Weekly News Wrap: Monday, January 12, 2015

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

Africa

• A girl perhaps no more than 10 years old detonated powerful explosives concealed under her veil at a crowded northern Nigeria market on Saturday, killing as many as 20 people and wounding many more. On Sunday, at least six people were killed after two suspected child suicide bombers blew themselves up in a market in northeast Nigeria, witnesses say, in the second attack involving young girls strapped with explosives.
• The United Nations Security Council backed plans by Democratic Republic of the Congo and U.N. peacekeepers to begin a military campaign to “neutralize” a Rwandan rebel group in the country’s rugged eastern provinces.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court may be close to opening an initial investigation into last summer’s Gaza war.
• Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Venezuela’s president on Saturday he backed coordinated action between Tehran and Caracas to reverse a rapid fall in global oil prices which he described as a “political ploy hatched by common enemies”.
• American-led forces launched 12 air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria since Friday, all but one of them near the contested city of Kobani, the U.S. military said.
• Reports have surfaced that a U.S.-led coalition airstrike killed at least 50 Syrian civilians late last month when it targeted a headquarters of Islamic State extremists in northern Syria, according to an eyewitness and a Syrian opposition human rights organization.

Asia

• Children streamed back to school across Pakistan on Monday in an anxious start to a new term following last month’s massacre of 134 students at an army-run school in the volatile northwestern city of Peshawar.
• South Korean President Park Geun-hye has said that she is ready to hold a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un without any precondition and urged Pyongyang to promptly return to dialogue.
• China has been quietly toughening travel restrictions on students and businessmen traveling from Ebola-hit West Africa even as it increases support to fight the deadly disease on the ground in the region, diplomats say.

Europe

• Two gunmen forced their way into and opened fire in the Paris headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve, including staff and two police officers, and wounding eleven, four of them seriously. The gunmen escaped but a day later they were shot dead as they fled a warehouse where they had hostages north of Paris, firing at police. World leaders including Muslim and Jewish statesmen linked arms to lead more than a million French citizens through Paris in an unprecedented march to pay tribute to victims of Islamist militant attacks.
• These attacks may fuel rising anti-immigration movements around Europe and inflame a “culture war” about the place of religion and ethnic identity in society. Over the weekend, a German newspaper in the northern port city of Hamburg that reprinted caricatures of Prophet Muhammad from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was the target of an arson attack, according to police and the offices of Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper that republished cartoons from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were evacuated on Sunday after receiving an anonymous bomb threat, its staff said. Hackers claiming to be with the group Anonymous say they have hacked a jihadist website in retaliation for the terror attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
• Transsexuals, transvestites and others thought to have what Russia considers to be “sexual disorders” have been barred from driving in the country for “medical reasons” under new road safety regulations.

Americas

• More than a decade after a series of shootings and bombings in the Jerusalem area, a trial is slated this week in New York to determine whether the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority should pay up to $1 billion to victims.
• Egyptian-born imam Abu Hamza al-Masri has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of terrorism charges last year.

UN/World

• The United Nations is immune from a lawsuit seeking compensation for victims of a deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti, a US judge said in dismissing a case that government lawyers said could open international body to an onslaught of litigation.
• Hundreds of civilians were massacred in two separate incidents in South Sudan last year in which victims were targeted for their ethnicity, nationality or political views, possibly amounting to war crimes, the United Nations said in a report on Friday.