Asia, Deaths | featured news

A pair of bombs exploded Thursday evening in a crowded shopping area in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, killing at least 12 people and wounding scores of others in the worst bombing in the country in more than a year, officials said.

Mr. Oshima, who challenged Japanese society with his movies, gained international notoriety with “In the Realm of the Senses.”

A Japanese official says a woman in his town near Tokyo who became world's oldest living female just last month has died at 115. Koto Okubo died Saturday at a nursing home in Kawasaki City, according to city official Mitsuhiro Kozuka. He said her relatives declined to release the cause of her death and family details.

A fire in a clothing factory apparently caused by arson killed 14 people in southern China on Tuesday, state media reported.

The strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year pounded the southern island of Mindanao on Tuesday and about 40 people were dead or missing, media said, after the storm destroyed homes and brought down power and communication lines.

At least seven people were feared dead after a highway tunnel collapsed on Sunday in eastern Japan, trapping them in their vehicles and starting a fire that filled the passage with thick, black smoke.

The garment factory in Bangladesh where a weekend fire killed at least 112 people had been making clothes for Wal-Mart without the giant U.S. retailer's knowledge, Wal-Mart said. Wal-Mart said the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory was no longer authorized to produce merchandise for Wal-Mart but that a supplier subcontracted work to it "in direct violation of our policies."

At least 14 people were killed on Monday and many more were injured in a stampede during a Hindu festival in the Indian city of Patna, police said. Among the casualties were many children and women, who had come to the banks of the River Ganges in the eastern Indian state of Bihar to enjoy Chhath, the biggest Hindu festival in the state.

At least 56 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 homes destroyed in the latest outbreak of ethnic violence in western Myanmar, a government official said Thursday....

Rescue workers cleared roads Saturday so they could search for survivors and rush aid to a remote mountainous area of southwestern China after twin earthquakes killed at least 80 people....