An al Qaeda splinter group seized control of the Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, putting security forces to flight in a spectacular show of strength against the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government.

A political storm over the trade of five Taliban inmates for a captured American soldier intensified on Monday when Obama administration officials told U.S. lawmakers that up to 90 people within the administration - but no members of Congress - were

Pro-Russian separatists attacked Ukrainian military checkpoints and other strategic points in eastern Ukraine overnight but they were beaten off with only minor casualties on the Ukrainian side, a government forces spokesman said on Tuesday.

A security academy at Karachi's airport came under attack on Tuesday, less than 48 hours after an all-night siege by Taliban gunmen at Pakistan's busiest airport that killed more than 30 people.

The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines MASM.KL jetliner suffered a further setback on Thursday after Australian officials said wreckage from the aircraft was not on the seabed in the area they had identified.

Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told a U.S. television interviewer on Wednesday he was not under the control of Russia's government and had given Moscow no intelligence documents after nearly a year of asylum there.

Thailand's military rulers will settle down to work at their Bangkok headquarters on Tuesday, firmly in charge after royal endorsement but facing small protests that the security forces have so far handled with restraint.

The New Zealand political party founded by alleged copyright pirate Kim Dotcom has formed an alliance with another small party in a bid to win a seat in the country's general election in September.

Ukraine launched air strikes and a paratrooper assault against pro-Russian rebels who seized an airport on Monday, as its newly elected leader rejected any talks with "terrorists" and said a robust military campaign in the east should be ab

Thailand's army chief summoned leaders of rival political groups and parties, Election Commission members and senators to a meeting on Wednesday, a day after he declared martial law, to discuss a way out of the country's political turmoil.

Russian troops that took part in military exercises in three provinces bordering Ukraine have packed up and are preparing to return to their permanent bases, the state-run news agency RIA cited the Defense Ministry as saying.

Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared to warn some Asian nations on Wednesday about strengthening military alliances to counter China, saying this would not benefit regional security.

A drone strike killed at least two people in the northern Yemeni province of Maarib early on Monday, a military official and an official from the region told Reuters.

Six months of political turmoil has created Thailand's biggest ever crisis, the leader of the country's Senate said on Monday, amid calls from anti-government protesters for a new interim prime minister after Yingluck Shinawatra was ousted la

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said on Sunday international military and intelligence assistance made him optimistic about finding 200 schoolgirls abducted last month by Islamic militants in an attack condemned globally.

Iraqis headed to the polls on Wednesday in their first national election since U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011, with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki seeking a third term amid rising violence.

To both critics and supporters, it was "classic" John Kerry. A day before the formal end of Kerry's quixotic, nine-month effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, the Secretary of State was surreptitiously taped making a

Hundreds of pro-Moscow separatists stormed government buildings in one of Ukraine's provincial capitals on Tuesday and fired on police holed up in a regional headquarters, a major escalation of their revolt despite new Western sanctions on Russia

Ukraine's acting president, Oleksander Turchinov, called on Tuesday for government forces to relaunch an offensive against pro-Russian rebels after a local politician from his own party was found dead with signs of torture.

South Korean divers swam though dark, cold waters into a sunken ferry on Wednesday, feeling for children's bodies with their hands in a maze of cabins, corridors and upturned decks as they searched for hundreds of missing.

U.S. President Barack Obama has said Washington welcomes China's rise but that engagement with Beijing would not come at the expense of its Asian allies - as Chinese state media greeted his imminent arrival in the region with a broadside accusing

An international agreement to avert wider conflict in Ukraine was faltering on Monday, with pro-Moscow separatist gunmen showing no sign of surrendering government buildings they have seized.

The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan may drop well below 10,000 - the minimum demanded by the U.S. military to train Afghan forces - as the longest war in American history winds down, Obama administration officials briefed on the matter say.

A Thai court accepted a new case on Wednesday against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, compounding her many legal problems as she resists pressure to step down over five months of sometimes violent street protest.

Three years after the Fukushima disaster prompted the closure of all Japan's nuclear reactors, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is moving to revive nuclear power as a core part of the energy mix, but many of those idled reactors will never come back onl

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev flaunted Russia's grip on Crimea by flying to the region and holding a government meeting there on Monday, angering Ukraine and defying Western demands to hand the peninsula back to Kiev.

NATO will decide new steps on Tuesday to reinforce eastern European countries worried by Russia's annexation of Crimea, and on how to bolster Ukraine's armed forces.

The last words from the cockpit of the missing Malaysian airliner were a standard "Good night Malaysian three seven zero", Malaysian authorities said, changing their account of the critical last communication from a more casual "All ri

Pakistan's former president, Pervez Musharraf, on Monday pleaded not guilty to five counts of treason, in the latest chapter of a long-running drama between the country's increasingly assertive judiciary and its former military ruler.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks on Sunday about ways to defuse the crisis over Ukraine, with Kerry telling Moscow that progress depended on a Russian troop pullback from Ukraine's borders.