“We Would Not Describe This As Sinister”

That is what a British Ministry of Defense spokesman is quoted as saying about the families of soldiers receiving telephone calls. The calls include claims that their son/husband/father has been or will be killed or verbal abuse or other threats.

The calls originate from Iraq.

Wives and family members of soldiers fighting in Iraq have received telephone calls, believed to include death threats, from insurgents, according to military documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph.

The "nuisance" calls have been made with increasing frequency over the past few weeks after insurgents managed to obtain home numbers from soldiers' mobile telephones.

The growing number of calls has led to an investigation by the Royal Military Police, which has issued a warning to all soldiers in Iraq to take great care when using mobile telephones to call home.

The extent of the problem emerged in a restricted Army document issued to soldiers of the London Regiment, a Territorial Army unit, which has soldiers from its ranks serving in Iraq.

The document warns soldiers preparing to take part in operations that insurgents in southern Iraq have managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of soldiers by using electronic intercept devices to hack into mobile phone systems.

It is understood that the threats range from claims that a husband or son is dead or will be killed fighting in Iraq, to verbal abuse. Many of those who have received calls say that they were made by people with a poor command of English or with a Middle Eastern accent.

The spokesmen say that these are "nuisance" calls. Military officials need to ban personal cell phones for British troops at once. This is not a good situation at all. In addition, all personnel deployed in any war zone need to password protect their personal computers. This is an information war - don't give up information that can be exploited.

I would call the telephone calls quite sinister.

The Lie Of Immigration?

Immigrants are good for the economy? They take jobs nobody else wants? Maybe we might want to look at Britain.

'We recognise the positive contributions immigration makes to the country and the economy," the Prime Minister's official spokesman said last week. "If we don't have migration, we don't have the growth from the economy that we all benefit from."

He was responding to some concerns about the rate of immigration raised by Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead - but Downing Street's claim that "if we don't have immigration, we won't have economic growth" has been stated over and over again since Labour took office in 1997.

If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration.

There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.

Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.

The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.

For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. The economy becomes dependent on a constant influx of immigrants who are willing to accept low pay and poor working conditions. That is what Labour ministers mean when they insist that "public services would collapse without immigrants".

The problem isn't really immigration. The problem is the immigration of low-skilled people. There really is a crisis coming and we need to get ahead of it. We need control and we need limits on who comes into this country. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation and we have to look after our own citizens first. A lot of other things are possible once the border is secure. But we really need to secure the border.

Up Or Out

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article about the navy JAG lawyer who won the Hamdan case. The headline reads, "Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his career". Actually, if you read through it's not quite like that.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift — the Navy lawyer who beat the president of the United States in a pivotal Supreme Court battle over trying alleged terrorists — figures he'll probably have to find a new job.

Of course, it's always risky to compare your boss to King George III.

Swift made the analogy to the court, saying President Bush had overstepped his authority when he bypassed Congress and set up illegal military tribunals to try Guantanamo detainees such as Swift's alleged al-Qaida client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

The justices agreed, ruling 5-3 Thursday in favor of dismantling the current tribunal system.

Despite his spectacular success, with the assistance of attorneys from the Seattle firm Perkins Coie, Swift thinks his military career is coming to an end. The 44-year-old Judge Advocate General officer, who was recently named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country by The National Law Journal, was passed over for promotion last year as the high-profile case was making headlines around the world.

"I may be one of the most influential lawyers in America," the Seattle University Law School graduate said, "but I won't be in the military much longer. That irony did strike me."

Swift's future in the Navy now rests with another promotion board that is expected to render its decision in the next couple of weeks. Under the military's system, officers need to be promoted at regularly scheduled intervals or their service careers are essentially over.

The "up or out" rule has been around for a long, long time. Is it fair? I have no idea. But it has been the way it has worked for a long time. Further down the article gets to what the problem may actually be:

Swift has worked under two officers as a member of the small team of lawyers defending "enemy combatants" being held at Guantanamo Bay. Both of them spoke highly of Swift Friday and said they gave him very high ratings on his annual review, called a fitness report.

