Asia News

KOLKATA (AFP) - Controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, in hiding in India since protests against her by a hardline Islamic group last month, is lonely and struggling to write, her publisher said.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan said on Saturday it regretted U.S. comments criticizing the island's planned referendum on U.N. membership and hinted that Washington should not to give in to pressure from China on the matter.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Making the first-ever trip to Afghanistan by a French president, Nicolas Sarkozy met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday to discuss political and military progress in the war-torn country.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - Pakistan security agencies on Saturday were hunting for clues in the suicide bombing at a mosque that killed 54 people but missed the target, a close ally of President Pervez Musharraf.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Police examined clothing, shoes and the severed legs of a man Saturday to try to identify a suicide bomber who killed at least 50 people during a holiday prayer service at a crowded mosque in northwestern Pakistan.

NEW DELHI (AFP) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to visit India on January 24 with Paris hoping to sign a nuclear energy accord with New Delhi, France's foreign minister said.

BANGALORE, India (AFP) - The family of an Indian doctor arrested in Australia on terrorism charges and later freed expects the government there to compensate for "turning his life upside down," a relative said.

LUCKNOW, India - Police on Saturday arrested two men suspected of being Islamic militants involved in a series of explosions that ripped through courthouse complexes in three north Indian cities last month, killing at least 16 lawyers.

BEIJING - The owner and four employees of a Chinese coal mine where an explosion killed 171 miners were sentenced Saturday to prison terms ranging from 3 1/2 to six years, state media reported.

HONOLULU - In a long and speckled career overseas, I have witnessed many unusual Christmases. None were more peculiar than the two spent in the exile capital of the godless fathers of Chinese communism, whose heirs are sponsors next August of the originally pagan Olympic games.

HANOI, Vietnam - Limited human-to-human bird flu transmission may have occurred in Pakistan, but no new infections have been reported for two weeks and there appears to be no threat of further spread, a top World Health Organization official said.

TOKYO - Humpback whales are safe — at least for now.

BANGKOK, Thailand - Thailand's former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a military coup, will return from exile early next year, political allies said.

BEIJING - After 800 years at the bottom of the sea, a merchant ship loaded with porcelain and other rare antiques was raised to the surface Friday in a specially built basket, a state news agency reported.

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan's foreign minister on Saturday urged the United States to not "overreact" to the island's planned referendum on U.N. membership after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice objected to the move.

As of Friday, Dec. 21, 2007, at least 405 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Dec. 15, 2007, at 10 a.m. EST.

KATMANDU, Nepal - Nepal's top court ruled Friday that the government must create new laws to protect gay rights and change current ones that might be tantamount to discrimination, an official said.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A top Pentagon official said Friday that he's hopeful the U.N. will name a veteran British diplomat as a top envoy in Afghanistan to coordinate international development efforts here.

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea may not be able to permanently shut down its nuclear facilities by the end of the year as initially promised, but it appears committed to the process and to declaring all its nuclear programs, the main U.S. envoy to South Korea said Friday.

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan - Tens of thousands of people on Friday marked the first anniversary of the death of longtime President Saparmurat Niyazov, laying flowers at monuments to the autocratic leader and streaming to his mausoleum.

KATMANDU, Nepal - The living goddess likes bubble gum.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - Parliament held its first session Friday as police arrested several people protesting an election that strengthened Kyrgyzstan's president but opened the door for further turmoil.

TOKYO - Warren Nobuaki Iwatake's family has seen more than its share of calamity.

MOSCOW - Uzbek secret service agents have seized a prominent poet and dissident who had protested authoritarian leader Islam Karimov's participation in this weekend's presidential vote, one of the writer's sons said Friday.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesia's latest campaign to lure tourists got off to a rocky start after embarrassed officials acknowledged that a key slogan was ungrammatical and ordered it corrected.

BEIJING - About 1,000 riot police fired tear gas at protesters in southern China who were blocking an electricity pylon near a power station they felt was built on unfairly seized land, a radio station reported Friday.

NEW DELHI - Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, who fled death threats in her home country, complained Friday that the Indian government was not allowing her to meet friends or travel outside the Indian capital.

BEIJING - The former chairman of one of Shanghai's biggest industrial groups has been given a suspended death sentence for corruption, state media said Friday, in a corruption case that has ensnared the city's top communist boss.

SHANGHAI, China - China's first fully homegrown commercial aircraft, the ARJ-21, rolled off the production line Friday, marking a major step in the country's aviation program.