Government supporters hurled stones at thousands of opposition activists demonstrating against the arrest of their defeated presidential candidate in Sri Lanka's capital Wednesday.

China declared a new food-safety campaign Wednesday after contaminated milk products from an earlier scandal showed up repackaged in several places around the country, exposing weaknesses in the country's promise to stop such problems from happening again.

A 20-year-old factory worker who joined a banned political party because he was unhappy with one-party rule in China was sentenced to jail for 18 months Wednesday, his mother said.

Afghanistan's Interior Ministry says 157 people have been killed in avalanches that blocked a mountain pass north of Kabul.

A Myanmar court ordered a U.S. citizen Wednesday to serve three years in prison for entering the military-ruled country with forged documents and undeclared foreign currency.

An alleged Islamist militant being tried on charges of harboring terrorists behind deadly twin hotel bombings in the Indonesian capital claimed Wednesday that he had helped craft a plot to assassinate the president.

China's highest court has issued new guidelines on the death penalty that instruct lower courts to limit its use to a small number of "extremely serious" cases.

A senior U.N. envoy pressed ahead Wednesday with international efforts to get North Korea back into nuclear disarmament talks, during the world body's first high-level visit to the reclusive state in nearly six years.

U.S. and Afghan forces pushed Tuesday to the edge of the southern Afghan town of Marjah, poised to seize the major Taliban supply and drug-smuggling stronghold in hopes of building public support by providing aid and services once the insurgents are gone.

A Chinese activist who investigated the deaths of thousands of children crushed in their schools during the Sichuan earthquake was sentenced Tuesday to five years, underscoring the government's determination to suppress questions about why the buildings fell.