Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that Syria’s new leadership is determined to root out separatists there, as Ankara said its military had “neutralised” 32 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, in the country.

Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have seized a strategic eastern town near the provincial capital Goma in Democratic Republic of Congo, local politicians said.

A second group of 75 Guatemalan soldiers arrived in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince to boost a United Nations-backed mission tasked with restoring order amid chaos wrought by gangs, the mission said.

Russia declared a regional state of emergency in Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, as workers cleared tons of contaminated sand and earth on either side of the Kerch Strait following an oil spill in the Black Sea last month.

The pro-Russian breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestria, left without Russian gas supplies no longer transiting through neighbouring Ukraine, faced longer periods of rolling power cuts, local authorities said.

Talks between Austria’s two main centrist parties on forming a coalition government without the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) collapsed, prompting conservative Chancellor Karl Nehammer to announce he would step down.

Attacks on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia border killed three people, local officials said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to South Korea, Japan and France from Jan. 4-9, the State Department said, amid a political crisis in Seoul.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson was reelected to the chamber’s top job by a razor-thin margin that highlighted potential fissures among President-elect Donald Trump’s Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Australia’s southeast sweltered in a heat wave that raised the risk of bushfires and led authorities to issue fire bans for large parts of Victoria state.

A judge has ordered that Donald Trump will be sentenced on 10 January in his hush-money case in New York – less than two weeks before he is set to be sworn in as president.

Hundreds of Montenegrins protested in the capital Podgorica against what they see as a lack of action by authorities to prevent a mass shooting in which a gunman killed 12 people and seriously wounded four.