You can buy a Blackberry over-the-counter within a block of the United Nations’ Manhattan headquarters, but bureaucrats recently told Srgjan Kerim, incoming president of the General Assembly, that his impatient staff would have to wait another two months to get theirs.

The diplomat and ex-foreign minister of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia cites the delay in supplying his aides with the must-have executive communications tool as a trivial if telling example of the bureaucracy he says is stifling the UN.