The World Is Good Hands

I've mentioned this before, but I like it so much - Smoke 'em if you got 'em:

The United Nations is perhaps the last public space in New York where one can light up a Camel over coffee, or even a Cuban cigar after lunch. And diplomats from a dozen foreign nations are working to keep it that way.

Earlier this year, New York City passed one of the most restrictive smoking laws in the country. But the statute has done nothing to stop diplomats from lighting up in the delegates' bar and coffee lounges at the U.N. headquarters building, and New York authorities have no jurisdiction to stop them.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has tried on his own to ban cigarettes inside the Secretariat building on First Avenue, succeeding mainly in prompting hours of debate in General Assembly committees and lending a defiant pleasure to each strike of the match.

When diplomats protested that only the General Assembly, not Mr. Annan, could outlaw cigarettes, the U.N. legal advisers were called in to study the matter.

Read the whole article for all the legal details - if you have a hard time getting to sleep. The UN should resolve this any decade now.