LIMA, Peru (AP) — Protesters set fire to the police station and judicial office in the Peruvian town of Macusani Wednesday after two people were killed and another seriously injured by gunfire amid anti-government protests. The deaths were confirmed by Macusani health official Dr. Iván Fernández. They brought to 53 the number of people killed during more than a month of unrest following the ouster of President Pedro Castillo.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a vast humanitarian catastrophe, as a wave of religiously motivated violence nurtured in Nigeria has swept across the region, targeting Christian populations at an alarming rate in countries like Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, and Niger. Signs of jihadist expansion are also clearly visible in Mozambique, Congo DR, and other countries. This is the disturbing finding of Open Doors’ 2023 World Watch List. The list ranks the nations where Christians face the most severe persecution and discrimination.

More than 312 million Christian face high levels of persecution just in the countries on Open Doors’ World Watch List, the organization said Tuesday. Worldwide, the group says, that number is more than 360 million. The World Watch List is Open Doors’ annual ranking of the 50 countries where Christians suffer very high or extreme levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith. Most of the countries on the list are in Asia and Africa, although some Latin American nations are included. North Korea tops the list, followed by Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea and Libya.

BROVARY, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's interior minister died Wednesday in a helicopter crash near the capital that killed more than a dozen other people, including children, authorities said. Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, who oversaw Ukraine's police and emergency services, is the most senior official to die since Russia invaded nearly 11 months ago. His death, along with two others from his ministry, was the second calamity in four days for Ukraine, after a Russian missile strike on an apartment building killed dozens of civilians.

BEIJING (AP) — Hairdresser Wang Lidan is making an emotional Lunar New Year journey from Beijing to her hometown in northeastern China — her first in three years after the government lifted its strict “zero-COVID” policy that kept millions of people at home and sparked protests. The relaxation of restrictions let loose a wave of pent-up travel desire, particularly around China’s most important time for family gatherings. Referred to in China as the Spring Festival, it may be the only time of the year when urban workers return to their hometowns.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook eastern Indonesia and southern Philippines on Wednesday, with no damage immediately reported and no tsunami warning issued. Some residents tried to escape from houses in the Indonesian town of Tobelo in North Maluku province. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake occurred 48 kilometers deep under the sea, centered 154 kilometers northwest of Tobelo.

SYDNEY (AP) — A Qantas flight traveling from New Zealand to Sydney landed safely on a single engine after it issued a mayday call over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday. Qantas Flight 144 with 145 passengers aboard landed at Sydney Airport from Auckland, New Zealand, after a 3.5-hour flight between the neighboring nations' most populous cities. The Boeing 737-838 “experienced an issue” with one of its two engines about an hour from Sydney, a Qantas statement said.

BEIJING (AP) — China’s population shrank for the first time in decades last year as its birthrate plunged, official figures showed Tuesday, adding to pressure on leaders to keep the economy growing despite an aging workforce and at a time of rising tension with the U.S. Despite the official numbers, some experts believe China's population has been in decline for a few years — a dramatic turn in a country that once sought to control such growth through a one-child policy.

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — Nepalese authorities on Tuesday began returning to families the bodies of plane crash victims and were sending the aircraft's data recorder to France for analysis as they try to determine what caused the country's deadliest air disaster in 30 years. The flight plummeted into a gorge on Sunday while on approach to the newly opened Pokhara International Airport in the foothills of the Himalayas, killing all 72 aboard.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The final death toll from a weekend Russian missile strike on an apartment building in southeastern Ukraine reached 44, officials said Tuesday, as the body of another child was pulled from the wreckage. The strike in the city of Dnipro was the war's deadliest attack since the spring on civilians at one location. Those killed in the Saturday afternoon strike included five children, and 79 people were injured, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president's office.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Under the Taliban, the mannequins in women’s dress shops across the Afghan capital of Kabul are a haunting sight, their heads cloaked in cloth sacks or wrapped in black plastic bags. The hooded mannequins are one symbol of the Taliban’s puritanical rule over Afghanistan. But in a way, they are also a small show of resistance and creativity by Kabul’s dress merchants. Initially, the Taliban wanted the mannequins to be outright beheaded.

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — Search teams retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders Monday of a passenger plane that plummeted into a gorge on approach to a new airport in the foothills of the Himalayas, officials said, as investigators looked for the cause of Nepal's deadliest plane crash in 30 years. At least 69 of the 72 people aboard were killed, and officials believe the three missing are also dead. Rescuers combed through the debris, scattered down a nearly 1000-foot-deep gorge, for them.

