Weekly News Wrap: Monday, April 21, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram is still holding 85 girls it abducted from a raid on a secondary school in northeastern Borno state this week.
• The UN is condemning what it calls the “targeted killings” and wounding of hundreds of civilians based on their ethnic origins in the contested town of Bentiu, attacks South Sudan’s rebel commander Riek Machar has said his forces were not behind. Al Jazeera asks the question: is South Sudan on the verge of collapse?

Asia

• Japan has said it will scale down the number of whales it targets during the Pacific Ocean hunt starting next week, as well as limit next season’s Antarctic whaling to observation, after the ICJ’s recent ruling.
• The chief UN investigator into human rights abuses in North Korea appealed to the Security Council to refer the situation in the reclusive Asian state to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Gulf foreign ministers have agreed to a deal to end months of unprecedented tension between Qatar and other members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council over the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Islamist militants killed at least 14 Algerian soldiers in an ambush in mountains east of the capital Algiers at the weekend in one of the deadliest attacks on the military in years.
• Yemen’s interior ministry says 55 members of al-Qaeda have been killed in what has been described as an “unprecedented” joint aerial campaign with the US that targeted a training camp operated by the group in the country’s south.
• Seven rockets fired from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel during the Jewish Passover holiday on Monday, drawing retaliatory air strikes from the Israeli army, officials said, the first cross-border clash in several weeks.
• A Saudi court has sentenced eight people to death and 77 others to prison on charges related to attacks against expatriate residential compounds in the country’s capital more than a decade ago, the official press agency said.

Europe

• The self-declared leader of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Denis Pushilin, has said that he does not consider his men to be bound by the Geneva agreement between Russia and Ukraine to disarm and vacate occupied buildings.
• EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has called on Israel to reverse recent actions, such as announcing new settlements in the occupied West Bank, to bolster faltering peace talks.

Americas

• The US has delayed its decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada by extending its review of the controversial project indefinitely, a move considered disappointing by the Canadian Prime Minister.
• The United States has indications that a toxic chemical, probably chlorine, was used in Syria this month and is examining whether the Syrian government was responsible, the U.S. State Department said.

UN/Other

• The UN panel on climate change released findings from a new report on climate mitigation, indicating that manmade greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned more quickly between the years 2000-2010 than in any of the three previous decades.
• World trade is expected to grow this year by 4.7 percent, WTO economists announced this week, exceeding earlier predictions for 2014.