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UN General Assembly president puts climate change at top of agenda

Ambassador John Ashe of Antigua and Barbuda, the newly elected president of the U.N. General Assembly, is familiar with overcoming barriers to opportunity, and is determined to make a difference for those growing up in in poverty.

He was one of seven children born to parents who hadn't completed high school. He grew up the grandchild of a man who signed his name with an X and the son of a woman who was the descendent of slave plantation owners on the island of Barbados.

Speaking at the opening of the General Assembly on Sept. 24, Ashe, perhaps reflecting on his own experience, told delegates: "It is not our limitations that define us; rather, it is what we do to overcome them."

And there is a lot to overcome. The international community's eyes have been glued to diplomatic breakthroughs in regards to Iran and Syria these past weeks, with President Barack Obama speaking on the phone to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the first time a U.S. president has done so in more than 30 years, and the U.N. Security Council passing a resolution on Syria for the first time in the two-and-a-half-year conflict.

But for the twin islands of Antigua and Barbuda, home to fewer than 90,000 people and its neighbors in the Caribbean, climate change is the urgent threat to their security.

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Al Jazeera's Whitney Hurst reports that the UN Security Council will meet at expert level in closed consultations at 3pm on Monday to discuss a draft statement on humanitarian access in Syria. There will be no ambassadors present, just Syria experts and deputy ambassadors from participating countries.

The draft statement requests that the Syrian government remove bureaucratic hurdles to cross-border access and open humanitarian routes for aid workers.

The feeling is that the Russians are supportive of this statement. Diplomats say that after progress on Syria's chemical weapons arsenal, the Russians may be more open to the humanitarian statement that they have in the past resisted.

The statement will not be passed today but possibly Tuesday or later this week.

Inspectors vow to first disable Syria's chemical weapons facilities

Inspectors who will oversee Syria's destruction of its chemical weapons said their first priority is to help the country scrap its ability to manufacture such arms by a Nov. 1 deadline — using every means possible.

This may include smashing mixing equipment with sledgehammers, blowing up delivery missiles, driving tanks over empty shells or filling them with concrete and running machines without lubricant so they seize up and become inoperable, the weapons inspectors said.

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council ordered the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to help Syria destroy its estimated 1,000-ton chemical weapons arsenal by mid-2014. It also calls for consequences if Syria fails to comply, though the Security Council would have to pass another resolution to impose any penalties.

"This isn't just extraordinary for the OPCW," Michael Luhan, a spokesman for the organization, said. "This hasn't been done before: an international mission to go into a country which is involved in a state of conflict and amid that conflict oversee the destruction of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction which it possesses. This is definitely a historical first."

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