Venezuelans once again watched as Nicolás Maduro was sworn into office on Friday, donning the executive sash and declaring himself president despite irregularities and questions around his election.

He repeated his attacks against the United States and any foreign leaders who did not recognize his return to power and vowed to squash all of those who oppose him.

“I come from the people. The power I represent belongs to the people and I owe it to the people,” Maduro told allies and supporters in his inauguration speech.

For many Venezuelans, there will have been a sense of déjà vu as Maduro assumed his third six-year term in office following the contested July 28 election.

The country’s National Electoral Council, the body responsible for supervising and certifying the vote, which is stacked with some of his closest loyalists, had declared Maduro the winner without providing detailed evidence or data to support his victory.

But the opposition disputed the claim, releasing tens of thousands of voting tallies from around the country claiming that their candidate, Edmundo González, had actually won with 67% against Maduro’s 30%.

Several nations, including the United States, have since recognized González as Venezuela’s rightful president-elect and have issued new sanctions against Maduro and some of the country’s electoral authorities.

Fellow opposition leader Maria Corina Machado accused Maduro of a coup d’état in a video posted to social media after he was sworn in for the third time. She said that with his inauguration “they decided to cross the red line” and “they stomp on our constitution.”

“Today, Maduro did not put the presidential band on his chest, he put it on his ankle like a shackle that would tighten more every day,” she added.

A contested comeback

This is not the first time a Maduro victory has been called into question. In fact, every presidential vote in which he’s been a candidate, dating back to when he first took office nearly 12 years ago, has been disputed.

Maduro first became president following the death of his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez in March 2013. The larger-than-life populist strongman – who had enshrined himself in power for nearly 15 years as the anti-establishment leader and transformed the country under his socialist-leaning Bolivarian Revolution – had hand-picked Maduro as his successor.

Despite the endorsement, Maduro struggled in the polls and only beat his then-challenger Henrique Capriles by a razor-thin margin of 1.49%. It was considered at the time as one of the closest ballots in decades and the opposition claimed irregularities and fraud in the vote.

Capriles, who had run against Chavez six months earlier and lost by 12%, called for an audit with the National Electoral Council and appealed the results with the Supreme Court. Both bodies were stacked with Chavez and Maduro supporters and the opposition’s claims were discredited.

By the time Maduro’s second presidential election was scheduled to take place, Venezuela had fallen into a deep economic and political crisis. The once oil-rich country was suffering from hyperinflation and widespread economic woes. There were massive food shortages, rampant crime and millions of people had fled the country in fear and desperation.

Many opposition leaders, including Capriles, were banned from running for political office with some arrested or forced into exile due to trumped-up accusations and charges.

Maduro was reelected to his second term in May 2018, in what the opposition and many foreign leaders called a sham election due to the low voter turnout and an opposition boycott following the bans against its candidates. Only 46% of the country’s population participated in the vote, the National Electoral Council said at the time, and Maduro was sworn into office in January 2019.

Massive protests broke out in the streets of the capital Caracas and throughout the country, questioning his legitimacy and calling for him to step down. This was not the first time the country had seen protests, but they were heavily repressed by the Maduro-supporting National Guard, police forces and militia groups and led to several deaths, injuries and arrests.

Global leaders shun Maduro return

As Maduro takes office for the third time, he finds himself more isolated than ever.

His inauguration lacked the usual pomp and pageantry that normally surrounds the event. Cuba and Nicaragua were the only two countries with their presidents in attendance. Meanwhile, the ceremony itself was markedly lowkey in comparison to previous events, held in a small room of the National Assembly rather than the building’s main hall.

Protesters also returned to the streets of Venezuela and the country’s growing diaspora staged marches in Ecuador, Spain and Mexico, among other locations.

Biden administration officials met earlier this week in Washington DC with González, who was recognized by the US as Venezuela’s rightful president-elect.

