Uruguay's president has accused the head of the UN's International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) of lying and double standards, after the official claimed the country did not consult the anti-drug body before legalizing marijuana.

Earlier this week, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize both the sale and production of marijuana.

INCB chief Raymond Yans has slammed the "surprising" move, accusing the South American state of legalizing the drug without first discussing it with the UN organization.

Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica, rejected the criticism on Friday, saying that he's ready to discuss the law with anyone.

"Tell that old man to stop lying," Mujica said in an interview with Uruguay's Canal 4.

"Let him come to Uruguay and meet me whenever he wishes... Anybody can meet and talk to me, and whoever says he couldn't meet with me tells lies, blatant lies."

"Because he sits in a comfortable international platform, he believes he can say whatever nonsense," he added.

"Despicable human scum." "Worse than a dog." A "traitor for all ages" who "perpetrated anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts in a bid to overthrow the leadership of our party and state and the socialist system." Fate: a swift military tribunal, and a swift execution "in the name of revolution and the people".

So that was the date with destiny for Jang Song-thaek, 67, uncle of North Korea's leader Kim Jong-eun (arguably 30), according to state news agency KCNA. In North Korea, the revolution is definitely not a bulgogi party.

KCNA maintains that Jang - married to Kim Kyong-hui, the very influential sister of the late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il - admitted he wanted to stage a military coup d'etat. The inevitable follow-up is - what else - a purge (at the Central Committee's administrative department). Who said all that Cold War shtick was over?

Jang was, in theory, young Kim's Cardinal Richelieu. And then, out of the blue, he is shown on state TV dragged out of a meeting, publicly humiliated, demonized as a drug addict and womanizer, stripped of all posts and titles (chief of the Party's administrative department, vice chairman of the National Defense Commission), accused of corruption, tried and whacked, as if this was a North Korean Pulp Fiction remake. What gives?

Chile's once and future leader Michelle Bachelet easily won Sunday's presidential runoff, returning centre-left parties to power by promising profound changes in response to years of street protests.

Ms. Bachelet won with 62 per cent of the vote to 38 per cent for the centre-right's Evelyn Matthei, who promptly congratulated her rival. "I hope she does very well. No one who loves Chile can wish otherwise," Ms. Matthei said.

But turnout was just 41 per cent, a factor that worried Ms. Bachelet, who needs a strong mandate to overcome congressional opposition and make good on her promises.

"I hope people can come and participate and through their vote give a clear expression of the kind of Chile where they want to continue to live," Ms. Bachelet said after casting her ballot earlier Sunday. "The changes we need can't be produced through skepticism."

What power has law where only money rules? - Petronius

French-born Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn became the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) tenth Managing Director in November 2007.

Unlike most of his predecessors at the helm of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn - also known as DSK to his fellow Frenchmen - is not a banker and has no known affiliations to banking entities. Instead, he had worked as a politician and as a university professor. (Whitney, 2011).

His term was remarkable because of three different extraordinary facts, namely:

1. Less than a year after his arrival at the IMF, a worldwide financial crisis of considerable proportions took place. (Chossudovsky, 2011).

2. As a member of the French Socialist Party, DSK was widely believed to harbor aspirations to run for the highest political office in France, i.e. the Presidency, in the elections that were scheduled for 2012. He was regarded as a competitive challenger who would contend against the then incumbent President Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, candidate of the conservative-leaning UMP Party - Union for a Popular Movement - (Weisenthal, 2011).

3. His skill as IMF Managing Director was praised for being a "sagacious leader" (Stiglitz, 2011) and, replaying the role of the legendary Austrian Prince and statesman, DSK was described as "Metternich with a Blackberry" for his bright maneuvers to establish a "system of interlocking interests" in order to ensure that stability and balance, understood in both financial and political terms, could prevail (Johnson, 2010).

A Sex Scandal at the Highest Levels

Nevertheless, DSK's promising career, in both the IMF and French politics was abruptly undermined in New York, on May 14, 2011 when he was arrested and charged with sexual assault and attempted rape of Guinean-born Sofitel Hotel chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo. Shortly afterwards - on May 18, 2011, DSK tendered his resignation from the IMF. He was swiftly replaced by French Finance Minister Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde. DSK pleaded not guilty and, eventually, all charges were dismissed (Los Angeles Times, 2011) after even public prosecutors became unable to believe the accuser's words (BBC, 2011).

Was this incident just another high-profile sex scandal, similar to the ones involving former US President William Jefferson Clinton, former US Democratic Senator John Reid Edwards, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, former Israeli President Moshe Katzav, former President of the World Bank Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency David Howell Petraeus, et al. or . . . is there more than meets the eye at play? As an educated guess, this research paper is meant to provide a plausible answer.

Can a country boycott itself? That may sound like a silly question. It is not.

At the memorial service for Nelson Mandela, the "Giant of History" as Barack Obama called him, Israel was not represented by any of its leaders.

The only dignitary who agreed to go was the speaker of the Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, a nice person, an immigrant from the Soviet Union and a settler, who is so anonymous that most Israelis would not recognize him. ("His own father would have trouble recognizing him in the street," somebody joked.)

