Connect Asia

The largest joint military exercise between Australia and the United States began yesterday in northern Australia.

Police in China have arrested more than 160 people, for alleged involvement in using child labour and slavery in brickworks and coal mines.

There is hope that North Korea is heading towards nuclear disarmament.

New Zealand's central bank is having little impact with its efforts to stop the rise of the local currency.

Broadband internet access has become a top issue in an Australian election year.

The weekend announcement of a knighthood for author Salman Rushdie in Britain has sparked anger amongst Muslims around the world.

Bird flu appears to be making a comeback with fresh reports of cases in Asia.

Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet is in the United States, the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the end of the Vietnam war.

East Timor's prime minister is standing by his commitment to increase the military capacity of the nation.

Officials from India and the US have held fresh talks to meet the global challenges of nuclear proliferation and threat of nuclear terrorism.

Talks aimed at coaxing North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme could continue in the coming weeks after the release last week of North Korean funds frozen in a bank account in Macau.

Human rights experts from the European Union are in Manila for the start of a 10 day mission to to assess how to help stop political and extra judicial killings.

Japan's controversial debate about sex slavery during the second world war is being played out in the advertising pages of America's biggest newspapers.

The latest United Nations conference on endangered species has ended in the Netherlands, with new agreements to protect a number of plants and animals from the Asia-Pacific.

Protesters linked to Thailand's ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra have delivered a letter to the country's military rulers demanding that the interim government resign and hold immediate elections.

In Australia, dozens of paddle-steamers once competed for business on the Darling River, as wool-growers along its banks grew rich on the sheep's back.

The exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, has finished his tour of Australia.

The commercial trade in sawfish has been banned, under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

The man who headed the World Food Program for a decade says it was only able to get emergency food aid to the world's hungry after winning a bureaucratic battle with another UN agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation.