Sept. 13, 2006: Hezbollah -&- UN

Hezbollah committed war crimes: Amnesty International , AP, Updated Thu. Sep. 14 2006 6:16 AM ET

[....] "Targeting civilians is a war crime. There's no gray area," said Larry Cox, Amnesty's executive director in the United States.

Although Hezbollah denies targeting Israeli civilians, it fired inaccurate rockets packed with thousands of metal ball bearings to maximize harm to noncombatants, Amnesty said. [....]

UN falls short on oil-for-food reform: investigator , Sam Cage, Sep 7, 2006
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BASEL, Switzerland (Reuters) - The United Nations has failed to take on board some of the key recommendations of an investigation into corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, an investigator told Reuters on Thursday.

The independent inquiry proposed reforms to prevent similar abuses in future, but at least two central tenets have not been addressed, said Mark Pieth, one of three members of the inquiry team, which was headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.

"They're not really taking us seriously," Pieth, a Swiss law professor based in Basel, said in an interview. "There are reforms going on that go some way, but not really as far as we would have hoped."

[....] Some governments are reluctant to disclose publicly which companies they are investigating for corruption or breaking the U.N. embargo on Iraq and the OECD will encourage them to contribute to an overall summary of oil-for-food probes, he explained.

Some 500-1,000 cases mentioned in the Volcker inquiry's final report are clear-cut cases of corruption, Pieth said.