SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - Lingering flood damage, high commodity prices and political wrangling with the South could push impoverished North Korea this year into one of its worst food shortages since a famine in the 1990s, experts said.
BASRA, IRAQ - Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered Shi'ite militiamen to surrender on Wednesday as a crackdown on followers of powerful cleric Moqtada al-Sadr spread across southern towns leaving a ceasefire in tatters.
UK - The UK financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has admitted that it failed to regulate Northern Rock adequately.
UK - Gordon Brown executed an embarrassing U-turn yesterday as he ceded to pressure from the Roman Catholic Church to offer Labour MPs free votes on legal changes for embryo and fertility research.
UK - MPs launched a "shameless" last-ditch legal bid yesterday to keep how they spend millions of taxpayers' money secret.
BAGHDAD - The Mahdi Army's seven-month-long cease-fire appears to have come undone.
TIBET - In 1990, the Dalai Lama hosted a delegation of American Jews in Dharamsala, his home in exile in the hill country of northern India. His agenda was clear. Tibetans had lost sovereignty over their homeland and were scattering around the globe. How, he asked, had Jews preserved their cultural and religious identities during their own 2,000-year exile, and what might Tibetans do to preserve theirs?
FRANCE - President Sarkozy signalled that he may stay away from the opening ceremony in August unless the Chinese authorities exercised restraint in dealing with the Tibetan independence movement and opened talks with the Dalai Lama.
USA - Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedge funds may report $460 billion in credit losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, or almost four times the amount already disclosed, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
FRANCE - President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged Britain and France to trust each other more and work together, ahead of his first state visit to the UK.
SOMALIA - Forty humanitarian agencies have warned of an impending catastrophe in Somalia unless urgent action is taken.
UK - Car giant Ford is to sell its luxury UK-based car marques Jaguar and Land Rover to Indian company Tata. Tata, India's biggest vehicle maker, is likely to pay about $2bn (£1bn) in the deal, although analysts will be keen to see the exact price and terms.
UK - Passengers across the country have been hit by EU rules on working hours meant to protect drivers, bus companies say.
UK - Imams and other preachers should be sent into state schools to give "religious instruction" to pupils under a radical overhaul of faith-based education, teachers said.
UK - A media monitoring organization and a British citizen forced the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to apologize for blatant anti-Israel news coverage. They caught the network "red-handed," reporting falsely.