Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday decried Buddhist monks' attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, saying killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable.”

Schools and businesses were closed on Wednesday as a nationwide strike called by Bangladesh's opposition over the killings of Islamists in a police crackdown brought large parts of the country to a halt.

Bangladeshi opposition parties have called a two-day nationwide shutdown from Wednesday to protest what they describe as the “mass killing” of Islamists in a crackdown by security forces.

Bangladeshi police broke up a protest by tens of thousands of religious hard-liners and shut down an Islamist television station Monday after 28 people were killed in running battles on the streets of Dhaka.

Myanmar has delayed by five years its deadline to eliminate drug production within its borders, a senior official said Monday, as the impoverished nation struggles to stem a growing narcotics crisis.

The death toll from Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster surpassed 620 Sunday after dozens more bodies were pulled from the wreckage of a nine-storey building that housed garment factories.

Tens of thousands of hard-line Islamists demanding a new blasphemy law blocked major highways Sunday to cut off the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka from the rest of the country, police said. Chanting “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is greatest!”) and “One point, One demand: Atheists must be hanged,” activists of Hefajat-e-Islam marched down at least six highways, halting traffic between Dhaka and other cities and towns.

Bangladesh on Saturday urged the European Union not to take tough measures against its economically crucial textile industry in response to the collapse of a garment factory that killed 550 people.

The heat in the rubble was sweltering. It closed in on his body like the darkness around him, making it hard to breathe. Working by the faint glow of a flashlight, he slithered through the broken concrete and spotted a beautiful young woman, her crushed arm pinned beneath a pillar. She was dying, and the only way to get her out was to amputate.

Two Buddhists have been arrested after Muslim shops were destroyed in northern Kachin State, police said Saturday, in a new outbreak of religious violence.