Kenya's parliament has passed a controversial new bill which will give the government a range of powers to tackle security issues and terrorism on Thursday.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) called for Simone Gbagbo, the wife of the former president of the Ivory Coast, to be handed over to The Hague to face trial, reports Deutsche Welle.

Local authorities in the Ivory Coast, have refused to hand over Simone Gbagbo, saying that she will be tried on charges of genocide in a domestic court.

Thousands of Palestinians gathered at the funeral of a Palestinian government minister, who died shortly after an Israeli policeman grabbed him by the throat at a protest in the West Bank.

Ziad Avu Ein’s funeral was held on Thursday in Ramallah, with thousands attending a procession from the Palestinian presidential headquarter to a nearby cemetery.

Three men were arrested in Burma after Buddhist monks complained about an online flyer that used a picture of the Buddha, reports WorldBulletin.

Following complaints by a group of Buddhist monks known as the Ma Ba Tha, one New Zealander and two Burmese locals were placed in prison after being charged under a law that forbids insulting religion.

US human rights officials warned North Korea that there would be escalating pressure on the country to end human rights abuses, reports Reuters.

A senior minister in the Palestinian Authority has died following a violent confrontation with Israeli troops during a protest in a village near Ramallah.

Palestinian minister Ziad Abu Ein reportedly died after inhaling large amounts of tear gas fired by Israeli security forces, with Reuters reporting he was assaulted by the soldiers.

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.