United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged he was coerced into removing Saudi Arabia from a blacklist of forces responsible for killing children, after the kingdom threatened to cut off funding to the U.N. An annual U.N. report found nearly 2,000 children were killed or injured in Yemen last year, a sixfold increase over the previous year. Sixty percent of those casualties were blamed on the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition. Ban Ki-moon described the decision to remove the Saudi-led coalition from the blacklist as “one of the most painful and difficult decisions I have had to make.”
— source democracynow.org