Donald Trump has delivered a shockingly bellicose speech during his first appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The speech began by striking a tone which sounded more like a speech before a domestic US audience than before the nations of the world. Trump welcomed delegates and leaders to his home town…
During a press availability at conclusion of the BRICS summit in China on September 5, 2017, President Vladimir Putin announced he instructed Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to advance the idea of making the OSCE monitoring mission on the Donbass more effective through the introduction of armed UN peacekeepers. Lavrov was reportedly instructed to introduce an…
Myanmar, the place we used to call Burma, has come back into the spotlight Western governments always try and keep it away from. Much is going on here, and too, many contradictions … but why? There is a well-known management technique called “kicking it into the long grass”. This involves committing yourself to doing something…
As Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian adviser on Syria, has stated, if there’s a worse place to be in the world at the moment than the Syrian city of Raqqa, then it’s hard to imagine. This week, the UN estimated that the battle to capture the de facto ISIS capital is costing the lives of…
The UN Secretary-General has called on Israel to end its 10-year blockade of Gaza, calling it one of the worst humanitarian crises he’d ever seen. Speaking from Gaza Wednesday, Antonio Guterres says he hasn’t seen a humanitarian crisis like the one in Gaza for years. “Yesterday I was in Ramallah. Today I am in Gaza,…
So far, the war between US President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un over the latter’s nuclear program has been fought only in words. But each turn of the rhetorical screw deepens the risk that, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “jaw-jaw” could turn into “war-war”. Last month, after North Korea’s second ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile)…
