Weekly News Wrap: Monday, August 17, 2015

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

Africa

• South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has arrived in Addis Ababa for peace talks aimed at brokering an end to the country’s civil war, reversing an earlier decision as international threats of possible sanctions mount.
• Fraught with logistic and security concerns journalists have struggled to report on Boko Haram’s insurgency in northern Nigeria; since 2009, around 17,000 people have been killed as the armed group battles the central government.
• Dozens of suspected Somali al Shabaab fighters swept into a Kenyan village and lectured locals for at least two hours before disappearing into a nearby forest without attacking anyone, police and residents said on Sunday.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited a labor camp in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to highlight New Delhi’s concern about the welfare of its migrant workers helping to build glitzy skyscrapers, hotels and museums in the oil-rich Gulf state.
• An Iraqi parliamentary committee says that former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and other officials were to blame for allowing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to overrun Mosul last year, and has called for them to face trial.
• The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has carried out an attack against Iraqi forces outside the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, killing at least 15 soldiers, officers have said.
• Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday approved an anti-terrorism law that sets up special courts and provides protections to its enforcers in the face of a two-year-long insurgency that aims to topple his government.
• The defence for ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi has filed an appeal against a death sentence and life-in-prison term for the former leader, a lawyer says.
• Displaced Iraqi children languish in deprived schools; hundreds of thousands of children face almost “impossible conditions” as they strive to learn in war-torn country.

Asia

• Indian and Pakistani troops have traded gunfire and mortars in the disputed Kashmir region, killing at least eight civilians and injuring several others, according to news reports.
• The United States has sent a warning to Beijing about Chinese agents it says are operating covertly in the United States to pressure fugitives, including some suspected of corruption, to return to China, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
• Russia’s oil industry is endangering its indigenous people.

Europe

• The United States and Germany said they will pull Patriot missile batteries from southern Turkey after a reassessment of the threats stemming from the conflict in neighboring Syria.
• Finland still walks a fine line between defying and placating Russia.
• The number of migrants who died in the hold of an overcrowded fishing boat rescued in the Mediterranean Sea on Saturday has risen to 49, the coast guard said on Sunday.

Americas

• The United States and its allies have conducted 22 air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in the past 24 hours, the U.S. military said on Sunday.
• Cuba’s top diplomat for U.S. sees long road to normal ties.

UN/World

• Their job is to protect the most vulnerable people in what are often impoverished and war-torn regions of the world, but the UN’s peacekeepers are facing serious allegations of wide-spread sexual abuse, exploitation and gross misconduct.