The Arakan Army (AA) says it seized Ponnagyun Township police station near Rakhine State’s capital Sittwe on Thursday.

Ponnagyun is on the Yangon-Sittwe road about 30km north of the state capital, where the regime has tightened security.

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Avdiivka was on the front lines of war between Kyiv and Moscow for almost a decade. Fierce fighting raged there for months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.

The withdrawal was far less drawn out. When the Ukrainian military abandoned the town on Saturday, handing Russia its most important victory in months, it was rapid and ruthless.

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Two Israeli-Argentinian men taken captive by Hamas on October 7 were rescued on Monday in an early morning raid in which the Israeli military carried out airstrikes that local officials said killed around 100 people in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

The hostages, 60-year-old Fernando Simon Marman and 70-year-old Louis Har, had spent 128 days in captivity. Both men are in relatively good condition and have since reunited with their families.

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Large numbers of Russian troops are attacking Avdiivka in east Ukraine from all directions, and the situation is increasingly difficult for Ukrainian troops defending the town, its mayor said on Thursday.

Russian forces have taken the initiative on the eastern front in the industrial Donbas region of Ukraine and have been trying to cut supply lines and encircle Ukrainian forces dug in at Avdiivka since October.

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Two bomb blasts at the election offices of a political party and an independent candidate in south-west Pakistan have killed at least 30 people and wounded dozens more, a day before parliamentary elections are to be held.

The first blast rocked the election campaign office of an independent candidate in Pishin in the troubled region of Balochistan, killing 18 people and injuring at least 30 people, local authorities said.

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