The United States has lodged a protest with China over an incident Sunday in which the Pentagon says five Chinese vessels harassed an unarmed U.S. Navy research ship in international waters in the South China Sea, and engaged in potentially dangerous maneuvering. Pentagon officials say this is the latest in a series of such incidents in recent days.
A U.S. Navy photo shows that one of the Chinese ships is fairly large and has “China Marine Surveillance” written on its side. The other ships are smaller and also do not …

Riot police in Malaysia have fired tear gas to disperse thousands of people in Kuala Lumpur, who protested against the use of English in local schools.
Some 124 people were reportedly held, as the demonstrators tried to march to the royal palace in the capital.
The ethnic Malay protesters demanded a return to Malay as the teaching language for maths and science.
Both subjects have been taught in English since 2003 to improve pupils’ poor language skills, officials say.

Israel launched airstrikes into Gaza on Saturday, responding to a series of rockets fired by Hamas the day before, the Israeli military said.
Hamas security forces also reported Saturday’s strikes. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Israeli air force struck two “smuggling tunnels” on the southern Gaza border and one “weaponry storage site” in Gaza City, a military spokesman told CNN.

Guinea-Bissau’s army chief discovered a 200-kilogramme cocaine stash a week before his assassination, which preceded the murder of the country’s president, an army officer said Thursday.
Following General Batista Tagme Na Waie’s killing, soldiers murdered President Joao Bernardo Vieira earlier this week in an apparent reprisal in the West African nation.

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was in stable condition and recovering from head injuries Friday night after a car wreck that killed his wife, Susan, medical sources told CNN.
The crash, on a busy two-lane highway between Tsvangirai’s hometown of Buhera and the capital city of Harare, comes just weeks after the start of a power-sharing agreement between Tsvangirai and his political rival, President Robert Mugabe.

China’s state-run media has said a Tibetan monk made up allegations that police shot another monk who set himself on fire to protest against Chinese rule in his homeland.
Activist groups reported police shot the monk when he protested in the flashpoint area of Aba in southwest China’s Sichuan province last week, and residents there contacted by AFP confirmed that they had heard guns fired.
But the Xinhua news agency issued a report on Thursday saying another monk had confessed to making up allegations about the police shooting, and cited residents saying …

Israeli air raids on Hamas-run Gaza killed four militants just hours after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended her first Middle East trip vowing to breathe life into the peace process Thursday.
An air strike in the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza on Thursday killed three militants and wounded two others, medics said.
An army spokesman said the raid targeted a group who had fired an anti-tank shell at an army unit on the Israeli side of the border.
Late Wednesday, an Israeli air raid killed a senior …

Gunmen have attacked a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team on its way to play in the Pakistani city of Lahore. At least five policemen escorting the team bus were killed, along with a driver….