Drawing on dozens of interviews with intelligence and police officers across two continents, a Guardian investigation reveals the murderous cost of our insatiable appetite for cocaine
Read more: Latin American organised crime ‘may operate in 16 European countries’
Explainer: What is state capture and why does it matter?
As abductions go, few have been more brazen. Alan Jalloh was with two friends outside Goodies supermarket, frantic as usual with late afternoon shoppers. Rush hour in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, was under way with familiar gusto.
A black Toyota Rav4 forced its way through the Peninsula highway traffic. Witnesses describe burly white men leaping out, yanking on balaclavas. Jalloh, 40, seemed to freeze. As did his two friends, one a famous Freetown footballer. All three were dragged into the waiting SUV. None of them have been seen since.
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© Composite: Guardian Design
© Composite: Guardian Design
© Composite: Guardian Design
Parts of London look like a dump. But that hasn't stopped the UN from giving Mayor Sadiq Khan an award for "improving urban life". It's all very incestuous, says Charlotte Gill: the UN is just rewarding its cronies.
The post Why Was Sadiq Khan Given a United Nations Award? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Five years after seizing Kabul, the Taliban’s strongest argument for international acceptance rests on control. The Taliban governs every provincial capital and faces no conventional army capable of marching on Kabul. It repeatedly cites improved security as proof that Afghanistan’s post-2021 order is settled. But armed resistance is becoming more geographically dispersed, more organizationally diverse […]
The post Bit by bit, the Taliban is losing control of Afghanistan appeared first on Asia Times.
By Junaid S. Ahmad | MEMO | October 7, 2026
There are careers that end in triumph, careers that end in scandal, and careers that achieve the rarer distinction of staging their own final indictment. António Guterres has found his in Islamabad.
After nearly a decade as Secretary-General of the United Nations, he arrives in Pakistan in the twilight of his tenure and performs the ritual that has come to define him: smile warmly, praise generously, deplore abstractly, and avoid saying anything that might seriously inconvenience the powerful men standing beside him. His record is littered with eloquent concern, grave warnings and solemn appeals. What it has lacked, again and again, is the one quality that gives moral language meaning: courage when courage carries a cost.
In Islamabad, the performance is almost indecent. Guterres praises Pakistan as a source of “solidarity and solutions,” commends the “resilience” of its people, and assures them that the United Nations stands with them. Meanwhile, former prime minister Imran Khan remains imprisoned after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his detention arbitrary.
UN experts have raised concerns about his treatment, prolonged isolation and conditions of confinement; the UN Committee Against Torture has separately highlighted broader allegations of politically motivated detention, torture, intimidation and repression.
Guterres does not need opposition politicians or troublesome journalists to brief him. He could simply read his own institution’s reports. But that would ruin the choreography.
So the Secretary-General moves through meetings with Pakistan’s political and security establishment while one of the country’s most popular and persecuted political leaders sits behind bars. Outside the diplomatic bubble, Khan’s supporters confront barricades, arrests and the familiar machinery of coercion. The Pakistani state, chronically incompetent at governing, once again discovers astonishing administrative efficiency when citizens decide to protest.
And Guterres praises their resilience. The euphemism is almost grotesque. A population is subjected to repression, institutional decay and coercive politics, and the world’s senior international diplomat congratulates it for enduring the experience. It is the diplomatic equivalent of praising a prisoner’s fortitude while refusing to ask who locked the cell.
But Islamabad is not a lapse in the Guterres record. It is the culmination of it.
The same moral evasion has defined his response to Gaza. For years, Guterres has described the catastrophe in increasingly apocalyptic terms: mass death, starvation, displacement, destroyed hospitals, shattered families, collective punishment and violations of international law. He has rarely lacked adjectives for horror.
What he lacked was willingness to name its most consequential possibility. Genocide.
When confronted directly, Guterres retreated into procedure, insisting that such a determination belonged to the courts. It was bureaucratic cowardice dressed as juridical sobriety. Apparently, a Secretary-General may describe the destruction of a people in exhaustive detail, denounce their starvation, mourn their children and warn of their dehumanization — but the moment the facts threaten to crystallize into the politically dangerous word, he develops an almost priestly devotion to institutional restraint.
The absurdity became complete when UN experts explicitly warned of genocide and a UN Commission of Inquiry later concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The institution Guterres leads could say what Guterres himself repeatedly would not. This was not neutrality. It was evasion refined into method.
That is the essence of the Guterres tenure: moral vocabulary without moral escalation. He has perfected the art of sounding anguished while remaining politically non-threatening. His speeches travel bravely to the edge of the necessary conclusion, stare into the abyss, invoke international law, then retreat into another carefully worded appeal to governments that have already demonstrated their contempt for it.
