambassador, whose unwieldy title is US Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Other International Organizations. The post has been empty since January 2009 when Warren Tichenor left. Tichenor, a Texan and George W Bush appointment, may not have been a household name, but the new US ambassador could well quickly become one, thanks to sharper interest in how the US will work with other countries on several issues, many of them through international organizations based in Geneva.
This is the era of the Obama administration, with its promise of new relationships, and the period of Hillary Clinton at the helm of the US State Department, re-booting the Start talks with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Geneva in March 2009. Obama told a group of ambassadors in Washington Wednesday 29 July that “I came into office with a strong commitment to renew American diplomacy, and to start a new era of engagement with the world. This must be a moment when we engage on the basis of mutual interest and mutual respect, so that we can build new partnerships for progress.”
Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe (image: Cisac, Stanford University)
One name being bandied about for the Geneva ambassador’s job is that of Obama fundraiser Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe. Le Temps wrote some weeks ago that she will be named, basing the information on “sources close” to President Obama, and IP Watch, an intellectual property industry newsletter, named her as the likely candidate in a 29 July article.
Unicef poster
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Revised estimates of the global trade in small arms show that it increased 28 percent between 2000 and 2006, the latest year figures are available, an annual survey of small arms published by Geneva’s Graduate Institute shows. The value of official transfers of small arms, ammunition, parts and accessories is estimated to be in excess of the previous estimate of $4 billion.
Illicit trade is possibly $100 million.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mathematicians at EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute, used a cluster of more than 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles to spend six months solving an encryption problem, breaking a previous record set in 2002. The laboratory for cryptologic algorithms cracked a 112-bit encryption based on elliptical curves. The significance of the work is that it “may serve to boost our confidence in the strength of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC),” say the authors, led Joppe Bos and Marcelo Kaihara. Encryption is widely used in banking and other industries for security. The encryption industry struggles to stay ahead of code-cracking hackers, who are using increasingly sophisticated methods and calculators.
A 160-bit elliptical curve standard is scheduled to be phased out by the industry in 2010, but the EPFL calculation shows that “for the next decade no regular user needs to be overly concerned about the security of 160-bit ECC.”
China has reacted to complaints filed by the US and the European Union with Geneva-based WTO (World Trade Organization) Tuesday 23 June, which accuse China of limiting exports of raw materials like zinc and bauxite. China is a major producer of both materials. Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that “China’s export policy is in line with the World Trade Organization rules, said an official with the Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday. Export restriction on some industrial material aims to protect the environment and the natural resources, he said.”
”Now more than ever, trade is essential to keep America’s economy afloat,” said Ron Kirk, US trade representative in Washington, commenting on the filings. China thus favours domestic manufacturers, according to the US.
China has complained to the WTO that the US illegally restricts poultry imports from China, originally on health grounds due to avian flu. With the deepest economic downturn in 70 years, many countries are trying to promote domestic industries to the detriment of foreign ones. NYT, FT
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Eight Webster University students will simulate the experience of being refugees for three days, 16-19 June. They will have a short time to throw together some personal belongings, then will walk from UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) headquarters in Geneva to the Webster campus in the village of Bellevue, 10 kilometres away. They will spend two nights and three days on minimum daily rations that they have to cook over open fires, and sleep in a tent donated by UNHCR.
Gliding over Bex, canton Vaud, Switzerland 20 May 2009
A reminder to readers who are not on holiday themselves today that 21 May is a public holiday in Switzerland, France and Italy.
International organizations that remain open in Geneva are likely to have reduced staffing since many employees’ children have school vacations Thursday and Friday.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The World Health Organization (WHO) reported a 16 percent increase in 24 hours in the number of A/H1N1 (swine flu) cases worldwide, from 6,497 confirmed cases Thursday 14 May to 7,500 Friday. During the previous week, the increase was 200 percent. The statistics hide a more complex picture than the dramatic rise in numbers at first appears to show.
Kofi Annan
Bern, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) – The Global Humanitarian Forum set up in 2007 by Kofi Annan, former UN director-general, is being audited by the Swiss government, reports TSR. Switzerland has contributed CHF500,000 in 2009 and is scheduled to pay another half million this year once the audit is completed. The decision to carry out a financial review was taken by Bern in September 2008. The forum’s “strategic focus” is the human impact of climate change, with its “centrepiece” a 23-24 June conference in Geneva, scheduled to host 400 world political and business leaders.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres 14 May visited camps for Pakistanis displaced by the fighting in the northwest of the country and called for massive aid from the international community. UNHCR says the number of people affected by the conflict in recent days has risen sharply to 800,000, and they are living in harsh conditions in camps. The BBC reports that Pakistan’s army has announced a temporary curfew lifting in the northwestern Swat valley to allow civilians to leave the conflict zone.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “Our staff are witnessing an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe,” ICRC (International Red Cross) Director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said in a statement 14 May from the organization’s headquarters in Geneva. “Despite high-level assurances, the lack of security on the ground means that our sea operations continue to be stalled, and this is unacceptable. No humanitarian organization can help them in the current circumstances. People are left to their own devices.”
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A local International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) employee and his mother were killed 13 May by an army shell, reports Le Temps, in the crowded and dangerous northeast corner of Sri Lanka, where government troops are battling Tamil Tigers.
A ferry boat contracted by ICRC to take essential food and medicine to the safe area and evacuate those civilians most at risk, especially the wounded, women and children, was unable to beach Monday 12 May due to the dangerous situation, according to Paul Castella, ICRC chief delegate in Colombo. The ICRC has called for a ceasefire to allow civilians trapped by the fighting to leave.
US gives green light and is elected to Human Rights Council in Geneva
Update 12:30 Geneva, Switzerland and New York, USA (GenevaLunch) – The US was last night elected to a three-year term on the Geneva, Switzerland-based UN Human Rights Council, by the UN General Assembly, after years of refusing to participate in what it called a flawed institution. US President George Bush’s administration claimed that some countries manipulated the Council to hide human rights offenses, pointing to a group of members that included Russia, Cuba and others which the US said had suspect human rights records.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres 11 May announced that his organization is chartering a Boeing 747 to transport emergency items to Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, at a cost of $584,000. Much more will be needed, he noted in an appeal to the international community for financial assistance and solidarity to help hundreds of thousands of Pakistani civilians displaced by recent heavy fighting in the region.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Fourth Conference of the parties to the Stockholm Convention on POPs, COP4, decided to restrict the use of nine chemicals, of which one, PSOF, is widely used in the imaging and semi-conductor industry, according to conference documents.
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Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swine flu has now been confirmed in 4,379 cases in 29 countries worldwide, and 49 people have died of the disease, the World Health Organization announced 10 May. On Saturday Argentina, Australia, Japan and Panama became the latest to confirm cases.
In Costa Rica, one man has died, and in the United States another fatality has been confirmed, bringing that country’s total dead to two. Mexico now reports five deaths from the disease.
Related: BBC
WTO aerial view (photo: WTO)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Pedestrian access to the lake will not be hindered by the extension to the World Trade Organization (WTO) building in the Jardin Barton on Geneva’s lakefront, the City of Geneva and the WTO told journalists at a 7 May press conference.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) has registered more than 45,000 new internally displaced persons (IDPs) over the past four days at 12 new registration points in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, the organization announced 7 May. It is setting up new camps in Mardan and Swabi districts, south of the conflict area in the Swat valley, to house people fleeing a surge in the fighting between govenment forces and Taliban militants. Up to 500,000 civilians may be affected by the conflict.
