Free Republic

A Queens guru who's been accused of seducing women despite his vow of chastity has stacked U.N. headquarters with scores of followers in a bid to promote himself as an advocate for world peace, according to ex-cult members. As many as 60 U.N. clerical workers and mid-level managers are devotees of Sri Chinmoy, 73, a spiritual leader espousing a philosophy of vegetarianism, celibacy, meditation and extreme athletics, ex-members said. The guru, whose actual name is Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, presides over a worldwide spiritual empire from his home in Jamaica Estates. In recent years, the self-avowed chaste holy man has been...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - A number of sites in Iraq known to have contained equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been either cleaned out or destroyed, U.N. weapons inspectors said Monday. The inspectors' report said they didn't know whether the items, which had been monitored by the United Nations, were at the sites during the U.S.-led war in Iraq. U.N. inspectors were pulled from Iraq just before the war began in March 2003 and the United States has refused to allow them to return, instead deploying its own teams to...

NEW YORK -- A book by three current and former U.N. employees about peacekeeping operations portrays wild parties with alcohol and drugs, and convicts and mental-asylum inmates passing as soldiers. Embarrassed U.N. officials have threatened firing or other disciplinary action against two of the authors, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. U.N. rules bar employees from writing about their work without approval, which had been denied in this case. The third author, former U.N. employee Kenneth Cain, works full time as a writer. The book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Matters," covers the authors' experiences during the mid-1990s in Cambodia, Somalia...

United Nations peacekeeping troops are sexually exploiting teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to an investigation by the The Independent newspaper of London. Many of the girls, as young as 13, are mothers who give up their bodies to the U.N. soldiers in exchange for food to feed their hungry children. The girls, who live in the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, northeastern Congo, already are victims of multiple rape by militiamen. The British paper interviewed girls and aid workers who said every night girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining...

<p>SOUTH OF BAGHDAD — In a valley sculpted by man, between the palms and roses, lies a vast marble and steel city known as Al-Tuwaitha.</p> <p>In the suburbs about 18 miles south of the capital's suburbs, this city comprises nearly 100 buildings — workshops, laboratories, cooling towers, nuclear reactors, libraries and barracks — that belong to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.</p>

EVIL PROOFBy BRUCE WILSON in London 28mar03 BRITISH troops have uncovered a bunker full of weapons of mass destruction in the southern Iraqi oilfields. The Ministry of Defence released a dramatic video it said showed more than 100 chemical warfare protection suits and mounds of dozens of artillery rounds it said contained suspected "weapons of mass destruction". It was not immediately clear if the weapons contained chemical or biological warheads. They were not believed to be nuclear. The bunker had been recently deserted by fleeing Iraqi troops attacked by a unit from the Irish Guards, a spokesman said. The film...

"US will lose war", says former UN inspector March 26 2003 at 06:42PM Lisbon - The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter said. "The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated. It is a war we can not win," he told private radio TSF in an interview broadcast here Tuesday evening. "We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United...

Kofi Annan just announced that once the war is over, UN inspections will continue. What the hell is this pygmy smoking?