Weekly News Wrap: Monday, August 10, 2015

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

Africa

• Somalia’s Puntland region needs more help from the central government and the African Union to fight al Shabaab militants, especially equipment and ammunition, the president of the semi-autonomous region has said.
• Suspected Boko Haram gunmen killed four people on Sunday in a road ambush in Nigeria’s restive northeastern state of Borno, a military source and a civilian joint task force said.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the United States should cooperate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State and that this required an international coalition uniting all those for whom the jihadists are “a common enemy”.
• U.S.-led forces conducted 16 air strikes in Iraq and seven in Syria on Saturday against Islamic State targets, the U.S. military said.

Asia

• South Korea has accused North Korea of planting landmines that maimed two soldiers on border patrol, sending military tensions on the Korean peninsula soaring as it threatened to make Pyongyang pay a “harsh price”.
• U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday accused China of restricting navigation and overflights in the disputed South China Sea, despite giving assurances that such movements would not be impeded.
• Japan wants to give planes to the Philippines that Manila could use for patrols in the South China Sea, sources said, a move that would deepen Tokyo’s security ties with the Southeast Asian nation most at odds with Beijing over the disputed waterway.

Europe

• The British government on Sunday accused Spain of violating its sovereignty over Gibraltar, saying Spanish state vessels had repeatedly and unlawfully entered its territorial waters without notifying it.
• Conservative German lawmakers on Sunday called for more measures to deter Balkan citizens from seeking asylum in Germany, as Europe’s biggest economy grapples with a record number of refugees.
• Swedish prosecutors’ plan to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London has stalled as Ecuador has demanded Sweden give him asylum as a condition of the meeting, a Swedish official said on Friday.
• A Sudanese migrant walked the 50-km (31-mile) Channel Tunnel from France, dodging high-speed trains and evading security guards before he was stopped just short of the British entrance and arrested, police said.
• Croatia rolled out tanks and waved flags to mark the 20th anniversary on Wednesday of the blitz that ended its independence war while Serbia mourned the event as ‘the biggest ethnic cleansing since World War Two’.

Americas

• The families of passengers killed in the Germanwings crash will take legal action against Lufthansa in the United States after rejecting the carrier’s compensation offer as inadequate, Bild am Sonntag said, citing the families’ lawyer.
• A former Soviet army officer accused of being a Taliban fighter was found guilty of terrorism charges on Friday by a federal jury in Richmond, Virginia, a court official said.
• The United States sent six F-16 jets and about 300 personnel to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey on Sunday, the U.S. military said, after Ankara agreed last month to allow American planes to launch air strikes against Islamic State militants from there.

UN/World

• The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a U.S.-drafted resolution on Friday laying the groundwork for an inquiry that would assign blame for chemical weapons attacks in Syria’s civil war.
• The United Nations will convene a new round of Libya talks on Monday in Geneva in a push to persuade warring parties to agree on a unity government and end the violence gripping the oil producer, the U.N. said on Thursday.