China said Friday one of its envoys met with a Libyan rebel leader in what could signal Beijing's change of tactics on the conflict after staying on the sidelines and avoiding criticism of Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

The meeting between the head of Libya's rebel council and China's ambassador to Qatar took place in the Qatari capital, Doha. It was Beijing's first known contact with the rebels.

Canada’s Liberal Party, pushed into third place in recent elections, has appointed as interim leader Bob Rae.

Rae was a prominent advocate of federalism who figured in the Norwegian-led peace process in Sri lanka between 2001 and 2006.

Thousands of residents have fled North Sudan’s offensive that captured the disputed Abyei region. As urgent talks began to try and defuse the situation, 110,000 people face a humanitarian crisis.

Having occupied Abyei, Northern Sudan claimed that it had ceased military operations in the region.

It has taken sixteen years, but Bosnian Muslims finally have a chance to seek final justice with the capture of one of ‘the most wanted man’ in Europe.

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander charged with responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre was caught in a small town in northern Serbia on May 26.

Sixteen years after he was first listed as a wanted man for acts committed during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, the Serbian national now faces The Hague on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

His arrest, so long after the crimes he commanded, underlines the powerful impact on international affairs of post Cold War norms of accountability – norms that presently also underpin international operations against Mummar Gaddafi in Libya.

"His arrest is a clear message to accused like Omar al-Bashir and potential accused like Moammar Gadhafi that justice never forgets," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program, in an email to the AP.

Last Friday the 69-year-old was declared fit to face trial and now faces extradition to Netherlands to face the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Since the 2008 arrest of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, Mladic has been the most prominent Bosnian war criminal on the run.

The Serb ultranationalist has been pivotal to the region’s politics for over two decades.

First he commanded the brutal three year siege of Sarajevo (the longest of a capital city in modern warfare) and the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.

Then, after going on the run in Serbia, he became a litmus test of the country’s commitment to international codes of conduct. After the Kosovo crisis and the removal of Slobodan Milosovic Serbia’s rehabilitation into international society and its ascension to the European Union became de facto conditional on handing Mladic over to the ICTY.

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.