Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that he will give $19bn in financial aid, for job creation and infrastructure, to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine earlier this year.  He was speaking during a visit to the region in front of members of Russian parliament who called out from their vacation in Moscow and asked to assemble in Crimean city of Yalta.

The US, UK and other states have pledged aid and humanitarian assistance to help rescue refugees fleeing Isis in northern Iraq.  The US has launched two airstrikes against the Islamic State. The defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, announced on Tuesday that 130 troops were being sent to Iraq as "assessors", joining 450 troops already there.

Another 130 U.S. troops arrived in Iraq on Tuesday on what the Pentagon described as a temporary mission to assess the scope of the humanitarian crisis facing thousands of displaced Iraqi civilians trapped on Sinjar Mountain and evaluate options for getting them out to safety.

The United Nations has warned that a mass atrocity or genocide of refugees in the Mount Sinjar region of northern Iraq could still happen “within days or hours”.  The UN's special rapporteur who has been investigating the plight of 40,000 mainly Kurdish-speaking Yazidis who fled to the mountain fearing attacks from the extremist militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), said the world urgently needed to recognise the severity of the humanitarian crisis.

With a theatrical flourish, Russia on Tuesday dispatched hundreds of trucks covered in white tarps and sprinkled with holy water on a mission to deliver aid to a desperate rebel-held zone in eastern Ukraine.  The televised sight of the miles-long convoy sparked a show of indignation from the government in Kiev, which insisted any aid must be delivered by the international Red Cross.

Ottawa is providing $5-million in new humanitarian assistance for the victims of the ongoing crisis in Iraq, vowing to come to the help of displaced civilians and religious minorities.  “Canada continues to stand by the people of Iraq in these difficult times and condemns the terrorist actions of ISIS and the killing of innocent civilians in northern Iraq in the strongest possible terms," International Development Minister Christian Paradis said in a statement on Sunday.

The political leader of Iraq's Kurds, Massoud Barzani, has appealed for international military aid to help defeat Islamist militants in the north.  The plea came as the US launched a fourth round of air strikes targeting Islamic State fighters near Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Saudi Arabia has just decided to give the Lebanese military $1 billion in military aid, mostly in ammunition and small arms. This latest dollop of cash has a lot more to do with the fact that the Islamic State, which has recently shown a noticeable lack of concern about what anyone else has to say about national borders, recently bopped over into Lebanon to go raise hell, shoot up, and finally occupy a small town called Arsal in the northeast of the country.