ROME (AP) — Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted Mafia boss who ordered some of the nation’s most heinous killings, was arrested Monday at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run, Italian paramilitary police said. Messina Denaro was captured at the Palermo clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition, according to Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad.

DNIPRO, Ukraine (AP) — The death toll from a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro rose to 30 Sunday, the national emergencies service reported as rescue workers scrambled to reach survivors in the rubble. Emergency crews worked through the frigid night and all day at the multi-story residential building, where officials said about 1,700 people lived before Saturday's strike.

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — A plane crash has killed at least 68 people, according to Nepal's Civil Aviation Authority. A regional passenger plane with 72 aboard crashed into a gorge while landing at a newly opened airport in the resort town of Pokhara Sunday, in the country’s deadliest airplane accident in three decades.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden's center-right coalition government wants to cut red tape when it comes to dancing by abolishing a decade-old requirement for restaurants, nightclubs and other venues to obtain permits before they let patrons shimmy and sway. The proposal made Thursday means that venues no longer would need a license to organize dances. Instead, as a general rule, they would only have to register with the police, which can be done verbally and does not cost anything.

As Russian troops wage a ferocious house-to-house fight for control of strongholds in eastern Ukraine, a parallel battle is unfolding in the top echelons of military power in Moscow, with President Vladimir Putin reshuffling his top generals while rival camps try to win his favor. The fighting for the salt mining town of Soledar and the nearby city of Bakhmut has highlighted a bitter rift between the Russian Defense Ministry leadership and Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rogue millionaire whose private military force known as the Wagner Group has played an increasingly visible role in Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia said Thursday that its forces are edging closer to capturing a salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine, which would mark an elusive victory for the Kremlin but come at the cost of heavy Russian casualties and extensive destruction of the territory they claim. More than 100 Russian troops were killed in the battle for Soledar over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said in televised remarks.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine hung in the balance Wednesday as Ukraine said its forces were holding out against a furious Russian onslaught in one of the fiercest and bloodiest recent ground battles of the nearly 11-month war. Russian forces using jets, mortars and rockets bombarded Soledar in what a Ukrainian military officer said was an unrelenting assault.

TOKYO (AP) — Japan and South Korea defended their public health restrictions on travelers from China on Wednesday, a day after China stopped issuing new visas in both countries in apparent retaliation. South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin said he finds it “significantly regrettable” that China stopped issuing short-term visas to South Koreans and called for China to align its pandemic steps with “scientific and objective facts.”

LONDON (AP) — Around 25,000 U.K. ambulance workers went on strike Wednesday, walking out for the second time since December in an ongoing dispute with the government over pay. The industrial action by paramedics, drivers and call handlers was the latest in a wave of strikes in recent months that has crippled the country's rail network on some days and strained the U.K.'s overburdened public health system.

LIMA, Peru (AP) — A police officer on patrol was attacked and burned to death by protesters in the Peruvian region of Puno as the death toll from demonstrations in the wake of the ouster of former President Pedro Castillo rose to 47, authorities said Tuesday. José Luis Soncco Quispe, 29, was on patrol with a fellow officer in Juliaca, a city near the border with Bolivia and Lake Titicaca, on Monday night when they were attacked by a mob that later set fire to their vehicle, according to police reports.

POMPEII, Italy (AP) — The newly restored remains of an opulent house in Pompeii that likely belonged to two former slaves who became rich through the wine trade offer visitors an exceptional peek at details of domestic life in the doomed Roman city. On Tuesday, the House of Vettii, Domus Vettiorum in Latin, was being formally unveiled after 20 years of restoration. Given fresh life were frescoes from the latest fashion in Pompeii wall decoration before the flourishing city was buried under the volcanic ash furiously spewing from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

LONDON (AP) — British officials and space scientists said Tuesday they were disappointed but not deterred after the first attempt to launch satellites into orbit from the U.K. ended in failure. U.S.-based Virgin Orbit attempted its first international launch late Monday, using a modified jumbo jet to carry one if its rockets from Cornwall in southwestern England over the Atlantic Ocean. The plane released the rocket, carrying nine small satellites for a mix of civilian and domestic uses. But about two hours after the plane took off, the company reported “an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit.”

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese embassies suspended issuing new visas for South Koreans and Japanese on Tuesday in apparent retaliation for COVID-19 testing requirements recently imposed by those countries on travelers from China. The embassies in Tokyo and Seoul announced the suspensions in brief online notices. The Seoul notice, posted on the embassy's WeChat social media account, said the ban would continue until South Korea lifts its “discriminatory entry measures” against China. The announcement covered tourist, business and some other visas.