Proposed law to protect Afghan women faces backlash

A proposed law to protect Afghan women and girls from abuses such as child marriage, bride barter and spousal abuse has created a furor in the past week, exposing a generational and religious struggle that persists in this traditional Muslim society despite a decade of Western-backed democracy and a constitution that enshrines women’s rights. Read full article >>

North Korea sends signals it may be willing to rejoin disarmament talks

BEIJING — After months of strained relations and provocations, North Korea sent signals this week that it wants to reengage with its longtime ally China and possibly resume international negotiations on ending its nuclear weapons program. Read full article >>

Blast kills 12 at Afghan mosque

KABUL — A blast during Friday night prayers in a mosque in central Afghanistan killed 12 people, eight of them Taliban insurgents, officials said Saturday.The insurgents placed explosives in a corner of the mosque, in Ghazni province’s Andar district, before joining worshipers, according to Qasim Deswal, a local official. They had been passing the village carrying the explosives they routinel

With ‘Abenomics,’ Japan catches a sense of revival

TOKYO — After two decades of chronic recession, Japan again feels like a boomtown. Its biggest companies are raking in money. It has the world’s best-performing stock market. The latest forecasts suggest Japan, in the next year, could grow more quickly than any wealthy nation but China. Read full article >>

Blasts, gun battle erupt in key Kabul district

KABUL — Bomb blasts and gunfire erupted in the center of the Afghan capital Friday afternoon, shattering the quiet after weekly prayer services as an intense battle raged into the night between Afghan security forces and Taliban insurgents. Read full article >>

Indian cricket tournament threatened by latest scandal

MUMBAI — Cricketers in custody, team executives under scrutiny and frenzied media coverage for all the wrong reasons: This is not the gripping end-of-season climax the Indian Premier League wanted. As cricket’s wealthiest tournament gears up for its annual final on Sunday, claims of alleged match-fixing by players and criminal betting syndicates threaten to undermine not just the closing jamb

Kim Jong Un’s special envoy visits China

TOKYO — A key North Korean military official arrived in Beijing on Wednesday as a “special envoy” of leader Kim Jong Un, state-run media reported. The trip comes amid new signs of strain between the traditional allies. Read full article >>

Infrastructure failings clip the wings of Indonesian airport

KUALA NAMU, Indonesia — The state-of-the-art $527-million Kuala Namu International Airport rises elegantly out of degraded plantation and swamp land 18 miles from the rapidly expanding city of Medan, the biggest on the resource-rich island of Sumatra. Read full article >>

Afghan peace lost in transition worries

KABUL — Amid the scattered but steadily mounting carnage of the Taliban’s annual spring offensive, including a suicide bombing Monday that killed a provincial council head, hopes of stirring life into peace talks with the Islamist insurgents seem to be dying here with each new suicide attack, kidnapping and roadside bombing. Read full article >>

Activists bristle as India cracks down on foreign funding of NGOs

Amid an intensifying crackdown on nongovernmental groups that receive foreign funding, Indian activists are accusing the government of stifling their right to dissent in the world’s largest democracy.India has tightened the rules on nongovernmental organizations over the past two years, following protests that delayed several important industrial projects. About a dozen NGOs that the governme

Without U.S. helicopters, Afghans struggle to save wounded

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — As soon as the Taliban bullet struck 24-year-old Afghan Sgt. Nazir Moradi’s leg, the men in his unit began brainstorming a way to get him off the battlefield. The roads were too dangerous for an army ambulance. The Afghan soldiers, in several calls to their commanders, repeated one plea: They needed a helicopter. Read full article >>

Pakistan army chief meets incoming prime minister in ‘good omen’

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who heads Pakistan’s powerful army and holds significant sway over civilian affairs, visited the incoming prime minister Saturday in what the military described as a show of support for stronger democracy and greater stability as the nation struggles with an economic meltdown and continued insurgent attacks. Read full article >>

In South Korea, high-profile defector is accused of spying for the North — by his sister

SEOUL — Earlier this year, one of the most prominent North Korean defectors, Yoo Woo-sung, walked out of his apartment building here and found four South Korean government vehicles waiting for him.Authorities hauled Yoo away and arrested him on charges of espionage. They had learned of his alleged crime, court documents show, thanks to testimony from his sister, who said Yoo had been sent on

N. Korea fires 3 short-range guided missiles into its eastern waters, South reports

TOKYO — North Korea on Saturday launched three short-range guided missiles off its eastern coast, South Korea’s National Defense Ministry said, a test of the tentative calm that has emerged on the peninsula after a period of heightened tensions last month. Read full article >>

Nothing entertaining in anti-Japan films, Chinese censor says

BEIJING — China’s film censors are offering hope for improved relations with Japan — or at least, that appears to be the case at first glance. As a bitter standoff over a disputed group of islands in the East China Sea fuels long-running animosity between the two neighbors, Beijing’s television regulator is cracking down on TV dramas that feature scenes such as a Chinese kung fu hero ripping

