Pakistani Army officials say 25 Islamist militants and three security officers were killed when special forces raided a counterterrorism police center in the northwestern city of Bannu on December 20 in an operation to retake the compound.
Heavy fighting continued unabated in the east as Ukrainian forces repelled dozens of Russian attacks over the past 24 hours, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said, as a regional official said one person was killed by shelling in the recently liberated city of Kherson in the south.
A court in Russia’s southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don has replaced a suspended sentence with a three-year prison term for the former coordinator of the now-defunct Open Russia group, Anastasia Shevchenko.
A court in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Blagoveshchensk sentenced five Jehovah's Witnesses to prison terms of between six years and three months and 6 1/2 years on extremism charges, a local court said on December 21.
The Russian parliament's lower chamber, the State Duma, on December 21 approved the final reading of a bill that would allow life sentences for those convicted of assisting "saboteurs."