Ukraine's latest ultimatum to pro-Kremlin militias who have seized buildings across a swath of the separatist east expired on Monday without any sign of the gunmen ready to give in.

The streets of the impoverished coal mining town of Slavyansk remained deserted and silent despite the Western-backed interim president's vow to unleash a "full-scale anti-terrorist operation" involving the army should the gunmen not give up the local police station and state security office by 0600 GMT.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday demanded that its peacekeeping mission with the African Union improve its protection of civilians in the strife-torn Sudanese region of Darfur.

In a unanimous resolution, the council endorsed "revised strategic priorities" for the African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID).

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday condemned North Korea's latest ballistic missile tests and agreed to quickly consult on an appropriate response, its rotating president said.

"Security Council members condemn this launch as a violation of Security Council resolutions," Luxembourg's ambassador Sylvie Lucas told reporters after a closed-door debate of less than an hour.

A South Korean naval ship fired warning shots Thursday and seized a North Korean fishing boat intruding across the disputed Yellow Sea border, military officials said.

The vessel sailed a nautical mile south of the sea boundary at 5:26 pm (0826 GMT), prompting a South Korean patrol ship to take action, the South's defense ministry said.

The Syrian conflict takes center stage at an Arab summit starting Tuesday in Kuwait, where a regional rift over Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has been kept off the agenda.

The dispute which broke out in the runup to the summit pits Qatar against Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

China on Tuesday urged the world community not to provoke tensions by "politicizing" human rights in North Korea, which a U.N. inquiry has compared to those in Nazi Germany and under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.

"We oppose politicizing the human rights issue or interfering in others' internal affairs on the pretext of the human rights issue," foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular briefing.

A group of U.N.-mandated investigators launch a probe Monday of human right violations in the conflict-ravaged Central African Republic amid fears of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The three international investigators will spend two weeks travelling the country, speaking with victims, witnesses, and actors in the conflict, and expect to draw up a list of suspected perpetrators.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday launched another round of closed-door talks on the situation in Ukraine, its fourth such meeting in less than a week.

The meeting, convened at Britain's request, was expected to discuss the mission of U.N. special envoy to Crimea Robert Serry, who was forced to cut short his trip to the region when he was confronted by unidentified gunmen on Wednesday.

Syrian government forces are waging a campaign of siege warfare and starvation against civilians as part of their military strategy, a U.N.-mandated probe said Wednesday.

Armed opposition groups are also besieging and indiscriminately shelling civilian neighborhoods, the independent Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in Syria said in a report.

Negotiations between Lebanon and France over an arms deal reached a settlement after difficult discussions concerning the prices, which exceeded what was expected, local newspapers reported on Tuesday.

“French authorities placed tough financial conditions and prices for the arms beyond the expectation,” a source said in comments published in As Safir.