BEIJING — If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust.
The [...]

BEIJING — Negotiators in the North Korean nuclear talks agreed Saturday to a blueprint for verifying North Korea’s nuclear disarmament as part of a deal under which it would dismantle its main Yongbyon nuclear weapons complex by the end of October in exchange for energy and economic aid.

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MOSUL, Iraq — As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill [...]

BAGHDAD — Two suicide bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, killing at least 30 people and wounding nearly 80.
The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular the [...]

TOKYO — North Korea took a step on Thursday toward reintegration into the world community and rapprochement with the United States by submitting for outside review a long-delayed declaration of its nuclear program.
The Bush administration almost immediately announced it would remove the country it once described as part of the “axis of evil” from the [...]

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court declared for the first time on Thursday that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun, not just the right of the states to maintain militias.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4 decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of handguns [...]

Spiking energy prices are powering a new wave of office construction in Calgary, Canada’s premier oil and gas metropolis.
A city of 1.1 million people in the province of Alberta, Calgary, now boasts the lowest office vacancy rate in the world — about 3 percent, according to 2008 figures. Although these numbers represent an adjustment from [...]

South Korean authorities on Tuesday sold as much as $1bn to shore up the won, according to currency traders in Seoul, underlining concerns in several Asian countries about weakening currencies in the face of oil-fuelled inflation.
With inflation last month at a seven-year high of 4.9 per cent, Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, told his cabinet [...]

The ceasefire agreed last week between Israel and Hamas suffered a violent setback on Tuesday, after Palestinian militants fired four rockets and one mortar from the Gaza Strip and Israeli forces launched a deadly incursion into the West Bank city of Nablus.
The Egyptian-brokered truce came into effect last Thursday, and called for a complete end [...]

India’s central bank on Tuesday night lifted its key lending rate to its highest level in six years as policymakers took emergency measures to rein in inflation.
The Reserve Bank of India, alarmed by inflation that in the first week of June reached 11.05 per cent – its highest level for more than a decade – [...]