Why? The President of the State, Shimon Peres, caught a malady that prevented him from going, but which did not prevent him from making a speech and receiving visitors on the same day. Well, there are all kinds of mysterious microbes.

The Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had an even stranger reason. The journey, he claimed, was too expensive, what with all the accompanying security people and so on.

Not so long ago, Netanyahu caused a scandal when it transpired that for his journey to Margaret Thatcher's funeral, a five hour flight, he had a special double bed installed in the El Al plane at great expense. He and his much maligned wife, Sara'le, did not want to provoke another scandal so soon. Who's Mandela, after all?

Altogether it was an undignified show of personal cowardice by both Peres and Netanyahu.

What were they afraid of?

Well, they could have been booed. Recently, many details of the Israeli-South African relationship have come to light. Apartheid South Africa, which was boycotted by the entire world, was the main customer of the Israeli military industry. It was a perfect match: Israel had a lot of weapon systems but no money to produce them, South Africa had lots of money but no one who would supply it with weapons.

So Israel sold Mandela's jailers everything it could, from combat aircraft to military electronics, and shared with it its nuclear knowledge. Peres himself was deeply involved.

The relationship was not merely commercial. Israeli officers and officials met with their South African counterparts, visits were exchanged, personal friendship fostered. While Israel never endorsed apartheid, our government certainly did not reject it.

President Obama and his family will leave Washington Dec. 20 for a 17-day holiday vacation in Hawaii.

The White House announced Friday that the Obamas will depart next week after what is expected to be a light work schedule for the president in Washington.

The president and his family traditionally spend their Christmas break in a rented home on Oahu with spectacular ocean views.

For his first three years in office, Mr. Obama rented a $24,500-per-week gated Plantation Estate, which offers security and privacy on the white sand beach of Kailua Bay.

Last year, renting a similar house in the same locale, Mr. Obama was forced to cut short his vacation and fly back to Washington on the day after Christmas to resume negotiations on an emergency budget deal with Congress.

This year, Congress is on track to approve a two-year budget deal before the Christmas holiday.

Nelson Mandela, a courageous resistance fighter, is dead. Mandela died 5 December, aged 95. He devoted his entire life to the struggle for his people's freedom, spending 27 years in prison for both his unarmed and armed resistance to South Africa's brutal and racist apartheid regime.

With the death of this courageous resistance fighter, we are now greeted with a sickening spectacle that whitewashes his history and the fact that Mandela was first and foremost a freedom fighter. Politicians and commentators in Australia, the United States, the UK, Israel, Europe and elsewhere, many of whom who had previously labelled him a terrorist, supported his incarceration and the South African apartheid regime, are now pretending they did no such thing and are falling over themselves to laud him as a hero, a great man and a man of peace.

Their eulogies insult the South African anti-apartheid struggle and Mandela's actions. They have rinsed clean, from their histories of him, that Mandela was a radical who worked with and was inspired by communists both in South Africa and Latin America (Today, in the wake of Mandela's death, the African National Congress [ANC] and the South African Communist Party [SACP] have issued a statement confirming that Mandela was a member of the SACP in 1962 when he was arrested and imprisoned - something that had been previously denied for political reasons).

In order to create a non-threatening caricature of Mandela, these revisionists are attempting to rewrite history and the fact that Mandela's resistance and struggle against apartheid encompassed all forms of disobedience and defiance, both violent and non-violent.

UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said that large regions of the Gaza Strip are a "disaster area" and called on the world community to lift the Israeli blockade in order to allow recovery efforts to proceed, in a statement sent to Ma'an.

"Large swathes of northern Gaza are a disaster area with water as far as the eye can see. Areas around Jabalia have become a massive lake with two meter high waters engulfing homes and stranding thousands,"

the statement read.

"Four thousand UNRWA workers are battling the floods and have evacuated hundreds of families to UNRWA facilities. Our sanitation, maintenance workers, social workers and medical staff have been working through the night and round the clock to assist the most vulnerable, the old, the sick, children and women," the statement continued.

"We have distributed five thousand of litres of fuel to local pumping stations, but the situation is dire and with the flood waters rising, the risk of water borne disease can only increase. This is a terrible situation which can only get worse before it gets better," it added, referring to major fuel shortages across the Gaza Strip that have dramatically worsened in the last few months.

Gunness also highlighted the need for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip in order to allow the region recover from the current crisis.

A senior government minister warned Wednesday that Russia could retaliate with a nuclear strike if a new US military strategy threatened its security.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that Russia was "preparing a response" to plans by the United States to develop a new fast-strike weapons platform capable of hitting high-priority targets around the globe.

He told the State Duma that the development of a global strike program was "the most important new strategy being developed by the United States today."

Four former bosses from the Icelandic bank Kaupthing have been sentenced to between three and five years in prison.

They are the former chief executive, the chairman of the board, one of the majority owners and the chief executive of the Luxembourg branch.

They were accused of hiding the fact that a Qatari investor bought a stake in the firm with money lent - illegally - by the bank itself.

Kaupthing collapsed in 2008 under the weight of huge debts.

For years, Kaupthing and other Icelandic banks had aggressively pursued overseas expansion plans, but when they went into administration, they brought the country's economy to its knees.