PAKISTAN

Hundreds of black-suited Pakistani lawyers and flag-waving opposition activists launched a cross-country protest on Thursday, as the year-old civilian coalition government scrambled for ways to avert a showdown.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told regional leaders on Wednesday that the capitalist system was close to collapse.

A United Nations investigator urged U.S. allies from Britain to Pakistan on Tuesday to fully investigate whether they helped in secret renditions that led to the illegal torture or disappearance of terror suspects.

India and Pakistan must change the way they treat each other and bury a dirty past to tackle growing militancy in the region together, Pakistan's former President Pervez Musharraf said on Saturday.

Pakistani authorities said on Friday they were making progress in the investigation of this week's attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team as suspicion settled on home-grown militants.

Royal Bank of Scotland is retrenching to its core businesses and plans to exit up to 36 countries, but unpicking a decade of deals in the eye of a financial storm will be a long slog.

Pakistani authorities have identified the people responsible for this week's attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team, a senior government official said on Thursday.

Pakistani investigators were following important leads to identify who was behind the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Wednesday.

Pakistani police hunted on Wednesday for gunmen who mounted the bold attack on Sri Lanka's cricket team in Lahore and officials scrambled to figure out who was behind it.

The attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore deepened a sense of crisis surrounding Pakistan's civilian government as it confronts political turmoil less than a year after it took office, analysts said.

Two thirds of the world's cell phone subscriptions are in developing nations, with the highest growth rate in Africa where a quarter of the population now has a mobile, a United Nations agency said on Friday.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina drew praise on Friday for bringing a swift end to a mutiny by paramilitary troops who slaughtered scores of their officers, with bodies found in a mass grave pushing the death toll past 70.

Thousands of supporters of former Pakistan premier Nawaz Sharif protested on Thursday, a day after a court ruling to exclude him and his brother from elected office raised fears of renewed political turmoil.

Pakistan plunged toward a debilitating power struggle on Wednesday as the Supreme Court brought down a provincial government controlled by President Asif Ali Zardari's main rival, former premier Nawaz Sharif.

Indian police Wednesday charged a man they say is the lone surviving gunman in last year's Mumbai attacks with waging war against India, drawing up the first formal charges in the case, a government lawyer said.

Pakistani Taliban militants announced on Tuesday an indefinite ceasefire in the Swat valley in the northwest of the country, a day after the army said it was ceasing operations in the region.

The Pakistan army said on Monday it had ceased operations against Taliban militants in the northwestern valley of Swat, and an Islamist cleric asked for troops to be shifted to safer places to give peace a chance.

A British resident held at Guantanamo Bay for more than four years returned to Britain a free man on Monday and accused the U.S. government of inflicting medieval torture on him -- with British collusion.

Kyrgyzstan's parliament voted on Thursday to close the last remaining U.S. air base in Central Asia, dealing a blow to U.S. efforts to use the region as a jumping-off point for its growing campaign in Afghanistan.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan agreed on Monday to restore strict Islamist law in the Swat valley to pacify a revolt by Taliban militants, and a suspected U.S. drone fired missiles in the region killing at least 26 people.

GENEVA - Mobile telephones are seen as a basic necessity around the world and should enjoy persistent strong demand throughout an economic downturn, a United Nations agency said in a report published on Monday. With or without a recession, millions of people in India, China, Nigeria, and other emerging markets will seek out mobile phones, according to the International Telecommunication ...