Gunmen wearing North Korean military uniforms beat up the captain of a seized Chinese fishing boat and stole its fuel during two weeks of captivity, but eventually released the boat and crew Tuesday without the ransom they had demanded, the boat owner said. The ...

A transsexual woman in Hong Kong won a groundbreaking court appeal Monday allowing her to marry her boyfriend and forcing the government to rewrite the city’s marriage laws. The woman, in her 30s, known in the Court of Final Appeal as “W” under anonymity ...

A U.S. academic says she was gang-raped by an armed mob in Papua New Guinea and wants to publicize her ordeal to raise awareness about rampant violence against women in the desperately poor Pacific country. The attack comes barely a week after an Australian ...

Organized crime groups dealing in fake goods, drugs, human trafficking and illicit wildlife trade earn nearly $90 billion annually in East Asia and the Pacific, a U.N. report showed Tuesday. “Transnational Organized Crime in East Asia and the Pacific: A Threat Assessment” is the ...

Three men chased and allegedly molested a South Korean student on a bus in eastern India, police said Monday, in the latest incident to raise fears over women’s safety in the country. The 20-year-old college student was trying to board a crowded bus in ...

Hong Kong’s top court on Monday threw out a landmark case that would have given hundreds of thousands of foreign maids the right to seek permanent residency, ending a legal battle that split the city. In rejecting the bid to give maids the same ...

A man on trial for the gang rape and fatal beating of a student on a bus in New Delhi last December was found dead in his prison cell Monday, prompting fury from the victim’s family and accusations of murder. Officials at the maximum-security ...

While China’s leaders convened in Beijing for its most important government meeting of the year, the rest of the country was transfixed by a car theft gone tragically awry in the northeast. The strangulation of a 2-month-old baby left in the backseat of the ...

Australia will set up an antigang task force based on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s model to combat “the gangs and guns on our streets,” Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Sunday. Gillard said the task force, expected to cost 64 million Australian dollars ...