"He's doing a fantastic job," said Swift's current boss at the Office of Military Commissions (tribunals), Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan.

Sullivan spoke of the crucial importance of the case decided Thursday by the Supreme Court. "It's a fundamental constitutional question about the powers of the president," Sullivan said. Asked about Swift's aggressive legal challenge of the commander in chief, Sullivan saluted Swift's "moral courage."

"He has been absolutely fearless is pursuing his client's interests. And also he has exhibited an extraordinary level of legal skill. His legal strategy has been brilliant.

"We all take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and he has certainly done that, literally."

Swift spoke Friday about his "immense pride" in the military justice system. "I don't feel that because you join the military you should lose rights. If there is anyone who deserves the protection of those rights, it's the people who are willing to lay down their lives for it."

So the question is will Swift lay down his career because of his vigorous defense of a Yemeni tribesman who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan.

Swift's first supervisor at the Office of Commissions was Col. Will Gunn, who said Friday that he gave Swift two annual fitness reports and "I gave him very high ratings overall."

Asked whether he thought politics might have played a role in Swift being bypassed for promotion, Gunn focused on Swift's atypical career as a military lawyer. "Charlie has spent a lot of time as a litigator, a trial advocate. That's really unusual in the JAG. You find that people in the more senior ranks have moved around and proved themselves in a variety of settings."

So, although a lot of people may not believe it, it may boil down to not having the right boxes checked to get promoted. I have no doubt whatsoever that Swift will land on his feet in a great job if he does get passed over. And I would be very hesitant to say it was malice that got him into that position. Rather blame a system that has been in place for a long time, fair or not.

Chavez Stirring The Pot

Hugo Chavez is not only stirring things up with Argentina and the Falkland Islands. He's also trying to get things stirred up in Africa. Speaking at an African Union summit, he is calling for Africa to join with Latin America (read Venezuela and Cuba) against the US.

Chavez, whose repeated criticism of America has raised hackles in Washington, called on an African Union summit to cooperate with Latin America in everything from oil production to university education to counter "colonial" meddling in developing nations.

Citing the example of Venezuela and Bolivia, he urged Africa to seize greater control of its energy resources. He described the low royalty payments made by some foreign oil companies as "robbery."

"We should march together, Africa and Latin America, brother continents with the same roots … Only together can we change the direction of the world," he told the opening day of the AU summit, to applause.

"The world is threatened by the hegemony of the North American empire," said the former paratrooper, following speeches from African leaders which had criticized colonialism.

Africa's abundant natural resources — ranging from precious metals to iron ore and oil — should make it a wealthy continent if it were freed from outside exploitation, Chavez said.

"Africa has everything to become a pole of world power in the 21st century. Latin America and the Caribbean are equipped to become another pole," he said.

He's also trying to buddy up to Iran, who's president is also attending the summit. This is the direct result of the internal disarray the world sees in the US right now.

101st Blog Of The Day

Today, my mission to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day led me to Iraq War Today, a milblog that has an extensive roundup of war related links updated daily. It's not all war, either. There is a lot of good news and interesting stories from all over. It's a nice one-stop if you're in a hurry.

Ticking Clocks

An interesting opinion piece in Asia Times, written by Sanam Vakil, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Vakil discusses the two internal clocks that are ticking away inside Iran. One is the nuclear clock (representing international pressures), the other that of democracy (or internal pressures).

These ticking clocks are important to consider as Iran ponders the nuclear offer, and the administration of US President George W Bush continues to pressure the regime and stimulate the Iranian people with words about democracy and freedom. At the same time, Iran has been subject to a burst of domestic hostility toward the regime from students, ethnic minorities and religious leaders. Undoubtedly, this increase in internal activity has made the regime feel the ticking of its democratic clock. While Washington hopes to stimulate this movement, Tehran aims to re-create a situation that balances its nuclear clock while stalling its democratic one. Understanding the dynamics behind these two clocks is necessary to deconstructing the Iranian decision-making process.

