Politics

Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s years-long confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been ruled unlawful by the U.N.’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and his lawyers have now called for Sweden’s extradition request to be dropped immediately.

The ruling is not binding and the British Foreign Office maintains the legal obligation to extradite Assange. Accordingly, he will be arrested should he decide to vacate the embassy premises.

Bernie Sanders has found the chink in Hillary Clinton’s political armor - and it has nothing to do with a private e-mail server.

The riley socialist has begun hitting the former First Lady hard on her liberal credentials, branding her a kind of wannabe progressive with an on-again off-again commitment to things like reforming the type of establishment politics that allow Wall Street to exercise undue influence on Capitol Hill.

Exclusive: One fallout from the Hillary Clinton-led “regime change” in Libya – after Muammar Gaddafi gave up his WMD deterrence – is that North Korea keeps building up its nuclear-weapon program. Its leaders don’t want to suffer Gaddafi’s grisly fate, another case of how war can exacerbate other tensions, notes Jonathan Marshall. By Jonathan Marshall…

The Russian Orthodox Church have confirmed that the Vatican have requested an “urgent and immediate” meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill over church leaders’ fears that the end of the world is coming.  The meeting is scheduled to take place on 12 February in Cuba.

UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has dismissed a UN panel’s ruling that Julian Assange should be allowed to go free, saying that their ruling is “ridiculous”.  The UN panel said that Assange had been “arbitrarily detained” and should receive compensation from the British government. BBC News reports: Philip Hammond rejected the decision, accusing Mr Assange of evading justice. Mr Assange hailed it as a “significant victory”, but the UK government insisted the ruling was not legally binding and the report “changes nothing”.