UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Palestinians and Israel to step away from escalating conflict on a snap visit into the region.

Stating that the violence was undermining Palestine’s hope for statehood and long term stability in the region, the UN Secretary General said,

The Liberal Party of Canada claimed victory in the country’s elections on Monday evening, ending almost a decade of Conservative party rule.

The party managed to form a majority government having won 184 seats, having started the campaign in third place.

The European Court of Human Rights stated that a Turkish politician who was convicted for denying the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire was genocide was wrongly prosecuted.

The ECHR ruled that Dogu Perincek had not called for "hatred or intolerance" when he stated "the Armenian genocide is a big fat lie" in 2005.

He had initially been sentenced by a Swiss court for racial discrimination for 2007.

Algeria’s permanent representative to the United Nations Boukadoum Sabri reiterated that the Western Saharan conflict been be solved by ensuring the Saharawi people’s “fundamental right” to self-determination.

Addressing a debate of the Committee on Special Political Decolonisation of the United Nations, Mr Sabri said,

The African Union Peace and Security Council called for the organisations to speed up plans to send troops to Burundi if violence in the region worsens, reports Reuters.

In a statement released after meeting on Saturday, the council added that sanctions would be imposed on anyone who incited further violence in Burundi.

The European Union (EU) will announce a formal end to economic sanctions imposed on Iran this weekend, reports Agence France Presse.

Diplomatic sources involved in the negotiations said that the removal of sanctions would take immediate effect as soon as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certified that Iran had met its commitments to the international community.

Syria’s Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) denounced allegations that its combatants had committed war crimes by forcibly displacing people and demolishing homes.

Amnesty International last week accused the YPB of carrying out a “campaign of collective punishment.”

The world’s largest body of scholars who study genocide have written to the German government to legally recognise the genocide of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek populations by the Ottoman Empire.

In a letter addressed to the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag Norbert Rottgen, the International Association of Genocide Scholars said:

“In order for progress toward reconciliation to be made between Turkey and the Armenian Republic and the Armenian people, acknowledgement of the historical facts about one of the most devastating human rights atrocities of the modern era must be made”.

The scholars praised Germany’s handling of its own history and the Holocaust, stating “Germany, more than any country in the 20th century, has dealt with the aftermath of genocide with exemplary courage and moral reckoning”. “Germany has been a world leader in its ability to face its past, create a powerful culture of historical memory and deal with issues of recompense and social justice in the wake of the Holocaust,” they added.

The International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor said she had enough evidence to open an investigation into alleged war crimes during the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, reports the International Business Times.