A new OECD report finds Britain has the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the EU, and rates 5th overall (after the US, Mexico, NZ and Australia). Japan and Korea are the trimmest kids on the bloc, but the problem’s getting worse everywhere.
And guess what – Italy’s the least overweight EU member of the OECD. Who knew?
H/t Owen Barder.
The New York Post has by far the best story of UN week in NYC:
New York cops found themselves in the middle of an international incident Thursday night after members of the Sudanese UN delegation balked at going through metal detectors at an East Side hotel.
The dust-up started when the Sudanese diplomats, invited to a party by members of the UN Iranian delegation after yesterday’s General Assembly, showed up at the nearby Tudor Hotel, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly said today.
“There was a bit of a dispute … there was some pushing and shoving and some resistance on the part of the Sudanese and members of their delegation to go through the magnetometer,” Kelly said.
Kelly said the party area became “overcrowded” — and that a detective from the NYPD intelligence unit hurt his thumb after being “involved in a scuffle.'”
“Eventually,” he said, the Sudanese agreed to go through the metal detector.
One person was taken into custody — but released when it was determined he had diplomatic status.
Check out the comments from irate New Yorkers on Post website too. Sample: “these diplomats are absolute scum.” Aw shucks, can’t the Axis of Evil party now and then?
Today’s FT has a piece about a bit of malware called Stuxnet, which “has infected an unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories” (or more specifically, the SCADA – Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition – systems that control them). According to the FT, Stuxnet
…spreads through previously unknown holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and then looks for a type of software made by Siemens and used to control industrial components, including valves and brakes.
Stuxnet can hide itself, wait for certain conditions and give new orders to the components that reverse what they would normally do, the experts said. The commands are so specific that they appear aimed at an industrial sector, but officials do not know which one or what the affected equipment would do.
While cyber attacks on computer networks have slowed or stopped communication in countries such as Estonia and Georgia, Stuxnet is the first aimed at physical destruction and it heralds a new era in cyberwar.
For the tech details, see this briefing from Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center back in July, and also this comprehensive overview from Wired – which notes that Symantec is calling the worm “the most complex piece of malware we’ve seen in the last five years or more … it’s the first known time that malware is not targeting credit card [data], is not trying to steal personal user data, but is attacking real-world processing systems. That’s why it’s unique and is not over-hyped.”
So is this down to hackers, terrorists or organised crime targeting the soft underbelly of OECD economies? Not necessarily. Some analysts are speculating that the target may be Iran’s nuclear program, given that the majority of infections have taken place there. That’s not confirmed by any means – but what analysts do know, according to Wired, is that
the worm is designed to attack a very particular configuration of the Simatic SCADA software, indicating the malware writers had a specific facility or facilities in mind for their attack and had extensive knowledge of the system they were targeting
Analysts have been expecting this type of attack for a long time – John Robb highlighted SCADA vulnerabilities in an excellent blog post on infrastructure attacks all the way back in 2004 – but it’s been slow to materialise.
The headache for governments is that defending critical national infrastructure successfully against this kind of attack depends on how good utility companies’ security is – which is why governments have been spending a lot more time and energy on stuff like this.
Yesterday, the Managing Global Insecurity project hosted an event in New York on the U.S. and UN. You can read a transcript or watch a video online. The line-up included Strobe Talbott of Brookings and Jim Traub of the NYT and Foreign Policy.
Jim raised an issue that he has written about before: his view that Ban Ki-moon is a liability for the UN and should stand down after one term next year. Strobe recalled the Clinton administration’s veto of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s second term:
I will recall what it was like to be part of an administration that actually did grasp the nettle of denying a second term to a sitting Secretary General. It was not fun, and it was not pretty, and it was successful. And the reason it was successful was that there was a very powerful alternative available [i.e. Kofi Annan] and there was a very doable process whereby to bring it about, and as I observe the current issue as it plays out, and listen to people I have a lot of respect for, I don’t see either of those being the case here.
What does that mean for the UN?
When we talk about the leadership of the U.N., we should not treat that as a singular noun. It’s a plural noun. It’s a collective noun. And my guess is that unless the current Secretary General decides he wants to be the next President of the Republic of Korea, he’s going to be a second-term Secretary General. And a lot of thought should be given, including by him, to strengthening the team and the system around him.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer statement from a better-connected U.S. policy figure.
Ban’s second term is already secure.