Jordan's King Abdullah appointed veteran politician Hani Mulqi as caretaker prime minister on May 29 after dissolving parliament as its four-year term nears its end, and charged him with organising new elections by October.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim's government on May 29 won a vote of confidence in parliament as well as approval for his legislative program, parliament speaker Ismail Kahraman said.

At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, Medecins San Frontieres and the UN Refugee agency said on May 29.

Servicemen from the US-led coalition are assisting Kurdish Peshmerga forces in a new offensive in Iraq that aims to retake a handful of villages from Islamic State east of their Mosul stronghold, a coalition spokesman said on May 29.

Turkish and US-led coalition airstrikes killed 104 Islamic State militants in retaliation for the latest attack on a Turkish border province, Turkish media reported on May 28, citing military sources.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on May 28 rejected a call for the Rio Olympic Games to be moved or postponed due to the threat posed by a large outbreak of Zika virus in Brazil.

Islamic State fighters captured territory from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border on May 27 and inched closer to a town on a supply route for foreign-backed insurgents fighting the jihadists, a monitoring group said.

Barack Obama on May 27 became the first incumbent US president to visit Hiroshima, site of the world's first atomic bombing, in a gesture Tokyo and Washington hope will showcase their alliance and reinvigorate efforts to rid the world of nuclear arms

The United Nations' humanitarian chief on May 27 demanded that the Syrian government and militant groups stop interfering with the delivery of food and medicine for civilians trapped in besieged and difficult-to-reach areas in war-ravaged Syria.

Nearly 1,000 people were killed in attacks on health centers worldwide over the past two years, almost 40% of them in Syria, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on May 26 in its first report on the issue.