Malaysia's top clerics on Monday issued a fatwa, deeming it "haram" for Muslims to participate in demonstrations that cause disturbance in the country, days after thousands defied government orders to stage a rally.
Japan on Tuesday warned French President-elect Francois Hollande to keep the nation's fiscal discipline in place amid worries the new leader will overspend in a bid to boost the economy.
When Alex Aan picked up a copy of Karen Armstrong's Holy War from his local library in west Sumatra in 2005, he had little inkling of his own religious battle to come. But after posting "God doesn't exist" on Facebook, the soft-spoken civil servant, 30, faces up to 11 years in jail for what is considered blasphemy in Indonesia.
At least 11 shop clerks sleeping in a Philippines' department store were killed when a fire swept through the building before dawn today, local authorities said.
Floods carrying volcanic debris swept through a town in eastern Indonesia on Wednesday killing four people, including a nine-year-old child, and leaving 10 others missing, a government official said.
Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri has built a reputation as al Qaeda's bomb-making savant one potential near miss at a time: Explosive-rigged underwear aboard a Christmas flight to the US in 2009, printers fitted with high-grade explosives the next year and now possibly a metal-free device that could avoid airport detectors.
A bra with built-in ice packs, a wind chime and a sprig of mint that was unveiled in Japan on Wednesday is promising to keep women cool this summer.
Insurgents killed four people, including a man and his son, in two attacks in Diyala province in central Iraq today, police and medical officials said.
South Korean warships today scoured the Yellow Sea in search of debris from a failed North Korean rocket launch that has heightened tensions in the region and brought international condemnation on the country's new leader amid a week of lavish celebrations to mark the centenary of the nation's founder.
It was not like December 2004. Sirens wailed, warnings blared and police moved millions of people away from coastlines around the Indian Ocean as Wednesday's 8.6 magnitude earthquake off northern Indonesia sparked fears of another tsunami.
Indonesia quake: a day later
North Korea on Friday launched a long-range rocket that disintegrated soon after blastoff in what the United States and Asian nations condemned as a "provocative" act threatening regional security.
North Korea's sole major ally, China, today urged "calm" and "restraint" from all sides after Pyongyang's failed rocket launch drew strong condemnation from the United States and its allies.
The six world powers gathering here for nuclear talks beginning Friday are finding themselves divided over how best to curb Iran's ambitions while defusing the possibility of a new military confrontation in the volatile Middle East.
Syria's opposition has called for major protests on Friday, as skirmishes between troops and rebels tested a shaky ceasefire to end a 13-month crackdown on dissent that has killed thousands.
North Korea has been developing a new long-range ballistic missile in a separate programme from the one that led to a failed rocket launch this week, a South Korean TV station reported today.