Reuters World News Summary

Following is a summary of current world news briefs. Police in Indonesia's Papua to investigate alleged killings

Police in Indonesia's restive Papua region pledged on Friday to hold an investigation after a local leader said the bodies of five villagers had been found with bullet wounds in an area where there has been a military crackdown. The village is in the mountainous Nduga area, where the military has been hunting separatist rebels since December, following the killings of 16 construction workers building a highway. Romanian president says to appoint PM designate by October 15

Romania's President Klaus Iohannis said on Friday he intends to appoint a prime minister-designate by Oct. 15 at the latest to form a transitional government, likely to be led by the main opposition party, until a parliamentary election next year. Prime Minister Viorica Dancila's center-left government collapsed on Thursday after losing a no-confidence vote in parliament, raising the prospect of a government with limited support from a fragmented opposition. 'Border on fire' as Turkey intensifies Syria campaign

Turkey stepped up its air and artillery strikes on Kurdish militia in northeast Syria on Friday, escalating an offensive that has drawn warnings of humanitarian catastrophe and turned Republican lawmakers against U.S. President Donald Trump. The incursion, launched after Trump withdrew U.S. troops who had been fighting alongside Kurdish forces against Islamic State militants, has opened a new front in the eight-year-old Syrian civil war and drawn fierce international criticism. Ethiopia's Abiy wins Nobel Peace Prize for ending Eritrea standoff

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his peacemaking efforts which ended two decades of hostility with longtime enemy Eritrea. Though Africa's youngest leader still faces big challenges, he has in under two years in power begun political and economic reforms that promise a better life for many in impoverished Ethiopia and restored ties with Eritrea that had been frozen since a 1998-2000 border war. Exclusive: U.S. migrant policy sends thousands of children including hundreds of babies back to Mexico

Since January, the U.S. government has ordered 13,000 migrants under 18, including more than 400 infants, to wait with their families in Mexico for U.S. immigration court hearings, a Reuters analysis of government data found. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, babies and toddlers are living in high-crime cities - often in crowded shelters and tents or on the streets - for the weeks or months it takes to get a U.S. asylum hearing. Hundreds take to Hong Kong streets ahead of weekend protests

Hundreds of mask-wearing pro-democracy protesters marched through Hong Kong's central business district on Friday, occupying a main thoroughfare and disrupting traffic as the Chinese-ruled city braced for another weekend of unrest. Chanting their core demands, which include universal suffrage and an independent inquiry into perceived police brutality, the crowd occupied the financial district at lunchtime before peacefully dispersing. Brexit breakfast for EU and UK negotiators after 'pathway to deal' opens

The chief Brexit negotiators of the European Union and Britain were meeting for breakfast on Friday, hours after Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Irish counterpart unexpectedly said they had found a pathway to a possible deal at last-ditch talks. With the United Kingdom due to leave the world's biggest trading bloc on Oct. 31, Brexit remains deeply uncertain; it remains unclear on what terms it will leave or indeed whether it will leave at all. Macron: cannot allow crisis between EU bodies after commissioner rejected

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that one must not let a crisis settle in between the European Union commission and the separate EU parliament, following the rejection this week of France's candidate to run EU industrial policy. "We must not allow for a European political crisis to settle in," Macron said at a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Paris. German synagogue gunman confesses to crime and to an anti-Semitic motive: prosecutors

The man accused of killing two in a gun attack near a synagogue in Halle, eastern Germany, has confessed to the crime and to a far-right, anti-Semitic motivation, prosecutors said on Friday. Prosecutors described how Stephan B., who published a racist and anti-Semitic manifesto and live-streamed the shooting on Wednesday, had shot two bystanders after failing to enter the synagogue. Iranian oil tanker hit off Saudi coast, may have been missiles - Iran reports

An Iranian-owned oil tanker was struck, probably by missiles, in the Red Sea off Saudi Arabia's coast on Friday, Iranian media said, an incident that if confirmed will stoke tension in a region rattled by attacks on tankers and oil sites since May. The Sabiti was hit in the morning about 60 miles (96 km) from the Saudi port of Jeddah, Iranian media reported. The National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) said the ship was damaged but now heading to the Gulf, denying reports it was set ablaze.