BREST, France (Reuters) - Sweden has decided to withdraw its troops this year from a European special forces mission to the Sahel region, and will review its UN contribution, its foreign minister said. “We have already decided that this year we will withdraw (from) the force of Takuba,” Ann Linde told reporters on Friday on the sidelines of an EU foreign ministers meeting in western France.

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PRAYAGRAJ, India, (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Hindu worshippers gathered on the banks of India’s Ganges river on Friday for a holy bathe despite a 30-fold rise in coronavirus cases in the past month. Hindus believe a bathe in the holy river on the Jan. 14 Makarsankranti festival washes away sins. A large number of devotees were taking a dip in the sacred river where it flows through the eastern state of West Bengal, which is reporting the most number of cases in the country after Maharashtra state in the west.

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PARIS (AFP) - At least 108 civilians have been killed this month in a series of airstrikes in the war-torn northern Tigray region of Ethiopia, the United Nations said Friday. The UN also warned of a looming humanitarian disaster in the region, with its food distribution operations on the verge of grinding to a halt. The UN human rights office urged the Ethiopian authorities to ensure the protection of civilians, saying disproportionate attacks hitting non-military targets could amount to war crimes. Northern Ethiopia has been beset by conflict since November 2020 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops into Tigray after accusing the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), of attacks on federal army camps.

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LONDON (Al-Jazeera) - The United Nations has voiced concern at recent incidents of hate speech and incitement to violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia, fearing inflammatory acts will escalate ahead of elections this year. Bosnian Serbs celebrated their national day on Sunday, marking the creation of the Republika Srpska (RS) – Bosnia’s Serb entity that was declared three decades ago. It was one of the events seen as putting the country on the path to the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, which killed approximately 100,000 people and forced two million others from their homes.

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MOSCOW (AFP) - Turkey and Armenia on Friday welcomed “constructive” talks between their special envoys, who met for the first time in Moscow in a bid to mend historically strained ties. Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic relations, a closed border and a long history of hostility rooted in mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Armenian envoy Ruben Rubinyan and his Turkish counterpart, Serdar Kilic, met “in a positive and constructive atmosphere” on Friday, their foreign ministries said in identical statements. No concrete measures were announced after the 90-minute talks in the Russian capital.