Africa, Asia | featured news

Incoming Chinese president Xi Jinping's first trip as head of state will take him to Africa, the government said on Saturday, as China seeks to cement a growing trade and energy relationship that has caused alarm bells to ring in Washington.

The Zambian government takes over the running of a troubled Chinese-owned coal mine after revoking its licence because of safety lapses.

If you can't keep track of all the Muslim protests erupting across the globe, you're not alone. The uproar over a 14-minute anti-Islam YouTube video has sparked furious protests from Somalia to Egypt to Sudan to Tunisia to Libya to Bangladesh to Indonesia to Pakistan. With new reports of protests surfacing every minute, we've compiled the latest reported incidents into this handy interactive Google Map. Click the locations and embedded links for more details about each incident.

Scientists have found alarming levels of the lung disease tuberculosis in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America that are resistant to up to four powerful antibiotic drugs. In a large international study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, researchers found rates of both multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were higher than previously thought and were threatening global efforts to curb the spread of the disease.

China’s state-run news media are rapidly growing in Africa, hoping to bolster Beijing’s influence in a region rich in the resources needed to fuel China’s powerhouse industries.

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday pledged African governments $20 billion in credit over the next three years and called for more China-Africa coordination international affairs to defend against the "bullying" of richer powers.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Chinese arms firms offered to sell weapons worth about $200 million to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's beleaguered forces in July, two newspapers reported, compounding pressure on Beijing's brittle ties with the rebels who have ousted him.

China's premier pledged $10 billion in concessional loans to African nations and said Beijing would cancel the government debts of some of the poorest of those countries.