Gaza became a theatre of catastrophic adjectives without commensurate political naming. Pakistan now becomes a festival of diplomatic compliments beside a prison cell.
The parallel is devastating. In Gaza, the UN system could document devastation while its Secretary-General recoiled from the word that carried the greatest political charge. In Pakistan, UN mechanisms can document arbitrary detention, abuse and repression while their chief shakes hands with the authorities presiding over the system they have condemned.
That is not merely institutional contradiction. It is leadership failure.
No serious person expects a UN Secretary-General to command armies, free prisoners by decree or compel governments into decency. But the office possesses one form of power that cannot be dismissed so easily: moral authority. Guterres has spent much of his tenure conserving it so carefully that, when history demanded its expenditure, there was often nothing to show for it.
He has confused caution with wisdom and diplomatic acceptability with statesmanship. But statesmanship is not the art of saying only what power can comfortably tolerate. Its purpose, at decisive moments, is precisely the opposite.
And so Islamabad is a fitting final tableau: Guterres praising resilience while surrounded by evidence of why resilience is necessary; representing institutions whose own findings he seems unwilling to embody; smiling through repression in Pakistan after years of speaking around genocide in Gaza.
History will not care how many statements he issued, how solemnly he frowned, or how often he invoked international law.
It will ask what he said when speaking plainly became dangerous. Too often, António Guterres chose not to. He saw almost everything. He described almost everything. And when history demanded courage rather than description, he chose cowardice.
Al Mayadeen | September 28, 2026
Iran has warned the United Nations that US President Donald Trump’s threats to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic constitute a grave development, particularly because the remarks were made from the podium of the UN General Assembly.
Gholamhossein Darzi, Iran’s ambassador and chargé d’affaires to the UN in New York, raised the issue in a September 27 letter addressed to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the President of the Security Council, Jérôme Bonnafont.
Darzi’s letter came in response to Trump’s September 22 address to the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, during which the US president said he could “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if no agreement was reached with Tehran. The wording appears in the official UN transcript of Trump’s speech.
Iran says threats made at UN carry wider implications
Darzi said Trump’s remarks were neither isolated nor ambiguous, arguing that they form part of a continuing pattern of public threats against Iran by the president of a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
“These repulsive statements are not ambiguous remarks or isolated utterances. They are rather part of a sustained pattern of public threats against Iran by the head of a permanent member state of the Security Council,” Darzi wrote.
“This latest development is particularly grave and alarming because the United Nations General Assembly is not a venue for threats of annihilation,” he added.
The Iranian envoy stressed that the General Assembly serves as the UN’s principal universal forum and was established to promote international peace, cooperation, and relations among states.
In the letter, Darzi referred to several previous statements by Trump that he said demonstrated a broader pattern of threats against Iran.
He cited remarks on March 22 in which Trump threatened to “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants, followed by statements on March 30 threatening destruction of Iran’s energy facilities and other vital infrastructure, including desalination facilities.
Iran calls for UN response to threats
Darzi argued that the issue extends beyond political rhetoric, saying an explicit threat against a sovereign UN member state raises questions concerning the UN Charter, international peace and security, and the prohibition on the threat or use of force.
He further linked the latest remarks to ongoing US-Israeli aggression against its sovereignty and territorial integrity since February 28, as well as attacks that targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.
“The issue before the Organization is therefore not merely one of political rhetoric,” Darzi wrote, arguing that failure by the international community to respond could normalize threats against entire nations and undermine the authority of the UN Charter.
The UN has itself emphasized the need for restraint and adherence to international law during the current high-level week. In his September 22 opening address, Secretary-General António Guterres said the principle that force cannot determine whose lives and rights matter was under “profound strain” and called on world leaders to use the week for de-escalation and dialogue.
Iran reiterates right to self-defense
Darzi said Iran would continue to defend itself against any further aggression and reserved its “full and unimpeachable right to self-defense.”
He also said Tehran reserves the right to pursue legal avenues to seek accountability from states and individuals it holds responsible for losses and damage inflicted on the Iranian people.
“Regardless of whether these threats are merely delusional fantasies, they will, as in the past, never materialize or be put into action in the face of the resolute resistance and determined defense of the Iranian people and armed forces,” Darzi wrote.
The Iranian envoy requested that his letter be circulated as an official document of the UN Security Council.
Climate Week NYC is packing its tent after another week of green grandstanding, empty promises and soaring energy bills, says Dr Tilak Doshi. Same circus, same clowns, same time next year.
The post New York’s Climate Circus: Same Clowns, Emptier Promises appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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