For many months it appeared that Tehran had managed to capture the upper hand in the nuclear balancing act through its divide-and-conquer confrontational strategy with the international community. The breakthrough counter-announcement by the Bush administration tactically tilted the scales of power in favor of Washington and gave Tehran's leaders reason to pause. Now, it is the Islamic Republic that has experienced a reversal of fortune and must carefully weigh its delicate international pressures against its domestic ones.

The ultimate goal for the Islamic Republic is regime preservation. To this end, the mullahs have pursued a two-pronged process: they've tried to keep the nuclear clock running while stalling the democracy clock. This approach worked for the regime throughout the nuclear negotiations until Washington pulled out its trump card. Tehran can no longer use the nuclear issue to buffer against the threat of growing domestic unrest.

This indicates a real internal struggle going on inside the Iranian halls of power, then. It's a longish piece, but well worth the read. It casts quite a lot of light on the unrest going on inside Iran and the forces driving it.

England, Argentina And The Falklands

It's been 25 years since the Iron Lady whomped hell out of Argentina for invading the Falkland Islands. The Argentinian president, Nestor Kirchner is stirring things up again, though according to The Guardian.

There are three perennial passions in Argentina: football, the tango and the country's claim to Britain's South Atlantic outpost, the Falkland Islands. Even the build-up to Argentina's World Cup game against Germany yesterday failed to entirely deflect attention from what in the last few months has become the hot political issue.

In the latest of a series of provocative moves - provocative, at least, when seen from the Falklands and the Foreign Office - the Argentinian parliament on Thursday established a commission to investigate how to win control of the islands Argentinians refer to as the Malvinas.

In Britain, the issue is regarded today mainly as historical. Margaret Thatcher and Rex Hunt, the Falklands governor when the Argentinians invaded the islands in 1982, joined 293 others at Lincoln's Inn in London on June 13 to mark Liberation Day. Plans are being prepared at the Ministry of Defence and other government departments for a march-past by veterans down Whitehall next year, the 25th anniversary of the war.

But for the Argentinian president, Nestor Kirchner, a Peronist with leftwing leanings, the issue is more than just historical. He has embarked on a renewed push for the islands and enlisted the support of other left-leaning leaders, from Cuba's Fidel Castro to Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. For Mr Kirchner it is personal as well as political. He was born in, and became mayor of, the southern Patagonian port of Río Gallegos, a city that sits directly across from the Falklands and from where Argentinian troops embarked for their failed invasion.

"Kirchner views the Malvinas question with a Patagonian eye, a view hardened by the geographic proximity and the war," according to a Buenos Aires-based political analyst, Rosendo Fraga. "I don't think it was Kirchner's original intention but the sovereignty issue has provided a rallying point to gather left-leaning Latin American governments into an anti- colonial bloc."

British government officials are privately dismissive, seeing the sudden renewed interest in the islands as little more than a piece of political cynicism, motivated by Mr Kirchner's drive for re-election next year. One of the officials said yesterday that about 200 diplomats, journalists, ex-combatants and legislators took part in Thursday's commission launch "but it contained few surprises, just the usual rhetoric from firebrands about the islands, depicting the UK as the Evil One".

The British government, while far from alarmed, is expecting the rumbling to continue and become louder as the election draws closer.

Notice the list of bad actors involved? Castro and Chavez. The Islanders do not want anything to do with Argentina and prefer to stay part of the remnants of the British Empire.

That’s What We Believe, Too

"My personal opinion is that the only way we will lose this war is if we pull out prematurely," Colonel Jeffrey Snow, Commander of the 1st Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division is quoted by AFP.

"I would hope we get the time and support we need to finish this mission," he said in a video conference from Iraq.