González, who has been living in exile after being accused of terrorism by the Maduro government, had vowed to return to the country to challenge the inauguration but said the “conditions for his entry” were not met. He posted a video message to his social media accounts from the Dominican Republic, in which he also accused Maduro of staging a coup.

“Maduro has violated the Constitution, and the sovereign will of Venezuelans expressed on July 28,” González said. “He carried out a coup d’état and crowned himself a dictator.”

US President-elect Donald Trump issued a harsh warning against Maduro following reports that Machado had been briefly kidnapped following a protest. The Maduro government denied any involvement.

Shortly after the inauguration, the US announced a $25 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro and his closest officials, including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. Washington also announced an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status for eligible Venezuelan nationals, which could benefit some 600,000 people living in the US.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country over the last decade, the second largest displacement in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The strongman leader may have succeeded in reclaiming Venezuela’s highest office but with so many – both at home and abroad – still questioning if he stole the election, he could find himself struggling for allies on the world stage.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said forces operating in the Kursk region of Russia have captured two North Korean soldiers, marking the first time that Ukraine has captured alive soldiers from the isolated state.

“Our soldiers have captured North Korean military personnel in the Kursk region. Two soldiers, though wounded, survived and were transported to Kyiv, where they are now communicating with the Security Service of Ukraine,” Zelensky said Saturday in a statement on X, which include several images of the injured soldiers.

According to Ukrainian and Western assessments, some 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy several hundred square kilometers after staging a cross-border incursion in August last year.

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said more than 1,000 North Korean forces had been killed or wounded in Kursk in the last week of December.

Zelensky said of the two Korean soldiers who had been captured: “This was not an easy task: Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine.”

Soldiers in bunk beds

The Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU, released video purportedly showing the soldiers.

In the video, the SBU spokesman says one of the North Koreans was captured on January 9 by Ukrainian special forces, and the other by Ukrainian paratroopers.

“They are being held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the SBU said.

The video shows the two soldiers in bunk beds in a cell. One has a wound to his jaw. Neither is heard speaking. An unidentified doctor says that the second soldier has a fractured leg.

The SBU spokesman said that “communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean,” in cooperation with South Korean intelligence service.

Saturday’s capture is the first time that Ukraine has captured North Korea soldiers alive from the battlefield.

The SBU released images of a Russian military ID card issued in the name of another person from Tuva in Russia, which it said was being carried by one of the captured soldiers. According to the SBU, the soldier said he had been issued the document in Russia last autumn. He also said that some of North Korea’s combat units had just one-week training with Russian troops. The other captive had no documents, the SBU said.

The soldier said he had been in the North Korean military and had thought he was being sent to Russia for training rather than combat, according to the SBU’s account.

It comes as Ukraine on Sunday renewed its offensive on Kursk, where its troops have been holding territory after launching a shock incursion last summer.

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday that it had conducted a precision strike on a Russian military command post near the town of Belaya.

Although Kyiv’s troops quickly advanced through Kursk in the summer – in the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II – Russia eventually managed to push the forces back. The lines had been mostly static for weeks before Ukraine’s latest push.

In his daily address on Monday, Zelensky said Kursk offensive was important in preventing Russian from redirecting its troops to Donetsk and other regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Despite both sides being drained after nearly three years of war, frontline fighting has ramped up in recent weeks. With Donald Trump set to return to the White House this month – promising to end the war in a day, without saying how – Moscow and Kyiv appear to be making an 11th-hour push to gobble up territory and strengthen their negotiating hands ahead of potential peace talks.

This story has been updated.

Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot who sustained years of horrific sexual abuse by her then-husband and other men, has described how she’s certain her father drugged her and strongly suspects she was raped too.

In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Darian, aged 46, described the mental “burden” of being the daughter of both victim and perpetrator, as she expressed her strong desire for her father to die in prison.

A horrifying, monthslong mass rape and drugging trial that shook France to its core concluded last month, with 51 guilty verdicts. Dominique Pelicot and 49 others were found guilty of the rape or sexual assault of his former wife, while one of those on trial was convicted of the attempted and aggravated rape of his own wife, rather than Gisèle, having copied Pelicot’s methods.

