Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Iran’s Ahmadinejad tells UN capitalism’s dying
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a U.N. General Assembly session on poverty this week that capitalism is on the verge of death and that it’s time for a new economic system.
“The discriminatory order of capitalism and the hegemonic approaches are facing defeat and are getting close to their end,” Ahmadinejad said at a summit meeting assessing progress on achieving U.N. goals to drastically reduce poverty by 2015.
“The undemocratic and unjust governance structures of the decision-making bodies in international economic and political fields are the reasons behind most of the plights today humanity is confronting,” he said, according to an English translation of his prepared remarks.
Ahmadinejad usually draws a large crowd for U.N. speeches but Tuesday’s address was delivered to a virtually empty hall.
UN General Assembly: NYC’s annual headache
For world leaders, foreign ministers and diplomats from the 192 members of the United Nations, the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly is a chance to stand at the iconic dark green marble podium and trumpet their countries’ successes, voice their concerns — or occasionally to attack their enemies. (Such as when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called former U.S. President George W. Bush “the devil” during his address to the assembly.)
But for people who live or work in, or travel through, the east side of midtown Manhattan, the General Assembly is a headache that runs for three or four days every September. It causes regular traffic jams as official motorcades speed through the city. It’s difficult to book a hotel as prices soar and availability plummets. Scores of heavily armed NYPD officers line the streets. The city’s trademark incessant honking of car horns is punctuated with the roar of helicopters overhead scanning for suspicious activity on the streets below. NYPD checkpoints are set up to screen everyone trying to get within a few hundred yards of U.N. headquarters and those without proof that they live or work in the area are told to get lost.
