Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in Sri Lanka yesterday seeking to advance Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative as the island nation tries to rescue itself from a foreign currency and debt crisis, partly due to infrastructure built with Chinese loans that don’t generate revenue. 

Colombian Victor Escobar became the first person in the Andean country with a non-terminal illness to die by legally regulated euthanasia late on Friday, his lawyer Luis Giraldo confirmed.

Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, 96, successfully underwent an "elective medical procedure" and is expected to be discharged in a few days, the National Heart Institute said on Sunday.

The Taliban’s religious police have put up posters around the capital Kabul ordering Afghan women to cover up, an official said Friday, the latest in a string of creeping restrictions. 

At least 21 people died in an enormous traffic jam caused by tens of thousands of visitors thronging a Pakistani hill town to see unusually heavy snowfall, authorities said yesterday. 

Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was admitted to hospital yesterday, the medical facility said, weeks after he was discharged following a check-up. 

Kazakhstan’s president yesterday rejected calls for talks with protesters after days of unprecedented unrest, vowing to destroy “armed bandits” and authorising his forces to shoot to kill without warning. 

In the governor’s compound of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, a new historical exhibit is unveiled before a rapt audience of Taliban fighters -- sections of blast walls from a former US military base.

Lawmakers in Hong Kong’s new “patriots only” legislature swore oaths of allegiance yesterday as it sat for the first time following a new selection process that barred the city’s traditional democracy opposition.

Married off at seven to a man old enough to be her great-grandfather, Fatema endured rapes, beatings and starvation until she could take no more and tried to kill herself. Through tears she recalls the beatings she received -- like the time, aged 10, she was flung against a wall and “my head crashed against a nail... I almost died”.

More than 100 Rohingya refugees who had been adrift on a sinking boat off the western coast of Indonesia were allowed to disembark early today after authorities relented following international pressure to allow the group to seek refuge.

An Indonesian navy ship on Thursday was towing a boat carrying 120 Rohingya Muslims into port after it had drifted for days off the country’s northernmost province of Aceh, a navy official said.

Indonesia yesterday said it will let dozens of Rohingya refugees come ashore after protests from locals and the international community over its plan to push them into Malaysian waters. 

A leading Myanmar actor, singer and model who was on a junta celebrity wanted list for supporting pro-democracy protests has been jailed for three years, his legal team said Monday.

A Myanmar junta court on Monday again postponed giving its verdict in Aung San Suu Kyi's trial for illegally importing and possessing walkie-talkies, a source with knowledge of the case said.

More than 30 people, including women and children, were killed and their bodies burnt in Myanmar's conflict-torn Kayah state on Friday, according to a local resident, media reports and a local human rights group.

Myanmar’s military carried out more airstrikes on a rebel-controlled area near the Thai border, the rebel group said yesterday, in the latest escalation of violence that has sent hundreds fleeing into Thailand.

Dozens of jade miners who remain missing yesterday following a landslide in Myanmar’s Kachin State have “very little chance of survival”, according to a fire department official.

Dozens of people are feared missing after a landslide early today at a jade mine in northern Myanmar, according to a civil society group and media reports.

Myanmar military carried out a series of mass killings of civilians in July this year, resulting in deaths of at least 40 men, according to a BBC investigation.