The trial – which has pushed the country to examine a culture struggling with pervasive misogyny and systemic sexual assault – has galvanized women to demand changes in the way it approaches gender-based violence.

Darian described receiving a fateful phone call from her mother, one evening in November 2020, in which Gisèle informed her that her father, now 72, had been drugging Gisèle for around 10 years in order to facilitate her rape by different men.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” Darian told the broadcaster.

Darian spoke of how she strongly suspects that she was also a victim of sexual abuse orchestrated by her father. Days after the phone call, Darian herself was called by police and shown images found on Dominique’s laptop of herself lying unconscious on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear – images she didn’t immediately recognize herself in.

She told the BBC she knows her father drugged her, and surmises she was raped too. “But I don’t have any evidence,” she laments.

“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported.”

In court, Dominique maintained he had not abused his daughter. Earlier that day, Darian screamed at him: “I’ll never see you again! You’ll die alone like a dog!,” according to media reports.

Now, she describes her father as “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years” and has written a book detailing her family’s trauma, titled “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.”

She described the reality she is faced with as a “terrible burden” and can now only view Dominique as the “sexual criminal he is.”

The book also explores the concept of “chemical submission” – the use of drugs to facilitate criminal action against a person, including sexual abuse. It was the method Dominique used to orchestrate his wife’s abuse, offering her unconscious body to strangers online.

In December, Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape. Forty-eight other men on trial were found guilty of aggravated rape, with two guilty of sexual assault.

Evidence shows how Dominique recruited the men to rape his then-wife on the now-defunct Coco.fr “dating site” for years, using the chatroom called “without her knowledge,” where he would exchange pictures of an unconscious Gisèle before moving to Skype and text messages to arrange the meeting with his accomplices.

Gisèle testified that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, the frequent sedation and sexual abuse began to take a physical toll. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor’s visits during which she complained about memory loss and pelvic pain, according to court documents.

It was only after Dominique was arrested in a local supermarket in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of female customers, for which he was convicted, that his web of crimes came to light. Pelicot received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for this offense.

Whilst investigating the upskirting, police officers confiscated his hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of images and videos of Gisèle being raped, opening one of the worst sex offense cases in modern French history.

Violent protests have erupted in China after the death of a teenage boy sparked accusations of a cover-up by authorities, videos from the northwestern region of Shaanxi have shown.

One of the protesters was seen hurling a fire extinguisher at a door, shattering its glass. In response, police are seen aggressively handling the demonstrators, beating some and throwing others to the ground.

The trigger for the protests was the death of a teenage student, whose surname was Dang and was in his third year at the school. Local authorities in Pucheng have claimed Dang’s death on January 2 was an accident and not criminal, but allegations have swirled on social media that there has been a cover-up.

Chinese authorities have been particularly wary of public protests in the country following the widespread “White Paper” demonstrations in late 2022 against Beijing’s hardline policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a statement last weekend circulated by state media, local authorities claimed Dang “had a verbal and physical altercation” with a first-year student surnamed Guo over “disturbing his rest” in his dormitory. That night, a school official helped resolve the argument.

At around 3 a.m., another student in Dang’s dormitory went to the restroom, where he found a wooden stool underneath the balcony window, according to the statement.

“The sliding window was open, and the metal mesh screen has been removed. Dang had already fallen from the window to the ground below,” it said.

Human Rights In China, a US-based activist group, reported “suspicious circumstances” leading to Dang’s death, including witness reports of “signs of a struggle in Dang’s dormitory” and the suggestion that he was “pushed from the roof.”

The group said Dang’s family has rejected the official explanation of his death. The family also claimed that photos from his cell phone had been deleted, Reuters reported. The family’s skepticism has been amplified widely on social media.

It is unclear whether the protests, which began Monday, continued throughout the week.

