TAIPEI: A 32-year-old Taiwanese man has died after a three-day gaming binge at an internet cafe in the island's south, the second such case this year, a report said on Saturday. The man, identified by his family name Hsieh, was found slumped motionless in his chair in the cafe in Kaohsiung city.

BEIJING: Thirty-two officials in far-western China have been punished over alleged bribe-taking, nepotism or other wrongdoing in the choosing of people for over-subscribed Muslim pilgrimages to the holy city of Makkah, a Communist Party commission and a state newspaper said. China’s Uighur Muslim

ANKARA: Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal on Saturday praised Turkey as a “source of power” for all Muslims in gratitude to Turkey’s leaders for supporting the Palestinian cause. “A democratic, stable and developed Turkey is a source of power for all Muslims,” Mashaal said in an address to the ruling Just

CAIRO: An Egyptian appeals court reduced the jail terms on Sunday for 23 young activists convicted of violating a law banning protests without a permit, judicial sources said. The arrest of the activists in June while they demonstrated against the law which tightly restricts protests was condemne

SURABAYA, INDONESIA:  The mystery of Indonesia's missing airliner was partly solved on Tuesday, when rescue teams retrieved and tallied a grim inventory of bodies and debris from the plane off the coast of southwestern Borneo. But it remained unknown what caused the plane, AirAsia Flight 8501, to

JAKARTA:  After a second day of searching without any confirmed sighting of wreckage, the Indonesian authorities on Monday sought to lower expectations about finding survivors from a missing AirAsia jet carrying 162 people. "We realize that we have to be prepared for the worst," Jusuf Kalla, Indo

JAKARTA: An astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia turned worse Sunday when an AirAsia plane carrying 162 people disappeared over stormy Indonesian waters, with no word on its fate despite several hours of searching by air and sea. AirAsia Flight 8501 vanished in airspace poss

TEHRAN: Iran’s army said Saturday it has deployed a suicide drone for the first time in massive ongoing military drills near the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Arabian Gulf. Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, the army’s chief commander of ground forces, described the unmanned aircraft

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia: Tearful memorials were being held on Friday across tsunami-hit nations for the 220,000 people who perished when giant waves decimated coastal areas of the Indian Ocean a decade ago. On December 26, 2004 a 9.3-magnitude earthquake off Indonesia's western tip generated a series

JERUSALEM: Israeli authorities gave final approval on Wednesday to the construction of 380 new settler homes in two areas of annexed east Jerusalem, a local official said. Yosef Pepe Alalu, a Jerusalem city councillor with the opposition Meretz party, said local officials were taking advantage of

GAZA CITY: Israel launched an airstrike in southern Gaza on Wednesday and killed a Hamas man. Palestinian medical sources said Tayseer Al-Ismary, 33, was killed “as a result of gunfire and shrapnel from a tank shell” in the incident east of the southern city of Khan Yunis. Hamas sources said h

(Reuters) - Five bombs exploded on Tuesday in Sanaa's old quarter, where many supporters of the Shi'ite Muslim Houthi movement live, killing a member of the group and wounding another person, a senior security official said. One of the bombs was placed near the home of Ismail al-Wazir, a professo

Beji Caid Essebsi has won Tunisia's first free presidential election, beating rival and incumbent Moncef Marzouki with 55.68 percent of the vote, official results show. Marzouki secured 44.32 percent of the vote, Tunisia's High Electoral Commission said on Monday. In a Facebook post, Marzouki co

New York: Two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were shot at point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who, officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill officers. The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the authorities s

Israeli aircraft have bombed a site in Gaza, in the first such action since the declaration of a truce in August. The air strike was carried out on a Hamas facility in response to a rocket fired earlier from Gaza, a statement from the Israeli military said. Residents of the Khan Yunis area in Ga

PESHAWAR: Pakistani security forces killed more than 50 suspected militants on Friday as operations against insurgents intensify in the wake of a Taleban school massacre that killed 149 people. The bloody rampage in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Tuesday brought international condemnation a

The European Union’s second highest court has ordered the removal of the Islamist group Hamas from a terrorist blacklist, citing procedural problems with the listing. It added, however, that the group’s assets should remain frozen for three months pending an almost certain appeal. The decision ca

Israel has been hammered by a series of diplomatic rebuffs across Europe after the European parliament voted overwhelmingly for qualified recognition of the Palestinian state. The vote on Wednesday came on the same day as a meeting of signatories to the Geneva conventions warned that Israel must