Elite police commandos patrolled a suburb of the Sri Lankan capital Friday after hundreds of rampaging Buddhist hard-liners torched a Muslim-owned business in the latest in a series of mob attacks.

Cambodia's war crimes court ruled Friday that Pol Pot's former deputy, Nuon Chea, was fit to continue standing trial after the death of a co-defendant renewed fears that the elderly accused may not live to see verdicts.

Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition newspaper is among a host of Myanmar publications planning to print daily, the party said Tuesday, as authorities prepare to loosen their grip on the long-shackled media.

The top U.N. envoy to Myanmar on Sunday toured a central city destroyed in the country's worst explosion of Buddhist-Muslim violence this year, calling on the government to punish those responsible for a tragedy that left dozens of corpses piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition.

A manhunt was under way Sunday after 49 prisoners, including an infamous cult leader known as “Black Jesus” who is suspected of cannibalism, broke out of a jail in Papua New Guinea.

Myanmar's army took control of a ruined central city on Saturday, imposing a tense calm after several days of clashes between Buddhists and Muslims left piles of corpses in the streets and buildings ablaze in the worst sectarian bloodshed to hit the Southeast Asian nation this year.

A powerful tornado ripped through more than a dozen rural villages in eastern Bangladesh late Friday, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 100, officials said.

The death toll from a vicious explosion of sectarian bloodshed in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar rose to at least 20 on Friday, as the president declared a state of emergency, thousands of minority Muslims fled, and overwhelmed riot police crisscrossed the ruined streets of a still-burning city seizing machetes and hammers from angry mobs.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on Friday urged Myanmar's government to allow private businesses to develop the country's woeful telecommunications infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of competition and free speech.

Bangladesh President Zillur Rahman, a veteran ruling party politician named to the largely ceremonial post in 2009, died Wednesday in a Singapore hospital, an embassy official said. He was 84.