"The UN post at Naqoura is barely a kilometre from the Israeli border. Beside it is a sleepy fishing harbour used to bring in supplies and reinforcements.
Since the outbreak of violence in Lebanon last month, the anti-UN crowd has worked overtime tarring the General Secretariat with accusations that it is pro-Hezbollah (and ergo, pro-terrorist). Writing in The Weekly Standard , Lori Lowenthal Marcus mines UNIFIL's press-releases to prove this point.
AP: "A new study finds that very few survivors of Hurricane Katrina contemplated suicide despite the extreme conditions they faced.
While the survivors suffered twice as much mental illness as the pre-storm population, they contemplated suicide far less often than mentally ill people surveyed before Katrina.
BBC: "The UN's most senior humanitarian official has warned that Sudan's Darfur region faces a new humanitarian disaster owing to lack of security.
Jan Egeland spoke as the Security Council considered a US and UK plan to send 22,000 UN troops to Darfur."
"U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Friday European nations would provide the backbone of a 15,000-strong United Nations peace force for Lebanon and he had asked France to lead it." More
Ever the thinking person's heavy metal front man, Dave Mustaine articulates to Billboard Magazine precisely how he came up with the name of Megadeth's next studio release.
"I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said 'UN' on them and said, 'Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything," the singer/guitarist said in a recent Billboard interview. "I thought, 'Wow, I've got to run with this. I got it -- United Abominations, 'cause it's an abomination what they're doing!"
Reuters: "France will greatly increase the size of the contingent it is promising for a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, possibly making it easier to recruit other nations, officials and diplomats said on Thursday.... The United Nations says a strengthened U.N. force in south Lebanon is urgently needed to preserve the fragile truce which came into effect on August 14 after a month of fighting which killed more than 1,300 people, mostly Lebanese civilians."
NYT: "By the United Nations' latest estimate, more than 49 million sub-Saharan children age 14 and younger worked in 2004, 1.3 million more than at the turn of the century just four years earlier.
Their tasks are not merely the housework and garden-tending common to most developing societies. They are prostitutes, miners, construction workers, pesticide sprayers, haulers, street vendors, full-time servants, and they are not necessarily even paid for their labor.
Some are as young as 5 and 6 years old."