Extracts from niqash.org (see the full text here):

Nokia Siemens Networks, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the world, is to expand its manufacturing facility in Chennai, making it the firm’s biggest in Asia.

NSN’s head of operations, Herbert Merz, said the factory in China is currently the company's largest in Asia, but the Chennai facility could overtake it in a year.

United States President Obama announced last week the creation of a new body which will coordinate a government approach to genocide and other mass atrocities.

The Atrocities Prevention Board – whose exact authority, mandate, and structure will be under interagency review over the next months – will begin functioning within 120 days, according to the presidential directive announcing its creation.

Brazil, India and South Africa, which have blocked United Nations pressure on Syria’s government to end repression of protesters, will send envoys to Damascus to seek an end to the violence.

India will assume the presidency of the Security Council for August and use the opportunity to demonstrate it has the “not only has the credentials but the political maturity” to be a permanent member, Delhi’s UN envoy Hardeep Singh Puri says.

US car-maker Ford, which has a major vehicle plant in Tamil Nadu, has announced it will invest $1 billion in Gujarat to build two new plants.

However, the decision does not seem to have upset or surprised the Tamil Nadu government which had courted the company to set up the new plants there, IANS reports.

Britain has recognised the Libyan rebel council as that country’s "sole governmental authority" and has expelled the Gaddafi-regime’s diplomats, the BBC reports.

Instead the UK will ask the rebel National Transitional Council to appoint a new diplomatic envoy.

Ivory Coast is to set up a commission of inquiry into crimes committed during the country's post-election violence, a council of ministers said last week.

See Al-Jazeera’s report here

At least eighty people were killed on a Norwegian island Friday by a lone gunman dressed in police uniform who attacked a summer camp of the ruling Labour party’s youth wing, shortly after a bomb ripped through the political district of the capital, Oslo.

Serbian authorities have arrested Goran Hadzic, the last remaining fugitive war crimes suspect sought by the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the BBC reports.

Think you’re open-minded? That you revise your opinions on the receipt of new facts?

And think you know what’s wrong with China’s government?

The anti-genocide group, Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), has published visual evidence of mass graves

Libyan rebels fighting to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi have won recognition as the country's "legitimate authority" from the entire international contact group co-ordinating policy on the crisis.

Former Guatemalan army chief Gen. Héctor Mario López Fuentes was charged this week with genocide for his command role in the killings of over 300 Mayan people in 1982 and 1983.

A UN-backed commission found that during Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict some 200,000 people were killed or disappeared and security forces committed 440 massacres in indigenous communities.

The commission specifically found that the military’s counter-insurgency operations in the Ixil Triangle amounted to acts of genocide, with 32 separate massacres targeting the indigenous Maya-Ixil population.

Gen. Fuentes is accused of being the “intellectual author” of 12 massacres from 1982-1983. At the time, he was Guatemala’s military Chief of Staff, the third-highest-ranking official in the country.

See Louisa Reynolds’s article for LaPress.org, and Amnesty International’s statement.

During the short-lived 1982-83 dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt, the army launched a brutal campaign targeting indigenous communities that it accused of supporting left-wing guerillas.

The strategy was known as “draining the water that the fish swim in.”

Any villages where signs of guerrilla activity were found — hidden weapons or propaganda — were deemed to be “subversive”, and the villagers were systematically killed.

Any villages found abandoned when terrified residents fled to the mountains were also razed to the ground, a policy known as “scorched earth.”

As a result of the regime’s genocidal policies, over 10,000 Mayans were murdered and 9,000 were displaced from their land.

Other former Guatemalan military and police officials have been arrested in recent months for their role in human rights abuses during the armed conflict.

These include  Colonel Héctor Bol de la Cruz and Jorge Humberto Gómez López, both former heads of the national police force.

An army officer and a soldier who participated in a December 1982 massacre in Dos Erres village were arrested earlier this year. Guatemalan security forces tortured and killed 250 men, women and children in Dos Erres before razing the village.