Weekly News Wrap: Monday, May 30, 2016

Here’s your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• Five United Nations peacekeepers were killed and one other seriously injured in an ambush in central Mali on Sunday, the United Nations said.
• Dozens of children are still missing after a cross-border raid on villages in the Gambela region of western Ethiopia by South Sudanese tribesmen.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Iraqi special forces launched an assault one of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group’s most emblematic bastions, Fallujah, as the group counter-attacked in both Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
• More than 100,000 Syrians were trapped near the Turkish border as fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group advanced on two strategically-vital towns.
• The United Nations’ humanitarian chief on Friday demanded that the Syrian government and militant groups stop interfering with the delivery of food and medicine for civilians trapped in besieged and difficult-to-reach areas in war-ravaged Syria.

Asia

• The Japanese government said on Monday it was doing all it could to secure the release of a Japanese journalist being held hostage by an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, after an apparent photograph of the man was posted on the internet.
• The brother of a man killed alongside Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a U.S. drone strike in southwest Pakistan has filed a report with police asking for his brother’s killing to be investigated, officials said on Sunday.
• China wants deeper military ties with Indonesia and will strengthen cooperation on bilateral and multilateral issues, China’s defense minister told his Indonesian counterpart, after a recent diplomatic spat in the South China Sea.

Europe

• At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, Medecins San Frontieres and the U.N. Refugee agency said on Sunday. Rights groups and activists have urged the EU to do more to protect refugees fleeing war and persecution following the recent deaths of scores trying to reach Europe in overcrowded boats.
• Almost half of the European Union member states have flouted an EU-wide suspension on arms transfers to Egypt, risking complicity in a wave of unlawful killings, enforced disappearances and torture, according to Amnesty International.

Americas

• US troops who were photographed in Syria wearing the emblem of a Kurdish armed group (YPG) on their uniforms have been ordered to remove the patches, a military spokesman said.
• Barack Obama has become the first US incumbent president to visit Hiroshima, the Japanese city where America dropped an atomic bomb in 1945, but White House says visit not to be viewed as an apology.

Oceania

• Australia’s government has intervened to have all references to the country removed from a United Nations report examining the effect of climate change on world heritage sites over concern it could have a negative impact on tourism.
• Mass bleaching has destroyed as much as one third of the coral on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef in Australia, according to a research.

UN/World

• The world’s environment ministers gathered at the second session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2) in the Kenyan capital Nairobi have agreed on 25 landmark resolutions to drive forward the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the Paris climate agreement, including one on the effects of armed conflict on the environment.
• The chief peace negotiator of Syria’s main opposition bloc said on Sunday he was resigning over the failure of the UN-backed Geneva peace talks to bring a political settlement to the Syria crisis.
• The United Nations on Sunday voiced alarm at the escalating political tensions in Cambodia, including attempted arrests of politicians, amid allegations from the opposition that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling party is persecuting it.
• The world community has yet to find an adequate response to cultural destruction as shown by the deliberate wrecking of ancient sites in Syria and Mali by Islamist radicals, the head of the UN’s cultural organization said.
• The World Health Organization has rejected calls to cancel or postpone the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro over the Zika virus.