Watchdog

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and his government resigned on March 15 amid a political crisis sparked by the killings of an investigative journalist and his fiancee.

President Andrej Kiska accepted Fico's resignation and asked Peter Pellegrini, Fico's deputy prime minister, to form a new government.

The decision is meant to keep the current three-party coalition in power and avoid the possibility of early elections.

"Early elections would not bring any stability," Fico said.

Slovakia's next general election is due in 2020.

Pellegrini, who also is from Fico's leftist Smer Social Democracy party, will form the same coalition as the previous government -- with the Most-Hid party representing ethnic Hungarians and the ultranationalist Slovak National Party.

Tens of thousands of Slovaks joined in protests across the country last week to demand the government's resignation and a thorough investigation of the killings of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova.

Kuciak, 27, was writing about ties between the Italian mafia and people close to Fico. In some of his articles, Kuciak tackled corruption scandals linked to Fico's party.

The protests were the biggest in Slovakia after the fall of communism. More demonstrations are scheduled for March 16 despite's Fico's move, amid continued calls for early elections.

Based on reporting by AP, AFP, Reuters, and dpa

Syrian government forces and allied militias have raped and sexually assaulted women, girls, and men in a campaign to punish opposition communities -- acts that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the United Nations said on March 15.

UN investigators said in a report that they found that rebel groups in Syria's civil war had also committed crimes of sexual violence and torture, although these were "considerably less common."

The report also said Islamic State (IS) militants had executed women and girls by stoning for alleged adultery, forced girls into marriage, and persecuted homosexual men.

"It is utterly repugnant that brutal acts of sexual and gender-based violence continued to be perpetrated throughout Syria for seven years by most warring parties," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry, told a panel in Geneva.

Meanwhile, a war monitor says that almost 20,000 civilians fled the Syrian town of Hammuriyeh and its surrounding areas in the rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta for government-controlled territory on March 15.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said thousands of displaced people had left Hammuriyeh, Kafr Batna, Jisreen, and Saqba throughout the day.

Rami Abdel-Rahman, the head of the observatory, said the flow stopped at the beginning of the evening, in what he said was the biggest exodus of displaced people since the regime launched an offensive on the enclave on February 18.

Almost 2,000 people, including 426 children, have been killed in eastern Ghouta due to violence in the past four months, the observatory estimates.

Based on reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP