Weekly News Wrap: Monday, January 19, 2015

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

Africa

• At least 80 people have been abducted and three others killed in a cross-border raid in northern Cameroon by the Nigerian armed group Boko Haram, officials have said. Nigeria’s neighbors are banding together to fight the armed group; a contingent of soldiers from Chad has arrived in northern Cameroon where it will deploy to the Nigerian border as part of efforts to contain Boko Haram fighters.
• Mali’s government and the United Nations have declared the West African nation free of Ebola following a 42-day period without a new case of the deadly virus.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Negotiators for Iran and six global powers, striving to reach a complex deal on Tehran’s nuclear program, have had “serious and useful” discussions in Geneva and will meet again next month, the European Union has said.
• Israel said on Sunday it had cracked the first Islamic State cell on its soil, made up of seven Arab citizens who would be prosecuted on charges of planning attacks in the Jewish state and communicating with the insurgent group in Syria.
• Israel is lobbying member-states of the International Criminal Court to cut funding for the tribunal in response to its launch of an inquiry into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, the country’s foreign minister said on Sunday.

Asia

• A senior Afghan army general has told Al Jazeera that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has been active in Afghanistan.
• Tens of thousands of people staged a rally on Monday in Russia’s Chechnya region against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, which the predominantly Muslim region’s leader denounced as “vulgar and immoral”.
• Chinese police shot dead two ethnic Uighurs trying to cross the border with Vietnam, state media said on Monday, as the public security ministry accused a separatist group of orchestrating hundreds of cases of human smuggling.
• Nigeria, Brazil and the Netherlands recalled their ambassadors in Indonesia after the Southeast Asian nation ignored their pleas for clemency and executed six prisoners for drug offences on Sunday, the first executions under President Joko Widodo. Australia could do the same.
• Five Pakistani men have been arrested in Afghanistan in connection with the Taliban massacre of 134 school children in the Pakistani city of Peshawar last month, officials from both countries said on Sunday.
• A North Korean defector whose escape from a brutal prison camp was the subject of a bestselling book has changed key parts of his story and on Sunday apologized for misleading people.

Europe

• The European Union said on Monday it would appeal against a court ruling that the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas should be removed from the bloc’s terrorist list.
• Ukrainian troops have recaptured almost all the territory of Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine they had lost to separatists in recent weeks and thousands gathered in Kiev for a state-sponsored peace march.
• British Prime Minister David Cameron said there was “a right to cause offense about someone’s religion” in a free society, drawing a distinction between himself and Pope Francis in their response to the deadly Islamist attacks in Paris.

Americas

• A delegation of US congressional Democrats began a three-day visit to Cuba to discuss expectations for the normalisation of relations between the United States and the island nation.

UN/World

• U.N. peacekeepers in Central African Republic have arrested a senior leader of the anti-balaka militia, wanted for crimes including murder, rebellion, rape and looting, the country’s senior prosecutor said on Sunday.