Sri Lanka’s president said Wednesday he will strengthen provincial governments to meet long-standing demands for self-rule from the ethnic Tamil minority, an issue that led to a bloody quarter-century civil war in the island nation. 

A report submitted to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Secretary General has called for Iran to halt surging executions and rollback mandatory veiling.  

The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court warned that Azerbaijan is preparing genocide against ethnic Armenians in its Nagorno-Karabakh region and called for the UN Security Council to bring the matter before the international tribunal. 

Sexual violence is being committed in Sudan on a "sickening scale," while fighting in the Darfur region is reopening "old wounds of ethnic tension" that could engulf the country, United Nations officials told the Security Council on Wednesday. 

In the Amhara region of Ethiopia, fighting between a militia group and Ethiopia's National Defense Force (ENDF) has intensified. The Fano militia, which draws volunteers from the local population, has reportedly taken control of several towns in the region. 

The unrest has quickly become Ethiopia's most serious security crisis since a two-year war—from 2020 to 2022—in the Tigray region, which borders Amhara.  

Italy’s justice minister has approved extraditing an Italian priest sought by Argentina on charges of murder and torture during that country’s last military dictatorship, but the priest has an appeal in Italian courts seeking to block extradition, a lawyer and rights groups said Thursday. 

War crimes committed by Myanmar's military, including the bombing of civilians, have become "increasingly frequent and brazen," a team of United Nations investigators said in a report published on Tuesday.

The report by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), which covered the period between July 2022 and June 2023, said there was "strong evidence that the Myanmar military and its affiliate militias have committed three types of combat-related war crimes with increasing frequency and brazenness."

Japan on Sunday commemorated the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in the final phase of World War II. 

Considering the growing nuclear threat worldwide, the mayor of Hiroshima Kazumi Matsui called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and described the nuclear deterrence policy of G7 as "folly."

According to numbers collected by the United Nations in 2021, over a decade of civil war means that around 28 percent of the Syrian population—aged over 2—now suffers from a disability of some kind.

The numbers are even higher in parts of northern Syria. The UN says that around 37 percent of the population in northeastern Syria suffers from some kind of disability.

That percentage is more than double the world average, which sits at around 15 percent.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's most prominent opponent was sentenced Friday to an additional 19 years behind bars on extremism charges.

A Russian judge delivered the guilty verdict and sentencing in the closed-door trial against Alexey Navalny at a courtroom inside the maximum-security prison camp in Melekhovo, about 145 miles east of Moscow, where the Russian opposition leader is already serving 11 and a half years. Russian prosecutors had requested a 20-year prison term for the latest charges, which stem from Navalny's pro-democracy campaigns against Putin's regime.