UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he will appoint an envoy to help shepherd a divided Cyprus toward long-lasting peace, as he hailed a “constructive atmosphere” in talks with Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders. 

More than 200 people, including women and children, have been killed in Syria in incidents involving war remnants in the three months since the fall of the Assad regime, as bomb disposal experts warn that “no area in Syria is safe”. 

The number of casualties has risen as approximately 1.2 million people return to their former homes and lands after being displaced by the country’s brutal civil war. 

Since 2014, conflict in Yemen has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, displaced millions, destroyed the economy, and exacerbated systemic marginalization, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. Yet currently, transitional justice and reconciliation take up little space in the Yemeni political arena. In this context, ICTJ has released a new report that explores pathways to a just and sustainable peace in Yemen.

Yemen’s Houthis have said they have retaliated after vowing to “meet escalation with escalation” following the United States air strikes against the group that killed at least 53 people. 

Former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo has ended a four-day hunger strike that he began in protest of his trial on rebellion and other charges, judicial authorities.  

A judicial clerk informed the Supreme Court’s panel overseeing the case that Castillo ended the hunger strike Thursday afternoon after being released from a hospital where he was taken that same day because of a “health problem.” 

The head of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been killed in Iraq in an operation by members of the Iraqi national intelligence service along with U.S.-led coalition forces, the Iraqi prime minister announced. 

Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have said that they had agreed on the text of a peace agreement to end nearly four decades of conflict between the South Caucasus countries, a sudden breakthrough in a fitful and often bitter peace process. 

The two post-Soviet countries have fought a series of wars since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, a region in Azerbaijan that had a mostly ethnic Armenian population at the time, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia. 

African leaders announced the withdrawal of thousands of troops from South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi who were sent to quell insurgencies in mineral-rich eastern Congo, where M23 rebels have killed some of the peacekeepers while overrunning the region this year. 

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is getting a first-hand look at the situation of more than 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as fears mount of serious aid cuts across the world following Washington’s decision to shut down USAID operations. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he agrees in principle with a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, but the terms need to be worked out, and he emphasized that it should pave the way to lasting peace.