United Nations-sponsored consultations on the Yemen crisis have started in Geneva, with the aim of ending the bloody conflict in the country. Representatives from Yemen’s exiled government, the Houthi rebels, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s General Peoples’ Congress and other opposition groups were expected to attend the talks in Switzerland, which began on Monday morning. It was not immediately clear, however, if all of the parties were in attendance when the talks started. Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, was in attendance at the opening session of the talks, posing for photographs with a number of representatives of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Yemen faces humanitarian emergency Announcing the start of “preliminary inclusive consultations” in the Swiss city, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN’s peace envoy for Yemen, issued a statement before the talks calling on “Yemen’s political actors to participate in these consultations in good faith and without preconditions, and in […]