UN/Treaties

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said striking a climate change deal and ending the bloody Syrian war top his agenda this year.

"Climate change is fast happening — much, much faster than one would have expected. Climate and ecosystems are under growing strain,” he told The Associated Press on Monday.

"I will do my best to mobilize the political will and resources so that the member states can agree to a new legally binding global agreement on climate change," Ban added.

Securing such a deal will be difficult.

A State Department official who helped lead international climate talks is moving to the Energy Department (DOE) to head that agency’s climate operations.

Jonathan Pershing will begin his new role as DOE deputy assistant secretary for climate change policy and technology on Tuesday, David Sandalow, DOE secretary for policy and international affairs, said in a Friday email to staff.

Pershing will oversee domestic climate and clean-energy initiatives for that office, Sandalow noted. He replaces Rick Duke, who left the agency in September.

At State Department, Pershing served as deputy special envoy for climate change under special envoy Todd Stern. He helped lead the U.S. envoy in United Nations global warming talks for the past four years.

Nearly all voters say it is important for the United States to remain involved in the World Health Organization (WHO), including providing the agency with funds, according to a new poll.

The Better World Campaign (BWC), which seeks to strengthen U.S. involvement in the United Nations, found that 61 percent of voters see the WHO favorably and 92 percent say the United States should continue contributing money to the agency.

The BWC touted its figures and argued U.S. funding for global health efforts should remain a priority as Washington enters a standoff over the debt ceiling and automatic budget cuts known as sequestration.

The State Department’s top climate change official says any hope of crafting a global greenhouse gas emissions accord means finding a recipe that countries view as consistent with their “core interests.”

State Department Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, in a speech Tuesday, laid out State’s thinking about how to pull off the fraught, complex challenge of creating a new agreement in 2015.

“Anyone can say we should demand draconian, legally binding commitments to slash our emissions and to have those commitments subject to a rigorous compliance regime with tough penalties for non-compliance. But this is really just ambition on paper, because in the real world, countries will reject obligations they see as inimical to their core interests in development, growth and eradicating poverty,” Stern said in prepared remarks for the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.

Christiana Figueres, the United Nations’ top climate change official, said data showing that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States should fuel efforts to curb global warming.

“There must be a strong policy and civil society response to the fact that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US,” said Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, on Twitter on Wednesday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Tuesday that 2012’s average temperatures blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit, according to records dating back to the late 1800s.

The National Rifle Association says it will not back down from its fight over a United Nations international arms treaty that will be negotiated early next year.

NRA President David Keene told Reuters Thursday that the gun lobby’s position on the U.N. arms treaty had not changed after the massacre in Newtown, Conn., and he said the Obama administration would have a fight on its hands if it tried to ratify the treaty in the Senate.

The U.N. General Assembly voted on Monday to hold a final round of negotiations on the treaty in March 2013 after negotiations this summer had stalled.

"We're as opposed to it today as we were when it first appeared," Keene said Thursday. "We do not see anything in terms of the language and the preamble as being any kind of guarantee of the American people's rights under the Second Amendment."

The Obama administration, which backs the treaty, says it will not affect domestic arms sales, a key NRA concern.

The State Department on Tuesday slammed John Bolton, George W. Bush's controversial ambassador to the United Nations, after he accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of faking an illness to avoid testifying this week about the Benghazi attack.

Bolton implied on Fox News on Monday night that Clinton lied about her illness to avoid saying anything potentially embarrassing that could come back to haunt her should she choose to run for president in 2016. The State Department put out a statement over the weekend from doctors at Mount Kisco Medical Group and George Washington University saying that Clinton “developed a stomach virus, leading to extreme dehydration, and subsequently fainted.”

“You know, every foreign service officer in every foreign ministry in the world knows the phrase I am about to use: When you don't want to go to a meeting or conference, or an event, you have a 'diplomatic illness,' ” Bolton told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren. “And this is a 'diplomatic illness' to beat the band.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland lambasted Bolton's comments during her daily briefing Tuesday.

“It's really unfortunate that in times like this people make wild speculation based on no information,” Nuland said.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright defended U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on Friday and decried the political attacks against her.

Rice, no longer a candidate for secretary of State, said that she was "not a political person at my foundation."