Peru’s prosecutor’s office has formally requested 34 years in prison for former President Pedro Castillo, who was dramatically removed from office and arrested after his attempt to dissolve Congress in late 2022.

On January 12, the public prosecution office wrote on social media that it sought the jail term for “crimes of rebellion, abuse of authority, and serious disturbance of public peace.” In the request presented to the court, Castillo is accused of “carrying out a coup d’etat.”

The government of war-ravaged Sudan says it has suspended its membership in the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the east African regional bloc that has tried to broker talks between the country’s warring parties.

The January 20 announcement was made by the foreign ministry, which is loyal to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army chief and Sudan’s de facto leader. The Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group have been fighting for nine months in a war that has killed thousands of people and displaced more than seven million.

The United States government has announced it is once again designating Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a “terrorist” organization.

The UN Security Council demanded an immediate halt to attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on ships in the Red Sea in a resolution adopted on January 10 that implicitly condemned their main weapons supplier: Iran.

It condemns “in the strongest terms” at least two dozen attacks carried out by the Houthis on merchant and commercial vessels, which the resolution says are impeding global commerce and undermining navigational freedom.

The killing of civilians in Gaza is at a scale unprecedented in recent history, monitoring groups have said, as Israel continues to pound the besieged coastal enclave more than three months into the war.

Britain-based charity Oxfam said on January 11 that the daily death toll of Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza surpasses that of any other major conflict in the 21st century, while survivors remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases, and cold, as well as ongoing Israeli bombardments.

Hundreds of people paid their respects on the 25th anniversary of the killing of 45 Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian forces in Recak/Racak—a massacre that helped spark NATO’s military action against Yugoslavia.

Recak/Racak was surrounded and attacked by Serbian security forces on the morning of January 15, 1999. The attack formed part of the Hague Tribunal prosecution’s indictment of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic. But no verdict was ever delivered because Milosevic died in 2006 while in detention.

France's highest court on January 16 rejected a request by French cement maker Lafarge to dismiss charges of complicity in crimes against humanity as part of an investigation over how it kept its factory running in Syria after war broke out in 2011.

The ruling, which upheld an earlier decision by a lower court, is not a verdict on guilt. It is procedural, and means the years-long probe into the company's criminal liability on the grounds of the highly symbolic crimes against humanity charges can continue.

Taiwanese voters swept the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) presidential candidate Lai Ching-te into power on January 13, strongly rejecting Chinese pressure to spurn him, as China said it would not give up on achieving "reunification."

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina swept to a fourth straight term in power, with her party winning almost 75 percent of the seats in the January 7 general election that was boycotted by the main opposition and drew a low turnout.

The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which participated in the 2018 vote but kept away in 2014, boycotted the polls after Hasina refused its demands to resign and allow a neutral authority to run the general election.

A Myanmar rebel alliance has gained control of a key town along the country's volatile northern border with China after weeks of fierce fighting with junta troops, the alliance and the junta said.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance, as the group is known, said on Friday it had taken took over Laukkai town after the military's regional headquarters located there surrendered. The fall of Laukkai is the rebels' latest victory in a sweeping offensive that began in October and has become the most significant threat to Myanmar's military government since it seized power in a 2021 coup.