United Nations

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has invited representatives of the incoming Trump administration to the upcoming Syria peace talks in Kazakhstan. Speaking in Moscow on Tuesday Lavrov said he believes US and UN representatives should be invited to the meeting. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is against any US participation in the talks that are to be held in Astana on 1/23/17. He told Iran’s Tasnim news agency: “We are opposed to US presence (in the Astana meeting)”. “We have not invited the US and are against their presence,” he said.

Submitted by MiddleEastEye.net via TheAntiMedia.org,

A UN envoy held talks with Yemen’s President Abd Rabbuh Hadi on Monday as the United Nations said the death toll from the war had reached 10,000.

The envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, was in Aden for the meeting that focused on a return to a ceasefire and to political talks to end the nearly two-year war.

An investigation has been launched into claims that UN peacekeepers brutally raped over 100 children in the Central African Republic.  This is not the first time UN workers have been accused of violent and sexual criminal activity. Similar crimes were reported after the UN entered Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Sudan and Kosovo – with reports of child sex trafficking becoming ‘rampant’ as a result.

Back in 2013, the catalyst used by the US to intervene in the Syrian conflict which started in the aftermath of the Arab Spring (which according to some was inspired by CIA intervention), was a YouTube clip allegedly showing a sarin gas attack by Assad troops on his own people in the town of Ghouta, which reportedly led to hundreds of casualties. Subsequently, the video was shown to have been a hoax, but by then it was too late as the US was actively involved in the proxy war, which in the summer of 2013 nearly escalated to a naval conflict between the US and Russia.

Submitted by Jesse Tremblay via PlanetFreeWill.com,

The New York Times has reported that “a panel of French judges has decided not to bring charges against soldiers accused of having sexually abused children while on a peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic”.