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Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa dies at the age of 89.
- Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
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Daniel Noboa is re-elected president of Ecuador.
- General elections were held in Ecuador on 9 February 2025. As no presidential candidate secured an outright majority, a run-off was conducted on 13 April 2025. Incumbent President Daniel Noboa was re-elected for a full term, defeating Luisa González of the Citizen Revolution Movement in a rematch. The elections also included selecting members of the National Assembly, the 21 provincial assemblies, and Ecuador's representatives to the Andean Parliament to serve full four-year terms.
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Gaza war (ongoing)
- The Gaza war has been fought between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip and Israel since 7 October 2023. It is the 15th war of the Gaza–Israel conflict, and has sparked an ongoing Middle Eastern crisis. The first day was the deadliest in Israel's history, and the war is the deadliest for Palestinians in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
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M23 campaign (ongoing)
- The M23 campaign is an ongoing series of military offensives launched by the March 23 Movement (M23), a Rwandan-backed rebel paramilitary group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since March 2022. In November 2021, M23 first launched attacks against the Congolese military (FARDC) and MONUSCO, seizing military positions in Ndiza, Cyanzu, and Runyoni in North Kivu Province. This coincided with the deployment of Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) to the region to combat the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), Ugandan rebel group operating in the Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces.
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Russian invasion of Ukraine (ongoing)
- On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II, in a major escalation of the conflict between the two countries which began in 2014. The fighting has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. As of 2025, Russian troops occupy about 20% of Ukraine. From a population of 41 million, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II.
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Sudanese civil war (ongoing)
- A civil war between two major rival factions of the military government of Sudan began during Ramadan on 15 April 2023. The two opponent factions consist of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies (collectively the Janjaweed coalition) under the Janjaweed leader Hemedti. Minor factions have also participated in the fighting, allying with either major combatant or remaining opposed to both; these include the Darfur Joint Protection Force; the SLM (al-Nur) under Abdul Wahid al-Nur; and the SPLM-N under Abdelaziz al-Hilu. Fighting has been concentrated around the capital city of Khartoum (the largest and initial battle of the war) and the Darfur region.
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