The Syrian government is using local militia groups, known an Popular committees to carry out mass killings, said the UN Commission of Inquiry on Monday.

Presenting its findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the Commission said:

"In a disturbing and dangerous trend, mass killings allegedly perpetrated by Popular Committees have at times taken on sectarian overtones."

"Some appear to have been trained and armed by the government."

After careful investigation, police have stated that the Bomb attack on officers in Northern Belfast last Saturday, was a “sophisticated device with the intent to kill.”

Though it is too early to assign responsibility for the attacks, Detective Chief Inspector, Karen Baxter, said they were treating it as a terrorist attack.

A case against a man accused of crimes against humanity, alongisde Kenya's Kenyatta, at the International Criminal Court collapsed on Monday.

Kenyatta and former civil servant Francis Mathaura were charged of perpetrating violence that led to the killing of 1200 and the displacement of over 100,000 following the 2007 election.

Prosecutors were forced to drop their charges against Mathaura after a key witness decided to recant their testimony.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said:

Argentina’s ex-president Carlos Menem has been convicted by a court in Buenos Aires for selling arms to Croatia and Ecuador in the 90s.

He was found guilty of authorising shipments to the countries, although he denied knowing that the arms were destined for those countries.

The war in the Balkans saw Croatia placed under an arms embargo and during the war between Ecuador and Peru, Argentina was banned from selling weapons to either side, as one of the guarantors of the peace agreement.

Tibetans exiled across Asia have marked the 54th anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising against China with protests in India, Taiwan and Nepal.

The Prime Minister of the India-based Tibetan Government in Exile, Lobsang Sangay, stated that those who dare to speak out inside Tibet

"risk prolonged imprisonment, torture, public humiliation and disappearance at the hands of security forces".

A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced two well-known human rights activists to at least ten years in prison, finding them guilty of offences that included sedition and providing false information to foreign media.

The sentenced activists Mohammed al-Qahtani and Abdyllah Hamad, also the founding members of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA), were told that the ACPRA would be disbanded and have all its funds seized by the Saudi monarchy. The ACPRA group documents human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and has called for a constitutional monarchy with democratic elections in the country.

"The British parliament last week formally recognised the genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan. We are pleased that the parliament took this decision and did so after an impassioned debate by several MPs, some of whom are old friends of Kurdistan, and with no opposition to the motion.

We appreciate that the British parliament also said it will encourage governments, the European Union and the United Nations to do the same. This underlines Britain’s role as a leading player in the international community and we hope that it will follow up on this decision. By doing so it will be sending a clear message to all dictators and oppressors.

Formal recognition is a step towards justice for all those who suffered in the decades-long campaign of death against the Kurdish people. It is acknowledgement of the suffering of the widows and the children left behind without knowing what happened to their loved ones or even where their remains lie. It took over two decades for some of the perpetrators to be brought to justice by the Iraqi courts.

A group of UN observers, who were abducted by a Syrian rebel group, has arrived in Jordan after their earlier release.

A UN team, sent to collect the 21 hostages from inside Syria, couldn’t reach the area due to government shelling.

The rebels themselves then transported the hostages to the Jordanian border, and were taken to the capital Amman.

The hostages appeared in a video, saying they were treated well by the rebels, whose move to seize the UN observers was condemned by the Free Syrian Army.

South Sudan and Sudan signed a security agreement on Friday, pledging to withdraw their respective military troops from the demilitarised zone in between the two states, later this month.

The Sudan Defence Minister, Lt. Gen. Abdal-Rahim Mohamed Hussein, said: "We will be ... committed, definitely, to implement (the agreement) word-by-word and step-by-step,"

The move has been welcomed by the US. In a press release, the spokesperson for the US State Dept, Victoria Nuland said:

The United Nations has given the Democratic Republic of Congo until the end of March to act against two units of the Congolese army, accused of committing mass rapes.

The UN’s peace force has said it will stop working with the units if their demands aren’t met.

"We have investigated, we have identified a number of cases and we demand the Congolese authorities take legal action against those people," an unnamed UN official said.