KOLKATA, India (AP) -- A fire swept through a hospital in the Indian city of Kolkata early Friday, killing 61 people, many of them patients, and sending emergency workers scrambling to evacuate survivors from the smoke-filled building, officials said. Government officials accused the hospital staff of abandoning the patients and fleeing the building after the fire broke out. “It‘s a very seri...

BRUSSELS (AP) ― Russia and NATO remain deadlocked on a long-running dispute over the alliance’s plan for a missile shield for Europe, officials said Thursday, and Russia warned that time was running out for an agreement. NATO’s Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen reported no progress toward a deal on the contentious issue, following a key discussion among alliance foreign ministers and Russi...

TEHRAN (AP) ― Iranian state TV broadcast video Thursday of what it said was the high-tech U.S. drone that Tehran says its forces downed earlier this week, and lodged a diplomatic complaint over the violation of its airspace. The more than two minutes of footage showed Iranian military officials inspecting what state TV identified as the RQ-170 Sentinel drone, and offered the first evidence that ...

China’s inflation cooled to the slowest pace in 14 months in November, giving policy makers more room to loosen policies as export growth slows because of Europe’s debt crisis. Consumer prices rose 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said on its website. That was lower than all estimates in a Bloomberg News survey of 35 economists that had a median forecast of 4.5 percent. Pro...

Ford Motor Co., the second-largest U.S. automaker, declared Thursday a 5-cent quarterly dividend, its first payout to shareholders since September 2006. The move comes after Ford earned $1.65 billion in the three months ended in September, its 10th consecutive profitable quarter, and negotiated a new four-year contract with the United Auto Workers covering its 40,600 U.S. hourly workers. The div...

The Dec. 2 constitutional deadline for the passage of a budget bill has come and gone. Yet, no agreement on an extraordinary parliamentary session appeared to be forthcoming from the ruling and main opposition parties when the regular parliamentary session was set to come to a close Friday. The reason was that the parties were embroiled in internal turmoil. Budget officers in the administration ...

The main opposition Democratic Party is set to hold a national congress on Sunday to determine whether or not it will disband itself for a merger with a group of political, social and labor activists. Either way, its decision will have a great impact on the general and presidential elections next year. The party’s proposed merger with the activist group, which goes by the name of “Innovation and...

The class war is on. It’s the 99 percent of “us” versus the 1 percent of “them.” In the rhetoric of this war, we are fighting the 1 percent because they possess most of the nation’s wealth, bankroll their handpicked political candidates, control the banks and get million-dollar paychecks and billion-dollar bailouts; yet they don’t pay enough taxes or invest their wealth in creating American jobs...

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just concluded a historic trip to Myanmar. Her visit heralds a breakthrough in relations between the two countries, and a shift in political dynamics in Southeast Asia could be anticipated. While optimism is warranted, it should be tempered by caution; Myanmar has a long way to go before relations between it and the United States ― and indeed the world ...

The government and ruling parties, which proposed an integrated reform of the social security and tax systems in June this year, have now begun efforts to work out the concrete details and put their plan in place. The Headquarters of the Government and Ruling Parties for Social Security Reform has been established with Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda as its head. At its first meeting, Noda said, “...