HYDERABAD Pakistan ordered nearly half a million people to evacuate towns on Thursday as rising floods threaten further havoc in a country straining to cope after its worst humanitarian disaster. Torrential monsoon rains triggered massive floods affecting a fifth of the country – roughly the size of England – in volatile Pakistan, where a US [...]

JAKARTA Islamist extremists were hunting the editor of the defunct Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine on Thursday as police awaited authorisation to imprison him on indecency charges. More than four years after the short-lived and PG-rated version of the magazine hit Indonesia’s newsstands, editor Erwin Ar-nada said he was not afraid of Islamist vigilantes bent [...]

WASHINGTON US combat troops pulling out of Iraq can claim the ouster of a brutal dictator as a clear success but otherwise leave behind unresolved questions about democracy, terror and neighbouring Iran’s power. With Washington about to declare an official end to the combat mission in Iraq more than seven years after the invasion, analysts [...]

Twenty years after Lenin’s statue began to tumble across post-Communist Eastern Europe, the southern French city of Montpellier has erected a new 3.3 metre bronze of the Russian revolutionary. Flamboyant regional leader Georges Freche took delivery of five new statues for the southern city of Montpellier, celebrating his heroes Lenin, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, [...]

KABUL Afghanistan marked its independence day on Thursday as the long war in the country drags on, with foreign military deaths at record levels and the government under pressure to honour pledges on corruption and security. August 19 commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi in 1919, which granted Afghanistan full independence from Britain [...]

MOSCOW Looking out over his sunflower fields in Russia’s famed black earth country, Alexander Kniazev despaired over the damage done by the worst heat wave in living memory. Nearly four months without rain and record temperatures have scorched the soil and reduced his crops to dry husks. “It’s a catastrophe,” said Kniazev, whose 8,000 hectares [...]

SINGAPORE More Asian families are struggling under the pressure of simultaneously supporting their children and ageing parents, a study released this week says. Longer lifespans and women bearing children at a later age have increased the number of Asia’s so-called “sandwich generation,” said the study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). “Across the region, many [...]

TOKYO United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon called on Thursday for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, during a visit to Nagasaki, one of the two Japanese cities hit by US atom bombs in World War II. “The only way to ensure that such weapons will never again be used is to eliminate them all,” Ban [...]

BEIRUT Hezbollah is ready to strike the heart of Israel in the event of new aggression on Lebanon, the party’s deputy chief said on Wednesday, a day after deadly clashes between Lebanese and Israeli troops. “Israel must understand that any aggression on Lebanon, no matter how small, gives us the complete right to retaliate when [...]

WASHINGTON The massive oil slick that once spread for hundreds of miles from BP’s ruptured well deep in the Gulf of Mexico may be nearly gone, but its impact could be felt for decades to come. More than 15 weeks after the ruptured well began spewing enough oil into the sea to fill four Olympic-sized [...]

WASHINGTON THE space shuttle Atlantis blasts off on Friday on the last mission of its 25-year career, taking astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) one last time before becoming a museum piece. The 32nd and final voyage for Atlantis, which first launched in 1985, will take six astronauts to the orbiting space research facility, [...]

WASHINGTON PRESIDENT Barack Obama insisted on Wednesday that flared tensions between the US and Afghan governments were “overstated” as Afghan leader Hamid Karzai staged an effusive show of support for US war goals. The leaders met amid pomp at the White House after awkward public exchanges which strained their alliance and complicated Obama’s gamble on [...]