“Members of Boko Haram and other groups and entities, if judged to have committed widespread or systematic attacks against a civilian population, including on grounds such as religion or ethnicity, could be found guilty of crimes against humanity”.

Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, may have been poisoned with radioactive polonium, according to Swiss forensic experts.

Arafat was said to have died of a stroke, however Palestinians and others have long accused the Israeli government of poisoning him.

A report by scientists from the Vaudois University Hospital Centre (CHUV) in Lausanne said that Arafat’s exhumed body showed unusually high levels of polonium.

"We are completely satisfied with what we have agreed on the point of political participation,"

The Congolese M23 rebel group announced today that it was ending its armed rebellion against the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Hours after government forces drove its fighters out of their last two hilltop bases of Tshanzu and Ruyoni, the group announced that it would disarm and pursue political talks.

The US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israeli-Palestinian peace talks faced difficulties however he believed something is possible.

Addressing crowds at a memorial event for the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right wing Israeli in 2005, Kerry said:

"I come here without any illusions about the difficulties, but I come here determined to work,"

"We are seeing armed groups killing people under the guise of their religion,"

"My feeling is that this will end with Christian communities, Muslim communities killing each other which means that if we don't act now and decisively I will not exclude the possibility of a genocide occurring,"

Some Conservative MPs from England secretly favour Scottish independence, as it would give the party a permanent majority at Westminster, said former Conservative Secretary, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, who is Scottish.

Slamming the favouring of party gains over the British union as "foolish", Forsyth said:

“There are number of foolish people in the Conservative Party in the south who are keen on independence or ‘Devo max’.

A war crimes tribunal in Bangladesh on Sunday sentenced two expatriates- one living in the United States and the other in Britain- to death for the murder of 18 people, who were described as prominent intellectuals during, the country’s 1971 war of Independence from Pakistan.