In a historic speech in Britain President Barack Obama said Wednesday that US and UK leadership in the world is essential for the promotion of freedom and human dignity.

“Our relationship is special because of the values and beliefs that have united our people through the ages,” Obama said in the first-ever address by a US president to both houses of Parliament.

Below are some quotes on self-determination from a speech by Mahmood Mamdani, professor and director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) on the independence of South Sudan. The full speech can be found here. 

The United States has launched a high-level initiative to make its military more ready and able to respond to potential mass killings in future, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A senior Department of Defense official told the WSJ that the project, which is at an early stage, would help develop "a complete set of options that the leadership can consider in the preventive area before it comes to sending in the military, or not sending in the military."

An Iraqi tribunal has ruled that a 1983 attack on the Barzani tribe in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq was an act of genocide, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said.

The KRG said as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, most of them men and boys, were rounded up and killed by the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in 1983.

The reprisal came five years before the 1988 chemical attacks on Halabja in which 5,000 more Kurds were killed by Saddam’s forces.

A party advocating Scotland’s independence from Britain has won a surprising majority in the Scottish Parliament in last Thursday’s elections.

A UN team is due to arrive in Tripoli to investigate allegations of human rights violations in Libya since the start of the conflict in February, the BBC reported Wednesday.

The team was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council following the Libyan government's crackdown on protesters.

The government has said it will co-operate with the inquiry.

Fatah, the Palestinian political organisation, has reached a comprehensive agreement with its rival Hamas on forming an interim government and fixing a date for a general election.

The deal was announced by Egyptian intelligence in a statement, Al-Jazeera reports.