Recent deaths, attacks by militias cast doubts as Baghdad prepares to stand alone BAGHDAD (AP) ― Frequent bombings, assassinations and a resurgence in violence by Shiite militias have made Iraq more dangerous now than it was just a year ago, a U.S. government watchdog concludes in a report released Saturday. The findings come during what U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction St...

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) -- Flight 523 from New York had just touched down and passengers were applauding the pilot's landing in the South American country Saturday when something suddenly went wrong. The Boeing 737-800 slid off the end of a rainy runway, crashed through a chain-link fence and broke in half just short of a deep ravine. Yet all 163 people on board survived. Officials were startin...

BEIJING (AFP) - Knife-wielding attackers in China's ethnically-tense Xinjiang stabbed to death seven people and injured 28 others in a rampage, authorities said Sunday, in the region's latest bout of unrest. One of the attackers was later killed in the violence that erupted Saturday night in Kashgar city -- the second attack this month in Xinjiang, where the mainly Muslim Uighur minority has lon...

LIMA (AP) ― Ollanta Humala, the leftist military man who won Peru’s presidency after abandoning a radical platform, promised in his inaugural address Thursday to make his priority the one in three Peruvians still mired in poverty. The 49-year-old former army lieutenant colonel charted a plan for spreading the wealth from Peru’s mineral boom beyond Lima, where it has been concentrated among a sma...

Bong Joon-ho, the director and screenwriter of hit films, “The Host” and “Memories of Murder,” will direct a short film on the tragic March earthquake in Japan, according to reports. The South Korean director is one of 60 film directors expected to join in an omnibus movie project aimed at paying respects to quake victims. Among the 60 directors, 40 are Japanese and the rest are foreign, reports...

U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens said Thursday that she was recently reunited with one of the students she taught in the 1970s as a Peace Corps volunteer, describing the meeting as another reminder of her “unbreakable” ties with South Korea. The meeting between Stephens and the student, Lee Chul-won, who becomes a colonel in the South Korean Army, took place after Lee’s wife spotted a 1976 phot...

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) ― An assassin struck at the heart of President Hamid Karzai’s political machine in southern Afghanistan Wednesday, killing the mayor of Kandahar with an exploding turban and deepening a power vacuum in the Taliban’s main stronghold. The slaying of Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi was the third killing of a Karzai associate in a little more than two weeks. The attacks have j...