China has convicted seven students of the imprisoned Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti on charges of separatism, according to his lawyer.

The students, who went on trial in Xinjiang last month, were accused of contributing to a Tohti's website on the Uyghur people and were jailed for periods ranging from three to eight years.

Tohti's lawyers, Li Fangping and Liu Xiaoyuan said the students were detained in January and were given a secret trial in the remote province of Xinjian in the west of China.

Venezuela has slammed the US for passing a bill which would impose sanctions on officials from the country over its treatment of protestors.

President Nicolas Maduro said the US senators who passed the bill were "insolent" and that the US wanted to "challenge Venezuela with sanctions and threats".

"If the crazy path of sanctions is imposed, President Obama, I think you're going to come out looking very bad," Madura warned the US president.

"Who is the US Senate to sanction the homeland of Bolivar? We don't accept insolent imperialist sanctions," he added.

The Venezuela Defense on Human Rights and Civil Society Act was passed by the senate on Tuesday, and targets current and former Venezuelan officials who directed "significant acts of violence or serious human rights abuses against persons associated with the anti-government protests in Venezuela that began on 4 February".

The Chinese government has sentenced six people to death, for helping organise an attack on a market in its restive Uyghur province earlier this year, which left 39 people dead.

Two others were given death penalties for another attack on a railway station in the provincial capital Urumqi.

The exiled World Uyghur Congress has blamed the violence on the central government's policies, which the group says repress the local culture.

The Xinjiang province, originally inhabited by the Uyghur, a Turkic people following Islam, has seen violence escalate over recent months, with scores left dead in regular attacks, blamed by Beijing on terrorists, however experts say the violence is also rooted in the social and economic exclusion of Uyghur.

China has systematically settled Han Chinese in the region, in an effort to rebalance the ethnic makeup of the Xinjiang province. In November the government announced it would deploy thousands of former soldiers in Xinjiang, to counter the increasing violence.

The Israeli air force's attacks on four high rise buildings in the Gaza strip amounted to war crimes, a new report by Amnesty International says.

The report, which focused exclusively on these attacks in which no one died, says the destruction by Israel was extensive and “appeared to be wanton”, for no military reasons.

"All the evidence we have shows this large-scale destruction was carried out deliberately and with no military justification," said Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director, Philip Luther.

"Both the facts on the ground and statements made by Israeli military spokespeople at the time indicate that the attacks were a collective punishment against the people of Gaza and were designed to destroy their already precarious livelihoods."

The Canadian government has closed its embassy in the Egyptian capital Cairo over "security concerns", a day after the British mission in the city closed.