The US has hit back at Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu slammed Secretary of State John Kerry over comments made at a security conference in Munich.

Kerry had criticised the slow progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and said that failure to reach an agreement could lead to more boycotts against Israel and would harm the country’s capacity to be a democratic state.

"The risks are very high for Israel," he said in Munich.

A former Bangladeshi minister, Syed Mohammad Qaisar was indicted by a special three-member International Crimes Tribunal.

Qaiser, a former minister for Agriculture, was arrested for responsibility for alleged war crimes in March last year.

Israeli troops have shot and killed a Palestinian man in the occupied territory of the West Bank.

22 year old Mohammed Mubarak was unarmed and had been harassed by the soldiers who forced him to remove his clothes, witnesses told AFP news agency.

The Palestinian Red Cross said Mubarak was found with three bullet wounds to his back.

The Israeli military claimed the labourer, from a refugee camp near Ramallah, was a “terrorist” and that they opened fire only after he fired a gun.

The Syrian government has demolished thousands of buildings and entire neighbourhoods in a series of reprisals against residents in rebel-held areas, Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded in a report released today.

Using satellite images of the cities Damascus and Hama, HRW found that at least 7 residential neighbourhoods were either totally or partially destroyed.

Commenting on the findings, the emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, Ole Solvang, stated,

Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson has quit her role as an Oxfam ambassador, after facing criticism for her endorsement of an Israeli company based in settlements declared illegal under international law.

Oxfam International opposes all trade with companies based in the settlements and labelled Johansson’s endorsement of SodaStream “incompatible” with her role as Oxfam Global Ambassador. In a statement, Oxfam said,

Croatian prosecutors announced today the commencement a war crimes investigation into a suspected former guard of several Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

The suspect in question, Jakob Frank Denzinger, is alleged to have been a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where over one million Jews were killed within the space of 5 years.

Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson has courted controversy after advertising for an Israeli firm operating in a West Bank settlement, declared illegal under international law.

Johansson, who appears in a commercial for SodaStream, defended her role, but has come under fire from activists for her continued support of the company. In a statement Ms Johansson said last week that the company was “not only committed to the environment, but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine”.

The US State Department condemned the Assad regime's siege of Homs in order to exert leverage as peace talks take place in Geneva, reports the Washington Post.

Dismissing the regime's claims that it was rebel snipers and armed groups preventing World Food Program food convoys from reaching the people of Homs, the US State Department placed the blame at the Assam regime for deliberately halting the convoys.

The British government today, reached a compromise with the United Nations and agreed to provide refuge for 500 of the most vulnerable refugees from the Syrian conflict.

The deal ends weeks of an UN initiative to encourage Britain to sign up to the UN refugee quota programme for Syria.
The chief executive of the Refugee Council, Maurice Wren, welcomed the news, stating,