Snow, whose own troops have come under stepped-up insurgent attacks this month, criticized media coverage as too focused on insurgent roadside bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.

"Our soldiers may be in the crosshairs every day, but it is the American voter who is a real target, and it is the media that carries the message back each day across the airwaves," he said.

"So when the news is not balanced and it's always bad, that clearly leads to negative perceptions back home," he said.

Which mirrors exactly what this blog - and an awful lot of others in the blogosphere - have been saying all along. Omar at Iraq the Model has some information about how the reconciliation plan is working. I see it as being a work in progress, but there does appear to be progress. We must give the Iraqi government time to work this out internally. There is an information war being fought. Our media has to stop cooperating and decry terrorist propaganda spin as heartily as they decry US attempts at controlling the news.

Thunderstorms Threaten Shuttle Launch

AP is reporting that thunderstorms are moving toward the shuttle launch pad and may disrupt the planned launch schedule. NASA's official Launch Blog is still showing normal countdown activity at this time, with the crew strapped in and performing communication checks.

UPDATE: 3:29 EDT - countdown is holding at T-9 for thunderstorms and clouds in the area.

3:38 EDT - Countdown still on holding at T-9, the launch window closes at 3:53. The last launch poll still had weather as a no-go. It looks like the launch may be scrubbed for today.

3:42 EDT - Launch is scrubbed for today. Another attempt will be made tomorrow.

Cow Power

The Associate Press has an article about a Vermont dairy farm that has figured out a way to increase revenues, cut power costs and help the environment all at the same time. And all by using a by-product typical to all dairy farms.

Cow pies.

With the help of their power company, Central Vermont Public Service Corp., the Audets have devised a way to extract the methane from the manure and pipe it to a generator.

They make enough electricity to power 300 to 400 average Vermont homes. It's renewable energy, and they're not the only ones interested in it. Four other Vermont farms now have similar projects in the planning or early construction stages, power company officials said.

The Audets "deserve to be congratulated. They're the pioneers among Vermont farmers," said Dave Dunn, a senior energy consultant with CVPS who worked with them on the cow power project.

Elsewhere in the country, farmers are using similar technology to make energy, said Corey Brickl, project manager with Wisconsin-based GHD Inc., which built a device that the Audets use to harvest the methane.

One in Washington uses tomato waste from a salsa factory and waste from a fish stick plant as fuel, Brickl said.

For the Audets, the electricity has created an important new income stream at a time when low wholesale milk prices have squeezed their margin. The utility pays 95 percent of the going New England wholesale power price for electricity from the Audets' generator.

In addition, the utility charges customers willing to pay it a 4-cents-per-kilowatt-hour premium for renewable energy and then turns the money over to the Audets. So far, more than 3,000 CVPS customers have signed up to pay the premium to support the renewable energy effort.

The bottom line is more than $120,000 a year from electricity sales. When they add in other energy savings enabled by the project, the Audets expect their $1.2 million investment in project equipment to pay for itself in about seven years.

The process used is interesting:

In their stalls, cows munch contentedly on a mix of hay and silage while they make an occasional contribution of fuel for the Audets' power plant. An "alley scraper," which looks like a big squeegee on wheels, comes by to push their manure down the row and through grates to a conveyor belt below.

From there, the manure goes to an anaerobic — meaning oxygen-free — digester, a 100-foot-by-70-foot structure similar to a covered swimming pool built by Brickl's company. The manure spends 20 or 21 days in the digester, being pushed slowly from one end to other as more is added.

Three products result: a liquid that contains enough nutrients that it can be used as fertilizer for the farm's feed crops; a dry, odor-free, fluffy brown substance that is used as bedding for the cows and some of which goes to a local firm that bags and sells it as fertilizer on the home-and-garden market; and methane.

The methane is piped into an adjacent shed that contains a big Caterpillar engine that powers the 200-kilowatt generator.

