Kofi Annan

Losing clearances, torture conditions and major contenders + this day in history w/Yellowstone's Black Saturday and our song of the day by Mudhoney on your Morning Monarchy for August 20, 2018.

Kofi Annan, possibly the most beloved UN secretary-general, died on Aug. 18, 2018, at age 80, in Bern, Switzerland. After he left the UN in 2006, he joined The Elders, a group that uses diplomacy to resolve intractable problems. THE ELDERS

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan died on Saturday. The following is a look back on his tumultuous ten years in office by Consortium News Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria, writing for The Boston Globe on Dec. 29, 2006.  By Joe Lauria, for The…Read more →

No, the US has not made ‘well-meaning efforts to broker peace’ in Syria
by Ian Sinclair
Middle East Eye
9 May 2017

The Illegality of the U.S. War on Iraq
One overlooked lesson of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that international law–even the most fundamental one embodied in Article 2 of the UN Charter prohibiting use of force in international relations–can be violated with impunity, without legal ramifications or sanctions. Even Henry Kissinger–that embodiment of vicious amorality and imperialist aggression–noted in 2002 that the planned invasion would upset the structure of international relations existing since the Treaty of Westphalia 1648. Never mind, it happened anyway.

The “Srebrenica massacre” is repeatedly referred to in the Western media as “the largest massacre in Europe since World War II,”1 and its alleged Bosnian Serb perpetrators have been relentlessly pursued by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1995 up to the present time (the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic are even now on trial for this and other purported crimes).

As with everything to do with “The New Iraq”, the death, on June 5th, 2015, of the country’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, 79, was announced with a lie.
The Deputy Governor of Nasiriya, Adel Aldikhaly, stated that he had died of a heart attack after “a long term incurable disease.”

The disgraced former head of the UN smears skeptics while ignoring the dubious motivations of green opportunists.

Celebrities are making public pronouncements about the upcoming climate summit in Paris. Just as they did about the Copenhagen summit six years ago.

It’s not often I praise the BBC for producing real journalism. Further, it is with some disbelief that I find myself applauding Jane Corbin, who I will struggle till my dying day to forgive for her despicable piece of Israeli propaganda parading as reportage a few years back on the Israeli navy’s attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza.