The Syrian government agreed today to allow United Nations inspectors to investigate allegations of a chemical weapon attack near Damascus last week.

The Colombian government halted its participation in peace talks with the FARC rebels on Friday, citing FARC's announcement of a "pause" to the talks in order to review the government's plan to put the peace deal up for a vote.

The President Juan Manuel Santos recalled the Colombian negotiating team back from Havana in Cuba where the talks were taking place.

One of the lead FARC negotiators, Pablo Catatumbo, has said in a statement:

"The FARC has decided to pause the discussions at the table, to focus exclusively on analysing the implications of the government's proposal,"

After discussions over  last week’s chemical weapons attack in Syria , David Cameron and Barack Obama, agreed that the crisis had been taken to a new level and would require a ‘serious  response’.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said,

The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been released from prison and is expected to be placed under house arrest.

Mubarak was arrested after widespread protests forced him from power 2 years ago, and was charged with corruption and involvement in the deaths of protestors and jailed for life, before the conviction was overturned on appeal earlier this year.

There has been some criticism of the release.

The British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, suggested today that the only “plausible explanation” for the deaths of 1300 people outside Damascus on was a chemical attack orchestrated by Bashar Assad’s regime.

An American soldier was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for the killing of 16 unarmed Afghan civilians.

Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales admitted to killing the villagers, mainly women and children, in two nighttime attacks on their family compounds in Kandahar in March 2012.

Prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Jay Morse referred to Bales as a "cold blooded killer" and had "wiped out generations and ruined lives forever".

Afghan survivors of the attack however expressed disappointment that the penalty had fallen short of the death sentence.

Speaking on Friday about the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria earlier this week, the US President Barack Obama said that it was a "big event of grave concern" and would "require America's attention".

Despite calls from many states for the Assad regime to effectively 'prove' its innocence by the allowing the UN's chemical weapons inspectors immediate access to the area and investigate, there is no sign of the Assad regime relenting.

Speaking to CNN, Obama added,

The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced the assignment of a disarmament official to negotiate a visit for UN investigators to verify alleged chemical weapons usage.

Former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, could be freed from prison on Thursday, after a court in Cairo ordered his release.

The 85-year old was sentenced for life in a corruption case last year, however an appeal was successful and a retrial was ordered.

He was imprisoned over the acceptance of gifts from a state-run publisher and still faces separate charges for the killing of protestors in the 2011 uprising.