Audet said the farm was saving the $1,200 a week it formerly spent on sawdust bedding for the cows, as well as some of the cost of heating the milking barn. A study by agricultural scientists from the University of Vermont found that the bedding produced from the manure was better than the sawdust. "Wood harbors a lot of bacteria," she said.

Speaking as someone who worked in the power field for a long time, there are two things that are always missing from stories like this: What is the design life of the project and what are the annual maintenance costs? At some point the engine is going to need an overhaul, belts and motors will need replacement, etc. I'm not saying it's not a good idea, it certainly is. It would still be helpful to know the rest of the story, though.

Wouldn’t Spinach Be Easier To Digest?

A 43-year old woman from Can Tho City, Vietnam went to the hospital complaining of a stomach ache. The doctors took X-rays and determined there were some oddities that needed further examination. They performed surgery and found the cause of the problem.

119 three inch long nails.

"After having her stomach X-rayed and scanned, we found a stack of strange objects and decided to operate as soon as possible," he said.

During surgery, doctors removed 119 nails, each about 3 inches long. Many were rusty, indicating they could have been in her stomach for months, Nam said.

The woman's stomach was scratched by the nails, but she did not suffer any major injuries, he said.

This is a novel way to address an iron deficiency. Stupid, but novel.

Israeli Incursion Into Gaza

I have not been able to find any other reports that the Israeli government has threatened the Palestinian PM other than the article from the Australian noted earlier. But there is a very thorough roundup of everything that has been going on over there in Ha'aretz today. One thing that really comes across is that an awful lot of world leaders are flat-out telling Hamas the first thing they have to do is release the kidnapped Israeli soldier.

Earlier Saturday, the new European Union President said that Israel should release dozens of detained Palestinian officials and that Palestinian militants should free Shalit, who was abducted Sunday, immediately.

"I call on the Palestinians to immediately release the Israeli soldier they took hostage. At the same time, Israel must halt its military operations, free the Palestinian ministers and members of parliament and stop destroying civilian infrastructure in the Palestinian territories," Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen told German newspaper Die Welt.

Add to that President Bush, the Turkish PM, and the UN Assistant Secretary-General.

Althouse Versus The Times Two

Ann Althouse's smoke detectors are going off over the op-ed appearing in today's New York Times describing how the Times Two editors decide to publish secrets. Baquet and Keller's explanation rings hollow.

The two editors — Dean Baquet and Bill Keller — rely heavily on the idea that government officials shouldn't have the final say over what gets out and what remains secret. Citizens need to be able to evaluate these officials, who can't be trusted controlling the flow of information. As Baquet and Keller put it: "They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes." Government officials are biased toward suppressing things that make them look bad, and the press needs to bring out the full story, so that citizens can exercise the independent judgment that is crucial to democracy.

But the recently revealed secrets — about the surveillance of telephone call patterns and financial transactions — were not cases of government suppressing failures. These ongoing programs were successful, and revealing the secrets impaired the operation of very significant efforts in the war on terrorism. I realize that there are arguments that people need to know about successes that are subject to controversy: the telephone surveillance program is attacked as an illegal invasion of privacy.

Here, Baquet and Keller have written a lengthy defense of their behavior, behavior that they know has been severely criticized, even called "treason." Despite the length, the piece seems padded. Look at that last paragraph in the blockquote above. We judge, we weigh, we make judgments. Essentially, trust us. Trust us, because you shouldn't just trust the government. Agreed, but why should we trust you? We look at what you just did and feel mistrustful. What in these generic remarks cures that mistrust? You tell us you really did think about it. Those who abhor what you did will not feel inspired to trust you when you say this is where we ended up when we really thought deeply about it.

That is the crux of it. These programs were not secret to protect the government from embarrassment, but the Times Two editors continue to couch their explanation in those terms. As Ann Althouse writes: Why should we trust you?

(By the way, anyone else now getting the feeling that the two editors are beginning to get a bit nervous about the building backlash they have triggered? That's what I am starting to feel here.)

