Myanmar on Thursday reached a preliminary cease-fire agreement with ethnic minority Kachin rebels, an official negotiator said, after two years of fighting that has sparked international concern.

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Islamic leaders expressed dismay over decisions by authorities in western Myanmar to restore a two-child limit on a Muslim minority group, a policy that does not apply to Buddhists and follows accusations of “ethnic cleansing.”

International garment buyers, particularly those in the United States, have a crucial role to play in ensuring the safety of Bangladesh's garment workers, a senior government official said on Monday.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday called for a new law banning statements denying that genocide was committed under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.

After a landmark visit by Myanmar's leader, the United States is looking to a new phase of greater cooperation to encourage reform with the former pariah state as it runs out of major symbolic steps.

Japan's premier on Saturday backed the development of a major industrial zone near Yangon on a visit to Myanmar aimed at deepening economic ties with the former junta-ruled nation.

Authorities in Myanmar's western Rakhine state have introduced a two-child limit for Muslim Rohingya families in an effort to ease tensions with the Rohingya's Buddhist neighbors after a spate of deadly sectarian violence, an official said Saturday.

A bill to tax gambling machines in Guam to pay for hospital operations is flaring up a fight between the attorney general's office, the tax department, machine owners and lawmakers on all sides of the issue.

Taliban militants launched a coordinated attack on a U.N. compound in the centre of the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Friday setting off explosions and battling the security forces.

The defects and errors that led to the world's deadliest garment-industry accident extend from the swampy ground the doomed Rana Plaza was built on, to “extremely poor quality” construction materials, to the massive, vibrating equipment operating when the eight-story building collapsed, a committee appointed by Bangladesh's government concluded.