International issues

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is warning that more than a million children below the age of five in the Sahel are facing a disaster amid the ongoing food crisis in the drought-prone region of Africa.

Washington DC – Compelling advice against a hasty, unilateral decision by Israel to “bomb, bomb, bomb” Iran has come – from Israel. The advice is significant not only for what was said, but for who said it.

Reporters Without Borders denies reports that it was “excluded” from UNESCO during this UN body’s most recent executive council session for a supposed “lack of ethics.” False reports to this effect have been circulated by certain media, especially in Latin America, without any attempt at verification.

Bangkok – Japan is widely regarded as well-prepared for disasters, being used to frequent tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes and volcanic activity, but a year after the calamitous events of 11 March 2011, the lessons from the multi-disaster still resonate.

Reporters Without Borders is deeply saddened by the news that radio journalist Jean Liphète Nelson was gunned down yesterday in Cité Soleil, the poorest neighbourhood of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Reporters Without Borders is deeply shocked by the raids that Israeli troops carried out on two Palestinian TV stations in the West Bank in the early hours of 29 February, seizing equipment and thereby forcing the stations to close.

Paris – If you ask the French ministry for foreign affairs about the country’s position on a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, the spokesperson will surely refer you to the statements by the French ambassadors before the UN both in New York and Geneva, and will repeat that France supports the global application of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

While rights groups stress that the brutal crackdown on protesters in Syria and other Middle East and North Africa countries underlines the absence of a global regulation on the trade of conventional arms, a number of states –including U.S., China, and Russia– are rejecting the Inclusion of strong human rights safeguards in an international Arms Trade Treaty.

The state system at its worst: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of US troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee US involvement, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world.

New York, 13 February – The UN General Assembly began meeting on 13 Feb. to discuss the situation inside Syria, where thousands of people have been killed as a result of the Government’s ongoing crackdown against a pro-democracy uprising.