Middle East, Asia | featured news

A son of the leader of a major Taliban faction attacking Western forces in Afghanistan has been killed in a missile strike by a U.S. drone in Pakistan, security officials said on Friday.

New details of the capture of Mulla Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, indicate that the arrest was a “lucky accident.”

North Korea and Iran are about to become two radically different experiments in how American “engagement” works or fails to work.

India protests that its neighbor is not serious about bringing Mumbai perpetrators to justice.

A court in Lahore, Pakistan, today ordered the release of a firebrand Islamic cleric with alleged links to the deadly attacks in Mumbai, India, last year, sparking an angry rebuke from Indian officials that Pakistan is not committed to meting out justice to militants.

Pakistan and India have begun sharing intelligence on Islamic extremists, with the prodding of the U.S., in an arrangement that represents unprecedented cooperation between the two nuclear-armed South Asian nations.

Cases of swine flu were confirmed early today in Israel and New Zealand, the first definitive proof that the dangerous new virus has spread to the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions, but international health officials said there was little point in imposing border or travel restrictions or otherwise trying to contain the virus.

The trial of the only surviving suspected gunman in the bloody Mumbai siege began Friday with the prosecutor calling the attacks "a criminal conspiracy hatched in Pakistan to attack India."