United Nations

The United Nations has dealt a bitter blow to the UK government, ordering them to immediately release Julian Assange from his “illegal detention”. The UN rejected a UK appeal against its previous ruling in favor of Assange as “inadmissible,” which means that both the UK and Sweden will be forced to free the WikiLeaks founder with immediate effect. “Now that all appeals are exhausted, I expect that the UK and Sweden will comply with their international obligations and set me free,” Julian Assange said in a statement.

In the first woman appointment to Trump's administration, South Carolina Govenor Nikki Haley has accepted the president-elect's offer to be his ambassador to the United Nations, NBC News reported this morning. The daughter of immigrants from India, Haley served three terms in South Carolina's State House before winning the governorship in 2010 and again in 2014. A two-term governor, Haley, 44, initially backed Trump rivals Sen. Marco Rubio and then Sen. Ted Cruz during the GOP battle for a White House nominee.

Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

“The war on drugs has failed,” the editors of the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal declared this week, arguing that doctors should lead the global effort to reform drug policy.

Fiona Godlee, the journal’s editor-in-chief, and Richard Hurley, its features and debates editor, penned an analysis citing academic and scientific reports to argue global policies on drug use — including the United Nations’ — have fallen drastically short.

Colum Lynch has more details on how the Saudis pressured the U.N. into removing its Yemen war coalition from the blacklist of violators of children’s rights:

Saudi Arabia threatened this week to break relations with the United Nations and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to its humanitarian relief and counterterrorism programs to strong-arm the U.N. into removing Riyadh and its allies from a blacklist of groups that are accused of harming children in armed conflict.

The U.N. has made a humiliating, disgraceful reversal in its reporting on the Saudi-led coalition’s crimes in Yemen:

The United Nations said on Monday it had removed the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in Yemen from a child rights blacklist pending a joint review by the world body and the coalition of the cases of child deaths and injuries.