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Bangalore is India’s third-largest city, with a population of some nine and a half million people.

...The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party's top leaders.

After a week of acrimonious accusations between China and Vietnam, the Chinese military has admitted that one of its ships fired at a Vietnamese fishing boat, though it insisted that only flares were shot and that Vietnam’s claims of fire damage to the fishing boat were a “sheer fabrication.”

The Pentagon on Tuesday condemned North Korea's threats to target U.S. military bases, saying the United States was ready to respond to "any contingency."

Pig carcasses — about 14,000 of them — have been floating down rivers that feed into Shanghai for nearly two weeks. The city’s residents have been told not to worry, and not much else. Where the pigs came from, how they died and why they suddenly showed up in the river system that supplies drinking water to a city of 23 million has not been explained. Officials have told residents that their drinking water is safe and have censored microblog posts suggesting that the public organize peaceful protests.

This week's power outage at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear plant may have been caused by a rat Masayuki Ono, spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, says a 15-centimeter (6-inch) rat was found dead Wednesday near a switchboard. He says the rat may be linked to the power failure, but that more investigation is needed to be sure.

In their first meetings with China’s new leaders, U.S. officials this week pushed for an acknowledgment of the unusual nature of cyberattacks originating from China aimed at stealing U.S. corporate secrets to benefit the Asian giant’s state-owned enterprises.

Suntech, one of the world's biggest solar panel manufacturers, was forced in bankruptcy court Wednesday, becoming the latest casualty of a painful slump in the global solar industry.

The FBI said Tuesday it is actively investigating a Chinese man arrested Saturday with a one-way ticket out of U.S. -- a scientist potentially carrying highly confidential military secrets and rocket technology from NASA labs.

Investigators looking for a missing Hong Kong couple reportedly found their severed heads in a bloody apartment, leading to the arrest of their son. A 29-year old man appeared in a Hong Kong court Monday in connection with the deaths of his parents, whose heads were found in a refrigerator, Sky News reports.