Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi has been sentenced to death in absentia for running death squads targeting the country’s Shia majority.

The fugitive vice president was the most senior Sunni Muslim in the Iraqi government, dominated by Shias.

He went on the run after he was charged last December, when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued a warrant for al-Hasjemi’s arrest, sparking a major political crisis and accusations by Sunni politicians that he was provoking sectarian conflict.

"We have a witness who testified about a medical procedure, done in northern Albania, that consisted of harvesting organs from Serbs kidnapped during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo"

The International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), hosted by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, to address the conflict in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, ended without the creation of a concrete plan to establish peace in the area.

However, the ICGLR did make some progress on working towards the implementation of a ‘Neutral International Force’.

“If more people fail to speak up, Burma could be headed towards Buddhist xenophobia similar to the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

And that’s the concern that we see today in Burma that if this continues, if the Burmese monkhood continues to come out and press against the Rohingya in this way, we will be on the road to a kind of Sri Lanka situation with the Rohingya, where you have the Buddhists across Burma raising their hands against Rohingya.

Members of the European Union have warned Iran of fresh sanctions over its controversial nuclear programme.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said sanctions are already impacting Iran, but that it was "necessary to increase the pressure on Iran, to intensify sanctions, to add further to the EU sanctions," he said to reporters after informal talks with other EU foreign ministers.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle expressed frustration over the lack of progress and said Iran has made no “substantial offer" to make clear the intentions of its nuclear programme.

Russia has rebuffed calls by the US to increase pressure on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Secretayr of State Hillary Clinton urged Russia to support the UN in taking action to end the conflict, saying that Congress may abolish trade restrictions still in place since the Cold War.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists that the Kremlin is against sanctions against Syria and Iran, after talks with Clinton on Saturday.

The Canadian government has decided to close its embassy in Tehran and kick out all remaining Iranian diplomats from Canada.

A statement by Foreign Minister John Baird said that Canada had suspended all diplomatic relations with Iran, due to its continued and increasing military support for the Assad regime in Syria, its noncompliance with UN resolutions in relation to its nuclear programme and its incitement to genocide and anti-Semitic rhetoric against Israel.