UN Special Envoy for Syria said on Monday that months of “potentially significant diplomacy” to resolve the crisis in Syria have not yielded any outcomes or political momentum for the war-weary population. “I hope they will soon, because if not, it will be another missed opportunity to help the Syrian conflict to come to a negotiated end, at a time when the impact of the crisis is deepening,” Geir Pedersen said, briefing the Security Council.
The United Nations said on Tuesday it had started the removal of more than 1 million barrels of oil from a decaying supertanker off Yemen's Red Sea coast. UN officials have been warning for years that the Red Sea and Yemen's coastline was at risk as the Safer tanker could spill four times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska. The war in Yemen caused the suspension in 2015 of maintenance operations on the Safer, which is used for storage and has been moored off Yemen for more than 30 years.
Air strikes and artillery barrages from Sudan's warring generals killed at least 16 people in a Khartoum neighborhood on Tuesday, a neighborhood group reported. After more than 100 days of war, the latest bombardments added to a toll of at least 3,900 killed nationwide. "Sixteen citizens died today in this senseless war" when shells hit civilian homes in the Ombada area of Khartoum's northwest, the neighborhood group said.
Crisis-hit Lebanon which has no president and is ruled by a caretaker government will also have to go without a central bank chief from next week, says the country's deputy premier. No successor has been named for the embattled bank governor, Riad Salameh, 73, who steps down after three decades at the helm at the end of July, Saade al-Chami told AFP. "We need to appoint a central bank governor, in consultation with all political parties," Chami said, noting however that "conditions are not ready for a new governor to be appointed within a week".