DR Congo sexual violence, Ukraine deaths: World news in brief

UN experts condemn M23 ‘reign of terror’ in eastern DRC

Independent UN human rights experts on Tuesday condemned the M23 armed group for what they described as a systematic campaign of sexual torture and violence against civilians in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Rwanda-backed militia, which controls significant swaths of territory in the country’s volatile east, has been accused of using rape and sexual mutilation as deliberate weapons of war.

The experts, speaking through a formal UN statement, called for an immediate end to the abuses. “What we are witnessing in eastern DRC isn’t sporadic violence — it’s a structured reign of terror targeting the most vulnerable,” said one UN human rights official familiar with the situation on the ground. Reports from the region describe attacks on women and girls in displacement camps, with some victims as young as eight years old.

Rwanda has consistently denied directing M23 operations, but UN investigators and Western governments have repeatedly challenged that position. The DRC conflict has displaced more than 7 million people, one of the largest displacement crises anywhere in the world.

Deaths reported in Ukraine and Russia as war grinds on

Overnight strikes killed at least six civilians in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials confirmed, as Russian forces continued artillery bombardments along a 1,000-kilometer front line. Emergency crews worked through the morning to pull survivors from the rubble of a residential building hit in the town of Orikhiv.

Inside Russia, authorities in the Belgorod border region reported three deaths following what they described as Ukrainian drone strikes on a residential area. Moscow blamed Kyiv directly. Ukraine didn’t immediately comment.

The exchange of cross-border fire has become routine, but the civilian toll keeps climbing. More than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to UN monitoring figures — and that number is almost certainly an undercount.

Southeast Asia crime wave draws international concern

Authorities across Southeast Asia are struggling to contain a surge in transnational crime linked to sprawling scam compounds operating primarily in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. Tens of thousands of people — many trafficked from China, Taiwan, India and parts of Africa — are believed to be held against their will, forced to run online fraud operations targeting victims globally.

Interpol estimates the compounds generate billions of dollars annually. Last week alone, Philippine police rescued 47 foreign nationals from a suspected scam hub outside Manila. Malaysian authorities made three separate arrests connected to the same network.

Still, regional cooperation remains patchy at best. Border enforcement is inconsistent, and in some cases local officials have been implicated in protecting the operations.

With international pressure building and a new ASEAN task force set to meet next month, governments in the region face growing demands to move faster — and prove that the political will to act is actually there.