Main News of January 14

WORLD

* US President Barack Obama said Congress must increase the nation’s $16.4 trillion debt limit quickly, warning that if it does not, the consequences would be “disastrous”

* More than 4,200 convicts have been released from custody due to an amnesty declared on Independence Day last year, the Belarusian Interior Ministry said

RUSSIA

* Lawmakers rejected a petition urging them to lift Russia’s controversial ban on adoptions by American citizens, which was signed into law late last year

* Opponents of a Kremlin-approved ban on US nationals adopting Russian children expressed anger at a state TV program that suggested they were betraying their homeland

* Russia’s Justice Ministry denied registration to the country’s Pirate Party over gripes with its allegedly misleading title, the party said

* A defender of a Moscow Region forest was beaten and hospitalized in the capital – an attack that his supporters said coincided with a crackdown on their efforts to save the local woodland from getting axed

* A district court in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Region has ordered the seizure of real estate from a former official found guilty of fraud involving fighter jets for Syria, according to the court’s website

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