Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the United Nations to Wall Street to the Inner City

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 6 -- The first speaker in the UN Security Council on Tuesday was Cuba's foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, who eulogized Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, cited Argentina's sovereignty over the Malvinas Island, and mentioned Hiroshima.

  Argentine President Cristina Kirchner thanked US Deputy Permanent Representative Rosemary DiCarlo for chairing the Council in July, and welcomed as new US Permanent Representative Samantha Power.

  Given what Power said during her Senate confirmation, including citing the Venezuela of Chavez and now Maduro as a regime, one wondered how she would respond in this, her first Security Council meeting.

  Ethiopia's Permanent Representative Tekeda Alemu, speaking for the African Union, said that the support package and compensation for the AU's AMISOM mission in Somalia should be the same as for UN Peacekeeping missions.

  For MONUSCO in Eastern Congo, UN Peacekeeping's Herve Ladsous (replaced at Tuesday's session by Edmond Mulet)  is spending 10 million Euros a year on a drone, Selex ES Falco, which previously crashed in Pakistan and Wales. Some note Ladsous' drone could view and film up to 10 kilometers into Uganda and Rwanda.

  Before the meeting, Rwanda's Permanent Representative Gasana chatted with Samantha Power, who devoted much of her book "A Problem from Hell" to the UN's, US' and France's inaction during the Rwanda genocide.

  One wondered if US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki's July 23 statement on external support to M23, seemingly scripted by Human Rights Watch and sussed out by a planted questions from Voice of America, which is run by the US State Department with John Kerry on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, would come up, or the Congolese foreign minister's July 24 statement that all rebellions in the Great Lakes bear the same "genetic signature," on which the US Mission to the UN never commented.

  It's been asked: did the minister mean that former rebel Joseph Kabila bears the same genetic signature?

  The UN, when also asked by Inner City Press, said it had no comment on the "genetic signature" citation in the Council.

For Tuesday's Security Council meeting, for the first time the Press was banned from using the southern entrance and exit of the Council stakeout (still without a media work table), a limitation nowhere to be found in the so-called Media Access Guidelines the UN Department of Public Information agreed to with its UNCA.

  The limitation of access has been raised by the new Free UN Coalition for Access, both to UN Media Access and Liaison Unit and its supervisor, so far without response. Libertad de prensa! Watch this site.