Weekly News Wrap: Monday, August 3, 2015

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

Africa

• Nigeria’s army says it has rescued 178 people held by the Boko Haram group in Nigeria’s Borno state in raids that destroyed several camps in the country’s northeast.
• At least one soldier with the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Central African Republic was killed on Sunday during clashes with armed assailants in a northern neighborhood of the capital Bangui, a spokesman for the mission said.
• Chad said on Thursday its forces had killed 117 Boko Haram insurgents during a two-week military campaign aimed at clearing islands on Lake Chad used by the militants as hideouts and bases to launch attacks.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• In a rare show of political unity, Israel, Jordan and Palestine have united for a common cause: to clean up the Jordan River.
• The United States and its allies launched 19 air strikes in Iraq and 11 in Syria on Friday in the coalition campaign against Islamic State militants, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
• The air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has killed more than 450 civilians, according to a new Airwars report (.pdf), even though the US-led coalition has so far acknowledged just two non-combatant deaths.
• Turkish warplanes struck Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in northern Iraq on Friday, CNN Turk television reported, in Ankara’s latest push against Kurdish militants.

Asia

• China and Southeast Asian nations have agreed to set up a foreign ministers’ hotline to tackle emergencies in the disputed South China Sea, a senior official of the ASEAN grouping told Reuters on Friday.
• Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said on Monday the disputed South China Sea should not be discussed at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• China and Russia will hold joint naval and air defense drills in the Sea of Japan, China said on Thursday, the latest exercises between the two countries which could concern Japan, involved in a marine dispute with China to the south.
• Malaysia will seek help from territories near the Indian Ocean island where a suspected wing part from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was discovered in an attempt to find more plane debris.

Europe

• French riot police have used tear gas on migrants who attempted to cross the Eurotunnel from Calais into Britain.
• Britain and France on Sunday urged other European Union states to help them tackle the growing crisis in northern France caused by thousands of migrants seeking to make illegal and dangerous crossings into England.
• Kosovo’s government asked parliament on Friday to reconsider its rejection of an ad hoc court to try ethnic Albanian former guerrillas for alleged war crimes including organ harvesting, responding to intense Western pressure.

Americas

• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday he would seek greater backing for a U.N. peace plan for Libya which has been spurned by some key players in a country where two rival governments are vying for power.
• A Mexican judge temporarily suspended a U.S. extradition order on Friday for the fugitive drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman even though the federal attorney general’s office had approved it a day earlier.
• Accused Taliban fighter Irek Hamidullin, the first military prisoner from Afghanistan to be tried in U.S. federal court, was portrayed by prosecutors and testimony Friday as the commander behind an attack on U.S. and Afghan forces six years ago near the Pakistan border.
• Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet stifled a police report that accused military officers of burning and killing a U.S. student in 1986, according to declassified U.S. government documents published by a research group on Friday.

UN/World

• The Central African Republic is staring at one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time if immediate action is not taken to increase aid to the country, according to the UN.
• The IAEA chief will meet with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Wednesday in Washington to discuss his agency’s monitoring role in Iran following Tehran’s deal with world powers on curbing its atomic activity.