Accumoli / AFP A powerful pre-dawn earthquake devastated mountain villages in central Italy on Wednesday, leaving at least 73 people dead, dozens more injured or trapped under the rubble and thousands temporarily homeless. Scores of buildings were reduced to dusty piles of masonry in communities close to the epicentre of the pre-dawn quake, which had a magnitude of between ...

  Pattani / AFP A car bomb exploded in a nightlife district in Thailand’s deep south, killing one and wounding more than 30, in a nation already on edge after a bombing spree that targeted tourist towns. The latest blast struck late Tuesday outside a hotel in Pattani, one of three Muslim-majority southern provinces battered by a long-running and shadowy rebellion ...

  Yangon / AFP Former UN chief Kofi Annan will advise Myanmar’s new government on resolving conflicts in Rakhine, a region divided on religious grounds and home to the stateless Muslim Rohingya, it was announced on Wednesday. The country’s western state is deeply scarred by bouts of sectarian bloodshed in 2012 that forced more than 100,000 Rohingya into squalid displacement camps. ...