Saddha Batolni / AFP A Pakistani plane carrying 48 people crashed on Wednesday in the country’s mountainous north and burst into flames killing everyone on board, authorities said, in one of the deadliest aviation accidents in the country’s history. Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Flight PK661 came down while travelling from the city of Chitral to Islamabad, the civil aviation …

  Bangkok / AFP Thai authorities are investigating the BBC over a Thai-language profile of the nation’s new king, officials said on Wednesday, after the article outraged ultra-royalists in a country where criticism of the monarchy is outlawed. Thailand’s harsh royal defamation law has been used to jail scores of critics and spawned a culture of self-censorship across the media, academia …

  Meureudu / AFP Rescuers scrabbled through the rubble of shattered homes, shops and mosques in search of survivors on Wednesday after a powerful earthquake struck western Indonesia and killed at least 97 people. The shallow 6.5-magnitude quake struck Pidie Jaya district in Aceh province at dawn as many in the mainly Muslim region on Sumatra island were preparing for morning …