Republican presidential candidates have slammed Obama’s foreign policy moves on Iraq and Libya, as they gave an indication on what grounds next November’s elections will be contested.

Herman Cain and Rick Perry criticised the pull-out of US troops from Iraq, although the deadline was first set by George Bush.

"For the president to announce that we are going to do a drawdown on the troops by a date certain, that just leaves a power vacuum in Iraq," Cain said on "Face the Nation" on CBS.

Uruguay’s Congress has voted to scrap an amnesty for military officials who have been charged with allegations of human rights abuses during the military rule crackdown of leftists between 1975 and 1983.

After 12 hours of debate, the lower house of parliament voted 50-40 to eliminate the amnesty, which leaves Jose Mujica, the country's president left to approve the change.

Luis Puig, a ruling Broad Front coalition legislator, said,

Why former Liban leader Muammar Gaddafi was ‘angry and disappointed’ in his final days:

"He thought his people should love him until the end. He felt he had done so many good things for them and for Libya. He also felt betrayed by men who had seemed to be his friends, like [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Italian Premier] Silvio Berlusconi."

Poland has reopened investigations into crimes committed in several concentration camps connected to Auschwitz during the Second World War.

It is thought over one million Jews and Poles were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz alone. Polish authorities hope to track down any surviving members of the Nazis, complicit in the genocide.

The original investigation was closed in the 1980s, due to Poland’s status as a Soviet satellite state, which created difficulties in questioning witnesses and hunting down the perpetrators abroad.

Former Syrian ally Turkey has been housing members of the Free Syrian Army, an anti-Assad group who have attacked Syrian soldiers, at a guarded camp in Turkey according to the New York Times.

The news comes as the Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for an attack on Wednesday that killed 9 Syrian soldiers, including one officer.

While Turkey insists their support for the group is purely “humanitarian”, Colonel As’aad of the Free Syrian Army was interviewed by the New York Times at a Turkish government official’s office, wearing a suit purchased by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and guarded by 10 Turkish soldiers, including a sniper.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has reportedly contacted the ICC in order to negotiate his surrender and sought an aircraft to transport him over to the Hague war crimes court in the Netherlands.

An NTC official told reporters that,

"He believes handing himself over is the best option for him."

Former navy captain Alfredo Astiz, Argentina's infamous ‘Blond Angel of Death,’ and 11 other death squad members from the 1970s were jailed for life on Wednesday in one of the country's biggest human rights cases.

However the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a French request to extradite Astiz, who was also convicted in absentia in Europe for killing two French nuns during the 1976-1983 ‘Dirty War.’

Libya’s interim government has agreed to prosecute the killers of Muammar Gaddafi, after previously claiming he was killed by crossfire.

The U-turn is likely to have been caused by increased international pressure after more videos emerged showing Gaddafi being assaulted by Libyan rebel fighters. Gaddafi is thought to have been killed by a gunshot to his head.

Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, deputy chief of the National Transitional Council, said it would seek to those who are responsible for Gaddafi’s death.

Bahrain's security forces are to be deployed to Afghanistan in order to train Afghan forces, as part of Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).

The move comes amidst on-going human rights concerns regarding the Bahraini government's brutal crackdown on civilian protesters using the military and police. At least 35 protesters are thought to have been killed.

The Asia director of Human Rights Watch, John Fortin, remarked,

A US federal court has revived a lawsuit against London-based mining giant Rio Tinto Plc.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of around 10,000 residents of Bougainville, a mining town in Papua New-Guinea.

Rio Tinto is accused of encouraging the government of Papua New-Guinea to crush an uprising beginning in 1988 by residents against the pollution and ‘slave-like conditions’ the residents were forced to work under.