Asia | featured news

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said late Tuesday it was halting most aid programs in Pakistan due to fears over deteriorating security – a concern underscored early Wednesday when 19 soldiers and militants were killed in a clash at a military checkpoint.

Vast oil reserves, trillion-dollar trade routes, fervent nationalist sentiments, competing territorial claims and bitter histories – the waters off the east coast of China are a sea of money and a sea of trouble.

European private-equity firm Permira said it would buy Japanese sushi chain Akindo Sushiro for around $1 billion, making a bet that the popular restaurant brand can expand beyond Japan.

A Nepali man who was bitten by a cobra bit it back and killed the reptile in a tit-for-tat attack, a newspaper said on Thursday. Nepali daily Annapurna Post said Mohamed Salmo Miya chased the snake, which bit him in his rice paddy on Tuesday, caught it and bit it until it died.

China won’t rescue the world economy this year as it has throughout the financial crisis period that started in 2008. The country’s latest economic data shows what many economists have been saying about the world’s second largest economy: be prepared to be disappointed.

To become a tunnel-hunter in South Korea, you need a pump, a generator and a bit of imagination. Lee Chang-gun and his band of investigators have all three. They spend their free time searching for North Korean infiltration tunnels here in the mountains near their country's northern frontier.

In Vietnam’s major cities, a once-booming property market has come crashing down, adding to an economic slowdown that is being compared to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

German carmaker Volkswagen AG says sales rose 11.9 percent in July as demand in Asia and the United States outweighed slacker sales in crisis-hit western Europe.

China's big cities are announcing large investment plans intended to boost slowing growth rates, but just how much of a lift they will give to the economy remains uncertain.

Myanmar abolished direct censorship of the media Monday in the most dramatic move yet toward allowing freedom of expression in the long-repressed nation. But related laws and practices that may lead to self-censorship raise doubt about how much will change.