(Al Jazeera English) South Korea has offered to send humanitarian aid to North Korea, the first in nearly two years, after a series of conciliatory gestures by its destitute neighbour.

(BBC) Dozens of ethnic Uighurs have disappeared since being detained in the wake of the riots in China's Xinjiang region, a human rights group has said.

(Al Jazeera English) The death toll from two weeks of unprecedented storms across the northern Philippines has risen past 540 people after landslides consumed homes and floods towns.

(BBC) Leaders of China, South Korea and Japan have urged an early resumption of talks on North Korea's nuclear programme.

(Xinhua) The Nepali government is planning to use journalists as paid informants under the special security campaign it is preparing to launch.

(BBC) An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 has hit Sumatra, a day after another powerful quake devastated much of the Indonesian island.

(BBC) The US says it would hold direct talks with North Korea to persuade it to return to stalled multilateral talks on ending its nuclear programme.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou will not be meeting the Dalai Lama when the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader visits next week, the president's office said on Saturday, a move aimed at avoiding renewed tensions with China

(BBC) North Korea has freed four South Korean fishermen and their boat, the South Korean Coast Guard has said.

CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodians marked their annual "Day of Anger" Wednesday to remember victims of the Khmer Rouge regime by re-enacting torture and distributing new textbooks about the era — largely ignored by schools run by a government whose leaders once served the movement.

(Al Jazeera) Millions of survivors of last year's deadly cyclone in Myanmar face being trapped in a worsening cycle of debt and are in urgent need of continued international aid, a leading aid group has said.

(Washington Post) SHANGHAI -- Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the past month, snapping up tens of billions of dollars' worth of key assets in Iran, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Australia and France in a global fire sale set off by the financial crisis.

VAVUNIYA, 20 February 2009 (IRIN) - Outside the primary school in Vavuniya, northern Sri Lanka, the warning signs are everywhere. Scores of civilians caught up in the crossfire between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who have been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland since 1983, stand in the midday heat awaiting assistance.

BEIJING (AFP) — China has ordered government and security forces in Tibet to crush any signs of support for the Dalai Lama, state media said Thursday, as the tense 50th anniversary of an anti-Chinese uprising nears.

(Independent) Of the 14,000 Cambodians held in the brutal Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng, barely a dozen survive. Chum Mei is one of them, and this week he will finally see his torturers put on trial. Andrew Buncombe reports from Phnom Penh.

(RTTNews) - Thailand's Prime Minister Wednesday refused to grant U.N. experts access to 126 boat people from Myanmar, following accusations that the Thai military had left them to die on the open seas, media reports said.

KATHMANDU (IRIN) - A decade of fighting between the Maoists and government forces, and several years of drought or excessive rains and landslides have left parts of Nepal with little infrastructure and food insecure.

(euronews) China and Taiwan are closer than they have been for nearly 60 years with the opening of direct air, sea and postal links.

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Thailand's parliament chose the country's Oxford-educated opposition leader as prime minister Monday, capping six months of violent anti-government protests that included a weeklong takeover of Bangkok's two airports.

MANILA, 26 November 2008 (IRIN) - Joy Cruz (not her real name) will never forget the abuse she suffered for 10 years at the hands of her husband. "I tried to fight back once. He just banged my head against the wall and choked me until I couldn't breathe any more," she said.

KATHMANDU (IRIN) - "When can we go home?" is Furma Lama's constant refrain. The 10-year-old has spent the last eight years displaced since her family fled Ramechhap District, 100km east of the capital, in fear of former Maoists rebels.