Tag Archives: Asia

Sri Lanka plans to settle a debt for past oil imports from Iran by paying it off in tea, a government minister said.

China has reacted angrily to the US government’s diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics, as more countries said they would consider joining the protest over Beijing’s human rights record and New Zealand announced it would not send representatives to the Games. Chinese officials dismissed Washington’s boycott as a “posturing and …

The army general who seized power in Myanmar in February has been excluded from an annual summit of regional leaders later this month.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, China’s two global policy banks, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, have brought a stepwise increase in public finance for energy and infrastructure that has been filling major financial gaps and fostering economic growth in emerging market and developing countries.

An official with Pakistan's Football Federation said the group, totalling 81 people, would travel from Peshawar to the eastern city of Lahore, where they would be housed at the federation's headquarters. A further 34 people will arrive on Thursday he said.

Afghan universities will be segregated by gender, and a new Islamic dress code will be introduced, the Taliban has said.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan with great ease that few expected. Now that all foreign troops have withdrawn, the group faces the more difficult task of governing the country. Will it be able to cope?

Pashtana Durrani knows that she is on the Taliban’s radar. The 23-year-old teacher has been fiercely advocating for girls’ education since the group started making advances in Afghanistan after the U.S. announced it would withdraw troops from the country by Aug. 31. But despite being told that she is not safe, Durrani is staying put.

While Taliban atrocities are widely understood, those committed by western forces and their allies have been wilfully ignored. As the author and Afghanistan expert Anand Gopal told me, the Taliban all but evaporated in 2001. But Afghan politicians in the new government exploited a US desire to eliminate “bad guys” by falsely claiming their opponents were Taliban supporters.

The Taliban is promising to protect women’s rights and press freedom in the group’s first news conference following its stunning takeover of Afghanistan as the group’s co-founder returned to the country.