White House visit by Burma’s Thein Sein a sign of changing times

RANGOON, BURMA — T-shirts bearing images of President Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader, hang side by side in the shops just off the busy Kabar Aye Pagoda Road in Rangoon. It’s a reminder of the history made last November when Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in Burma. Read full article >>

Taliban rival claims Kabul blast that leaves at least 15 dead, including two U.S. troops

KABUL — An Islamist militant group once allied with the United States and considered more moderate than the Taliban appeared to be behind a rush-hour suicide bombing in the Afghan capital Thursday morning that killed at least 15 people — two American troops, four civilian NATO contractors and nine Afghan civilians, including children walking to school. Read full article >>

Bomb in Kabul kills 4 NATO forces, 6 Afghans

KABUL — At least four NATO service members and six Afghan civilians, including school children, were killed when a suicide car bomber rammed a two-vehicle NATO convoy in the Afghan capital during Thursday morning rush hour, government officials said. Read full article >>

Afghans voice wariness of Pakistan’s Sharif

KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai, calling to congratulate Pakistan’s prime minister-elect this week on his victory in parliamentary elections, said he hoped the new government in Islamabad would create a “brotherly and peaceful atmosphere with Afghanistan” and cooperate in efforts to destroy terrorist hideouts so both “brother nations” can be saved. Read full article >>

Cat war breaks out in New Zealand

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Call it the Kiwi cat war.In this island nation said to harbor more cat owners per capita than any other country, a furor has broken out over a crusade to eradicate man’s second-best friend. The charge is being led by Gareth Morgan, a nationally renowned economist-turned-environmental-activist, who has dubbed cats “natural born killers” that are menacing the native bi

China’s prostitutes routinely extorted, abused by police, report says

BEIJING — Police raids on brothels in China have a pattern, sex workers say, often occurring a few days ahead of politically sensitive events or whenever someone in government orders an anti-pornography campaign to please the leadership. Read full article >>

Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif locks down victory

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —Nawaz Sharif, who twice served as Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s, has decisively garnered enough seats in Parliament to give him an unprecedented third term in the post, analysts said Sunday, as election results continued to pile up in favor of the industrialist’s center-right party. Read full article >>

Pakistan’s Sharif claims victory after polls close in historic national election

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Nawaz Sharif, a wealthy businessman who twice served as Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s and brought the country into the world’s nuclear club, appeared Saturday night to be headed to an unprecedented third term in the post. Read full article >>

In Pakistan’s northwest, young women buck tradition to monitor historic vote

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — They call themselves “Aware Girls,” and they consider themselves foot soldiers who will help safeguard a historic vote that could change Pakistan. Based in this militancy-hit provincial capital in the northwest, the group is carrying out a risky mission as the first citizen election observer team consisting of young women. They deploy Saturday for an election that will ma

China wrestles with stubborn air polluters

Early on in Beijing’s winter of pollution-wracked discontent, one of China’s biggest power companies, Huadian, turned off the coal scrubbers at its Datong plants and let emissions of sulfur dioxide, a leading cause of acid rain and respiratory illness, soar to more than four times government standards. Read full article >>

Frustrated Chinese complain to Obama

The Chinese people would like President Obama to stop an oil refinery from being built in southern China, endorse sweet-flavored tofu and reopen an 18-year-old criminal probe of a poisoning case. And while he’s at it, if he wouldn’t mind mobilizing U.S. troops to liberate Hong Kong, as well as China as a whole, that’d be great, too. Read full article >>

Gunmen kidnap Pakistani candidate, son of former prime minister Gilani

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen kidnapped the son of a former Pakistani prime minister Thursday at a campaign rally in southern Punjab province as violence continued to rise ahead of Saturday’s national election , which some call the bloodiest in the country’s history. Read full article >>

Has Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif changed his stripes?

What kind of prime minister was Nawaz Sharif, who twice held Pakistan’s premiership in the 1990s, defied Washington, tested a nuclear bomb and is touted as likely to win a third term in Saturday’s national election? Read full article >>

Pakistan election violence targets both secular, Islamist politicians

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Bomb blasts tore through two campaign events in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 18 people, authorities said, as attacks ahead of Saturday’s national electioncontinued against liberal politicians as well as a pro-Taliban Islamist party. Read full article >>

Afghan, Pakistani forces again clash on disputed border; NATO troops broker truce

KABUL — Afghan and Pakistani forces exchanged fire along a disputed border Monday, the second clash of its kind in less than a week.Both sides used artillery and mortar rounds in the two-hour skirmish in the Goshta area of eastern Afghanistan’s Nangahar province. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force brokered a cease-fire, a senior Afghan general said. Read full article >>