Weekly News Wrap: Monday, October 12, 2015

12 Oct Weekly News Wrap: Monday, October 12, 2015

12.10.15 | 1 Comment

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

South Africa plans to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC), a deputy minister said on Sunday, as the government faces criticism for ignoring a court order to arrest Sudan’s president earlier this year.
Thirty-eight people, including five attackers, were killed and another 51 were wounded on Saturday in a series of suicide bombings in a town in Chad suspected to be the work of Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamist militant group, a local government official said.
Rwanda’s female football revolution–football is helping Rwandan women overcome the trauma of the 1994 genocide.

Iraqi security forces say they have struck the convoy of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, in an air strike near the country’s border with Syria.
Syrian troops backed by Russian air strikes have advanced against fighters in the centre of the country as Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Moscow’s intervention in the conflict, saying it would aid efforts to reach a political settlement.
Even after the Iranian parliament gave preliminary backing on Sunday to a bill approving Tehran’s nuclear agreement with world powers, with supportive voices overcoming determined opposition from conservative lawmakers, Iran tested a new precision-guided ballistic missile on Sunday in defiance of a United Nations ban, signaling an apparent advance in Iranian attempts to improve the accuracy of its missile arsenal.
Turkey is targeting Islamic State in investigations of a double suicide bombing in Ankara that killed up to 128 people, officials said on Sunday, while opponents of President Tayyip Erdogan blamed him for the worst such attack in Turkish history.

A Thai judge will announce a verdict in the trial of two Myanmar migrant workers accused of killing two British tourists at the end of the year, a defense lawyer said on Monday, following a trial that has been mired in controversy.
China has completed the construction of two lighthouses in the disputed South China Sea, the official Xinhua news agency reported, as tensions in the region mount over Beijing’s maritime ambitions.

Approximately a quarter of a million people have rallied in Berlin against the TTIP, a massive free-trade accord being negotiated by the European Union and the United States.
“Waiting for David” has become something of a catchphrase among diplomats and officials, who say the British prime minister is frustrating them by not yet detailing his demands for new EU legislation ahead of the membership referendum he plans to hold.
Several jihadists, possibly including French citizens, were killed in recent French air strikes in Syria against Islamic State, a French government source said on Monday.
More than a million refugees will come to Germany this year, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy said on Sunday, as a poll showed almost half of Germans believe she is handling the influx of asylum seekers badly.
A secret MI6 document obtained by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit raises serious questions about the British government’s actions before and after the kidnapping of Judith Tebbutt and the killing of her husband, David in Kenya.

Thousands of Australians joined rallies calling for the closure of Pacific island camps for asylum-seekers, just days after the government confirmed it was in talks with the Philippines to resettle detained refugees.

Less than half of the world’s countries have equal numbers of girls and boys in school with not one sub-Saharan African nation achieving equality, according to a United Nations report released on Monday to mark International Day of the Girl Child.

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