Palestinian security forces have arrested one of the most prominent human rights activists in the occupied territories after he criticised the arrest of a Palestinian journalist in a Facebook post. Issa Amro, who lives in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, is the highest profile victim of a growing campaign by Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, against journalists and dissent on social media.

Amro is the founder of Youth Against the Settlements, which has long-documented alleged abuses by the Israeli military and settlers in Hebron. He was already facing charges in an Israeli military court for his activism. According to Amro’s brother Ahmed, the activist was summoned by Palestinian security forces for questioning after posting on his Facebook account about the arrest of Palestinian journalist Ayman Qawasmeh, who had called on the unpopular and increasingly autocratic Abbas to resign.(theguardian)…[+]

Photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge taken by paparazzi while she was on holiday in France were an invasion of privacy, a court has ruled.Just 24 hours after news that the Kate and Prince William were expecting their third child, the couple were back in the news when the court in Nanterre, west of Paris, delivered its verdict on the five-year-old case.

The court awarded the royal couple €100,000 in damages and interests and ordered the editor and owner of the glossy magazine Closer to pay the maximum fine of €45,000 each. The awards, while high for a French court, are considerably lower than the €1.5m the couple’s legal team had demanded. Six people, including three photographers, were tried earlier this year after long-lens pictures of the couple on holiday in France were published in the French celebrity magazine and a local newspaper, La Provence. The photographs were taken in the summer of 2012 and show the royal couple on a terrace by a swimming pool at a private chateau owned by Viscount Linley, the Queen’s nephew, in the Luberon, Provence.(Theguardian)…[+]

More than 120,000 Rohingya people have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in the last two weeks after a rise in violence against the Muslim ethnic minority, according to the United Nations. The situation has raised fears of a humanitarian crisis in overstretched border camps, with another 400,000 stateless Rohingya people estimated to be trapped in conflict zones in western Myanmar since more “clearance operations” by security forces in Rakhine state began last month. UN aid agencies continue to be blocked from delivering food, water and medicine to the Rohingya, while humanitarian workers on the ground say warehouses stocking vital emergency supplies are being looted. As the international outcry over the crisis grew, an aid group that has been rescuing tens of thousands of refugees from the Mediterranean Sea announced it was redirecting its ship to south-east Asia.(theguardian)…[+]