Militants dressed in Indian army uniforms killed eight people in attacks on an Indian police station and army base near the Pakistan border on Thursday, triggering calls to cancel talks between the rival nations' leaders at the weekend.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reiterated on Tuesday his country will free former Afghan Taliban No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, but that details of his release would be determined after he returned to Pakistan later this week.

Philippine forces freed scores of civilian hostages on Tuesday as fighting subsided in a port city where hundreds of rogue Muslim guerrillas have been battling for more than a week.

South Korean workers crossed into North Korea on Monday as the joint Kaesong industrial zone restarted operations five months after being shuttered by rising military tensions and threats of war.

America's top military officer General Martin Dempsey has already seen one Middle Eastern civil war. He is much more cautious about involvement in another.

A judge will deliver his sentence on Friday against four men convicted of killing a woman they gang-raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi, a case that triggered outrage in India and widespread demands for the guilty to be hanged.

Muslim rebels took 30 civilian hostages in the southern Philippines on Monday and held security forces in a standoff as part of a drive to derail peace talks, officials said.

South Korea banned all fishery imports from a swath of Japan around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on Friday, dealing another blow to Tokyo's credibility on the eve of the capital's bid to host the Olympics.

Japan vowed quick, decisive action, including the use of public funds, to tackle the worsening problem of contaminated water pouring from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, as the authorities step in to help the facility's embattled operator.

China has asked Philippine President Benigno Aquino to postpone a visit next week for the opening of a trade fair, Manila said on Thursday, an unprecedented snub by Beijing as relations sour over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is reaching out to Seoul and Washington after months of threats to try to mend his country's broken economy in a move that appears to have vindicated, for now, the policies of his South Korean counterpart.

China sees no reason to conduct talks with Japan over their dispute about ownership of a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, Chinese deputy foreign minister Li Baodong said on Tuesday.

Chinese prosecutors demanded a heavy sentence for ousted top politician Bo Xilai as his divisive, dramatic trial ended on Monday, saying his "whimsical" challenge to charges of bribery, graft and abuse of power flew in the face of the evide

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sacked his attorney general after the chief law officer held an unsanctioned meeting with Taliban peace negotiators in the United Arab Emirates, a senior Afghan official and a legislator told Reuters on Monday.

South Korea said on Friday that at least one bid came in under budget for its 8.3 trillion Korean won ($7.42 billion) purchase of 60 next generation fighter jets, the country's biggest-ever defense import program to replace its ageing fleet.

Japan's prime minister sent an offering to a shrine for war dead on Thursday, the anniversary of Japan's World War Two defeat, while cabinet members visited it in person, drawing harsh complaints from China and South Korea, and putting at ris

Afghanistan's future security will remain dependent on international troops for many years after most foreign combat forces leave by the end of 2014, the U.S. commander of the NATO-led force in the South Asian country said.

A typhoon struck the south coast of China on Wednesday, forcing airlines to cancel flights and halting stock exchange trading in the financial center of Hong Kong after leaving a trail of destruction in the Philippines.

Taliban fighters have kidnapped a female parliamentarian who was travelling by car through Afghanistan's central Ghazni province with her children, a local police commander said on Tuesday, the latest in a string of high-profile, violent attacks

At least 28 people were killed and dozens wounded in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Sunday when a suicide bomber attacked a largely Shi'ite Muslim neighborhood, police said.

The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant said it had found another leak of contaminated water on Wednesday, piling pressure on the utility to curb the problem as it seeks permission to release water to the sea.

A new bout of fighting erupted on Monday in a border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the latest indication of a sharp deterioration in relations between the important U.S. allies.

North Korea said it would attack U.S. military bases on Japan and the Pacific island of Guam if provoked, a day after leader Kim Jong-un oversaw a mock drone strike on South Korea.

A stampede at a railway station in northern India killed at least 36 Hindu pilgrims on Sunday, the busiest day of the world's largest religious festival at which some 30 million had gathered to wash away their sins in the sacred Ganges river.

Women in India's capital are taking self-defense classes, snapping up pepper sprays, booking cabs with female drivers or leaving work early, all signs of growing insecurity following the brutal gang rape and murder of a student last month.

Reclusive North Korea made most of the key parts of the long-range rocket it launched in December, South Korea said on Monday, evidence of home-grown technology moving it a closer to designing a missile system capable of hitting the United States.

Pakistan's interior minister on Wednesday warned an anti-government Muslim cleric and thousands of protesters camped out near parliament to disperse, saying they were at risk of attack by militants.

Heavy monsoon rain triggered severe flooding in large swathes of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Thursday, bringing the city to a halt with many government offices and businesses forced to close because staff could not get to work.

Pakistani security forces fired shots in the air on Tuesday to quell supporters of a populist Muslim cleric calling for the resignation of the beleaguered government while the interior minister dismissed his demands as unconstitutional.

A U.S. drone strike killed a key Taliban commander, his deputy and eight others in northwest Pakistan, intelligence sources and tribal leaders said Thursday, deaths that could substantially alter the power balance in the Taliban heartland of Wazirist