UPDATE: Armed Liberal at Winds Of Change is not impresed, either. Lori Byrd at Wizbang isn't. Mac's Mind is also detecting a whiff of panic. RantingProfs on credibility gaps. Decision '08 says it's all about cake. Hot Air running the numbers. Just One Minute calls it unintentionally funny. Patterico weighs in and slaps the Times Two silly. Flap also detects the smell of fear.

UPDATE: Although Planck's Constant linked this to another post here, it is simply too good not to share! Ladies and gentlemen, Representative John Murtha (D[efeatist] - PA).

Over And Under

A House Armed Services Committee hearing this week about the 500 or so chemical munitions found in Iraq so far appears to have been an exercise in futility.

Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) contended that an April report by the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) is clear evidence of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

"Some may want to play down the significance of this report or even deny that WMD have been found in Iraq," Hunter said at Thursday's hearing, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.

Citing the United Nations resolutions that called for destruction of all of Hussein's banned weapons, Hunter added that "the verified existence of such chemical weapons" proves they were not destroyed and "in part because of such violations, we voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq."

But Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the senior Democrat on the committee, countered that the NGIC report did not address Baghdad's prewar chemical weapons program. Rather, he said, it was "written to address the force protection concerns of our service members in Iraq."

"Yes, these certainly are munitions," Skelton added, "but they are not the evidence of prewar assertions made by the administration."

The classified overview of chemical munitions says that U.S. forces have found about 500 shells, canisters or other munitions containing the chemical weapons. Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee the shells were produced in the 1980s for the Iran-Iraq war but were not used.

Last week, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a strong supporter of the war, touted the findings, provoking protests from some Democrats.

Fact: Chemical munitions were found. Fact: They appear to date from prior to the first Gulf War. Fact: UN Ceasefire required destruction of all chemical munitions. Fact: The munitions are degraded, but many are still potentially lethal.

Spinning this one way or the other is really quite meaningless in light of the facts. And if the Democrats have long been accusing the White House of overstating the case for WMDs then this indicates just as much spin in the opposite direction.:

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."

The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."

Testimony given in front of Congressman Larsen indicated that the weapons were potentially lethal. To spin that in such a way as to make light of that fact is absolutely no better than what he is accusing the White House of. Is overstating or understating any different qualitatively?

UN Rejects Reforms

The UN General Assembly voted to remove a spending cap on it's budget and refused to agree to reforms requested by the US.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly lifted the cap on United Nations spending but put off a resolution on management reform that U.S. Ambassador John Bolton rejected as not going far enough.

The resolution, approved late on Friday, removes the freeze on the U.N. budget and averts a financial crisis by paying 14,000 staff over the next six months. But it represents a defeat for the United States because it was not made conditional on reforms.

Japan and Australia joined Washington in "disassociating themselves" from the decision.

The General Assembly measure, adopted by consensus without a vote, follows a budget committee's decision on Wednesday to lift a freeze of $950 million, part of a U.S.-led drive to get approval for a series of management changes.

Also high on the reform agenda is a "mandate review" of some 900 resolutions, programs and directives, more than five years old.

"There is not going to be a management reform resolution tonight," Bolton told reporters. "It was clear there was no agreement on a substantive issue, not enough of a critical mass for a resolution.

"We think it was a mistake to lift the cap. The real metric here is how much reform has been accomplished and the answer remains: precious little."

A initial management reform resolution has been put off until next week.

At issue is an increasing division between wealthy nations, which pay 80 percent of the budget, and developing states, which represent a majority in the 191-member General Assembly as well as the world's population. They fear rich countries want more control over U.N. jobs and programs.

The United States pays 22 percent of the budget, Japan nearly 20 percent and the European Union 38 percent.

While the Bush administration requested $423 million for U.N. dues this year, conservative lawmakers in Congress began to pare down the amount, following testimony by Bolton.

The UN continues to show just how useless it has become. It appears to be incapable of reforming itself and continues it's mad rush to irrelevancy.