Last fall, a coalition of rebel groups known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched a rapid-fire offensive across Myanmar’s northern Shan state, quickly overrunning more than 100 military outposts and seizing several key towns along the country’s border with China.

This in itself was not unusual. Myanmar’s military government has faced insurgencies from ethnic and political militias for decades, and there’s been a major uptick in rebel activity since the 2021 coup, which brought the country’s current military junta to power, ending a short period of representative government. Over the past few months, the government has been rapidly losing ground to rebel forces in several regions of the country.

People who are poor, unemployed, homeless, immigrants, or exploited, as well as all those killed by past dictatorships and turned into rubbish by the "throwaway culture" of the present: the level of a society's civilisation is measured by the way they are treated, the Pope said.

Pope Francis reiterated the centrality of the vulnerable as well as the urgency of countering the triple "scourge" of corruption, abuse of power, and lawlessness—both in politics and in society—in his address on Wednesday with representatives of the DIALOP transversal dialogue project.

US climate envoy John Kerry will leave the administration later this winter and plans to help President Joe Biden’s election campaign, Kerry’s office said on Saturday.

Kerry, a US former secretary of state, informed his staff earlier on Saturday after speaking with Biden earlier this week, a spokesman for Kerry said.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has helped in the fight against rebels for more than two decades, will completely withdraw from the country by December.

“After 25 years of presence, MONUSCO will definitively leave the DRC no later than the end of 2024,” Bintou Keita, head of the mission known as MONUSCO said at a media briefing in the Congolese capital Kinshasa on Saturday.

A landslide in north-west Colombia has killed at least 23 people and injured around 30 more, local authorities say.

The road connecting the cities of Medellín and Quibdo had been closed by several landslides, so many people stopped their cars to take shelter in a house near the community of Carmen de Atrato, a local official said.

Another landslide then struck the road, burying them and some of the vehicles.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ukraine’s foreign affairs ministry says that four of its citizens were among those captured by al-Qaida-linked extremists in Somalia after their helicopter that was contracted by the United Nations made an emergency landing in territory controlled by the militants earlier this week.

Officials say the helicopter went down on Wednesday because of engine failure and was then attacked by al-Shabab militants who killed one person and abducted the other passengers.

“Our citizens were members of the helicopter crew of the United Nations Mission in Somalia that crashed,” said Oleh Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian foreign affairs ministry said Friday in a Facebook post.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — France’s new foreign minister arrived in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, on Saturday to meet with his counterpart in a sign of support for Ukraine as Russia’s full-scale invasion nears its second anniversary.

Stéphane Séjourné noted that Ukraine was his first destination abroad since his nomination in a government reshuffle this week.

“Ukraine is and will remain France’s priority,” Séjourné said. “The defense of the fundamental principles of international law is being played out in Ukraine.”

ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey carried out airstrikes targeting Kurdish militants in neighboring Iraq and Syria on Saturday, the Turkish Defense Ministry said. This comes a day after an attack on a Turkish military base in Iraq killed nine Turkish soldiers.

Turkey often launches strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq it believes to be affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a banned Kurdish separatist group that has waged insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s.

Brussels wants to launch a bespoke EU mission to protect commercial vessels in the Red Sea from attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

In a document dated January 10 and seen by Euronews, the EU’s diplomatic service proposes sending "at least three" warships with "multi mission capabilities" to the region as early as next month.

The document recommends the "fast-tracking implementation" of an operation mandated to act "from the Red Sea to the Gulf," in order to protect maritime security in a region plagued by instability in recent weeks.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) on Friday said it had arrested a Russian national, working for a state firm, who it said was planning to pass on sensitive information to Poland.

The FSB said the man was working at a "secure facility" in the central Penza region and was held for attempting to pass on information about his workplace to Polish intelligence, state news agency RIA reported.

Poland's deputy foreign minister Andrjez Szejna poured cold water on the claims in comments carried by Polish news website Onet.

Amy Zoyomi is a 29-year-old transgender woman from Lucenec, a town with 30,000 inhabitants in southern Slovakia. As an adult, Amy decided to move to the capital, Bratislava. Her gender identity was one of the main reasons for leaving her hometown.

For Amy, life in Lucenec and life in Bratislava are poles apart. "When I walk down the street in my home town, people often stare at me," she told DW. "Sometimes they stop, and the stares change to verbal abuse. That doesn't happen in the capital. I feel safe here, people are much more relaxed and don't pay so much attention to others," she explained.

For many people in Ukraine, 2024 started just like 2023 ended — with Russian air assaults and rocket and drone attacks on infrastructure and homes. What's new is the scale of the bombardment: the Russian military is trying to get past Ukraine's air defenses by beefing up its firepower.

"The recent attacks and relentless hostilities have left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity and water supplies, at a time when forecasts indicate that temperatures might drop to minus 20 degrees Celsius [minus 4 Fahrenheit] in the coming days," said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.