It was 10 on the dot on Monday morning when the usher called the International Court of Justice to order to hear the case against Israel’s West Bank ”security fence”. Inside the United Nations building, officially called the Peace Palace, everything went smoothly.

A suicide car bomb attack at a police station in Kirkuk on Monday killed at least 10 people and wounded 45 others. The attack raised fears for the fragile peace which has held in the oil-rich, northern Iraqi city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The public will get a chance to decide if a photograph that scientists claim to be a rare image of Vincent van Gogh is really the artist or a simple case of mistaken identity. Van Gogh painted more than 40 self-portraits but there are only two photographs in existence that are widely believed to be the artist — at the ages of 13 and 19.

It could be billed as a case of David and Goliath, or at least the minnow against the whale. A French children’s book author told a Paris court on Monday that the main fish character in the Disney film Finding Nemo, which has so far grossed -million, was a direct copy of his own creation, a cheerful orange and white clown fish named Pierrot.

Government troops swept through villages in northern Uganda on Monday, hunting rebels who were responsible for killing more than 200 refugees in one of the worst atrocities of recent years. As the death toll continued to rise, the government was also having to reappraise its strategy of arming local militias to defend civilians against the fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

The suspension of Metrorail CEO Honey Mateya and two senior executives last week has capped a simmering feud between Mateya and trade unions at the parastatal. Unions applaud Transnet CEO Maria Ramos’s decision to investigate parastatal’s senior executives who ‘lack vision’.

Everyone now accepts that poverty — whether actual destitution or state-aided, underclass misery — is a growing global phenomenon. Less well known is the fact that, globally, the middle class is struggling and declining. Margaret Legum comments on the uprush of how resources from poor to rich is weakening ‘society’s stable backbone’.