Four lynx “illegally released” into the Scottish Highlands have been captured by park rangers in a rollercoaster two-day rescue effort.

The search began on Wednesday afternoon when two lynx were spotted in the Cairngorms National Park, one of the last truly wild places remaining in the UK. The animals were captured the following day, lured with bait into humane traps.

Two additional lynx, which appeared to have been “deliberately abandoned,” were later spotted on camera traps Thursday night in the same region, according to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS).

The 48-hour rescue effort was initially declared a victory by conservation groups, but the discovery of the medium-sized cats – which once roamed free in Scotland – has sparked fears that some might be taking rewildling into their own hands.

Lynx tend to ignore humans and don’t generally pose a threat, according to wildlife experts. Some conservationists have called for the lynx to be released back into the Scottish Highlands, but reintroducing the lost species has long been a thorny issue.

David Field, chief executive of RZSS, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that there are “rogue rewilders out there” who ignore international best practice with regard to the reintroduction of species.

“They are impatient and then proceed in a way which is this rebellious rogue rewilding. That’s really sad and that’s a real, real risk,” he said.

Edward Mountain, Conservative MSP for the Highlands and Islands, said the second lynx capture “would suggest a concerted approach to illegally reintroduce lynx,” according to PA Media.

Police Scotland and rangers from the Cairngorms National Park Authority joined the mammoth rescue effort and inquiries are being made into how the animals ended up roaming free in the park.

The second pair of cats were captured at around 6:30 p.m. local time on January 10 within the Kingussie region of the park and taken to the nearby Highland Wildlife Park to be assessed by vets, RZSS said.

The cats will be moved into quarantine for 30 days at Edinburgh Zoo, RZSS added.

“It’s been a rollercoaster 48 hours, with people working throughout the day and night, in some extremely challenging conditions,” Dr Helen Senn, RZSS Head of Conservation said in a statement Friday evening.

Senn added that they don’t think there are any more lynx in the park but will continue to monitor the release site.

Highland Wildlife Park said in a statement on Facebook that they “condemn the illegal release of these lynx in the strongest possible terms.”

“It is very unlikely they would have survived in the wild,” the park added.

Flight recorders from the passenger jet that crashed in South Korea last month, killing more than 170 people, stopped working minutes before the plane belly-landed and exploded on the runway, investigators said Saturday.

Officials probing the country’s deadliest aviation accident in almost three decades had hoped information from the so-called black boxes would shed light on why Jeju Air flight 7C 2216 from Bangkok belly-landed at Muan International Airport on December 29, erupting into a fireball.

The disaster killed 179 passengers and crew members. Two people survived.

But South Korea’s transport ministry said Saturday that both the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the Boeing 737-800 had stopped working about four minutes before the crash.

In a statement, the ministry said it was unclear why the devices stopped recording, adding that it will work to determine the cause.

“CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigations, but accident investigations are conducted through investigation and analysis of various data, so we plan to do our best to accurately identify the cause of the accident,” the ministry said.

The cockpit voice recorder was first analyzed locally and later sent to the United States for cross-checking, the ministry said.

The flight data recorder, which was damaged and missing a connector, was sent to the National Transportation Safety Board in the US last week for analysis, after South Korean authorities concluded they could not extract data from the device, due to the damage.

The crash was the country’s deadliest since 1997, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed in the Guam jungle, with the loss of 228 lives.

It is not yet clear what caused it, with the investigation expected to take months.

Footage of the crash showed that neither the back nor front landing gear was visible at the time of the crash-landing.

Prior to the emergency landing, the pilot made a mayday call and used the terms “bird strike” and “go-around,” according to officials, who also said the control tower had warned the pilot of birds in the area.

Another point of contention has been the concrete embankment that the plane hit upon landing. Many airports don’t have similar structures so close to runways, according to aviation experts.

South Korean police last week also raided Jeju Air’s office in Seoul and the operator of Muan International Airport as part of their investigation, Reuters reported.