PAKISTAN

Britain will commit 665 million pounds ($1.08 billion) in aid to help Pakistan stabilize its violent border areas and tackle the underlying causes of extremism, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday.

In the United States, there has been an increase in cases of typhoid fever resistant to the drugs most commonly used against the illness, federal health officials reported Tuesday.

Pakistani helicopter gunships stepped up attacks on Taliban positions in the South Waziristan region on Wednesday, a day after militants confirmed that their leader was dead and announced his successor.

As the Muslim month of Ramadan begins, tens of thousands of Pakistanis forced to flee their homes by war against the Taliban will have no choice but to languish in camps or host families over the religious period.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari backed China's policies in its tense Xinjiang region ahead of his latest visit to the giant neighbor he has wooed as a strategic and economic counterweight to the West, Chinese state media said.

The CIA has reportedly hired the infamous US security firm Blackwater on the Pakistan borders to help track down Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

U.S. President Barack Obama has started reaching out to some of Pakistan's most fervent Islamist and anti-American parties, including one that helped give rise to the Taliban, trying to improve Washington's image in the nuclear-armed state.

Pakistan's security forces have arrested top Taliban spokesman Maulvi Omar in the northwest tribal district of Mohmand, military officials said Tuesday.

India's prime minister said on Monday there was credible information that Pakistan-based militant groups were planning fresh attacks on India.

Pakistan has told the United States it hopes to ease power shortages by renting electricity-generating plants over the next three to five years but wants Washington's backing in a longer-term upgrade and diversification of the country's antiquated power sector.

Ensuring justice in last November's Mumbai attack is a high priority for President Obama and the United States will keep pressing Pakistan for action against its planners, a top U.S. diplomat said on Wednesday.

Two foreign journalists embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan were wounded by a roadside bomb, the Associated Press said on Wednesday.

Shakespeare, 18 years on death row in a Pakistani jail, and a famously alcoholic writer are just a few of the serious dramas that balance the zany comedy shows at this year's 63rd Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Pakistan confirmed on Friday that Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, was killed in a missile strike and that his body was buried in South Waziristan.

As information poured in on Friday that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed two days ago by a U.S. missile strike, a whole series of questions arise over what it would mean for Pakistan, Afghanistan and U.S. policy and Western military forces in the region.

Pakistan believes Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, was probably killed with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack two days ago, the interior minister said on Friday.

A court on Thursday sentenced to death three Indians found guilty of conspiring with a Pakistan-based militant group to carry out serial blasts in Mumbai in 2003 that killed at least 54 people, officials said.

Pakistan said on Thursday that evidence given by India failed to build a case for the arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of a Pakistan-based group blamed for the Mumbai attacks, a stance certain to stoke anger in India.

Agrium Inc posted a better than expected quarterly profit on Wednesday thanks to strong sales of seed and crop protection chemicals, sending its shares higher along with those of its peers.

A missile believed to have been fired by a U.S. drone aircraft struck the house of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud's father-in-law on Wednesday, killing at least one woman, a relative said.

Pakistan's Supreme Court adjourned an appeal hearing on Monday to decide whether to re-arrest the founder of a militant group said to have been behind the attacks on Mumbai last November.