But the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi on Dec. 16 has now thrown the issue of women's safety in India into sharp relief.

The victim, who passed away Saturday from injuries sustained during the assault, had boarded a privately operated bus with a mansaid to be her fiance.

The BBC had reported the vehicle was a "white line" bus, one of several services run by private operators to supplement the city's public bus network.

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New details are emerging in the horrific gang rape that caused the death of a female student in Delhi, India.

The gang of assailants who allegedly brutally assaulted and raped the 23-year-old aboard a private bus would have run her over if her boyfriend had not pulled her out of the way just in time, reported Agence France-Presse.

The severely injured medical student, who has not been named, was airlifted after initial surgery in Delhi to a hospital in Singapore, where she died Saturday after extensive organ failure. Her boyfriend, whom friends say she was planning to marry, was also was beaten and thrown off the bus on which the two were traveling.

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They blasted the Delhi police for incompetence and insensitivity. And they cried out for the death penalty for six men accused of brutally gang-raping a 23-year-old woman aboard a private bus on Dec. 16. The woman succumbed to her injuries on Friday in Singapore, where she was being treated at a hospital, according to media reports.

In the story of India's battle against sexual assault, the honorable members ignored one important footnote: Every major political party has fielded and continues to field candidates facing criminal charges for rape, harassment and other crimes against women.

“We found that all these parties had given tickets to people of dubious backgrounds, involved in crimes against women,” said Anil Bairwal, national coordinator of the watchdog group National Election Watch. “It's the highest order of hypocrisy.”

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A statement by Singapore's Mount Elizabeth hospital, where the 23-year-old victim was being treated, said she "died peacefully" early Saturday.

The horrific ordeal of the woman galvanized Indians, who have held almost daily demonstrations to demand greater protection from sexual violence, from groping to rape, that impacts thousands of women every day, but which often goes unreported.

She and a male friend were traveling in a public bus on Dec. 16 evening when they were attacked by six men who raped her and beat them both. They also inserted a rod in her body, stripped both naked and threw them off the bus onto a road.

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Police chased angry protesters with batons as they fought pitched battles to try to get past steel barricades and a wall created by hundreds of policemen to reach the president's mansion to present their demands. "We want justice," they shouted.

Television footage showed that some protesters were injured in the clashes.

The demonstrations continued Sunday despite Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde promising to consider their main demand for death penalties for all six suspects who have been arrested by police following the Dec. 16 attack.

Shinde said Saturday night that the government was taking steps to better ensure the safety of women.

A group of protesters met Sonia Gandhi, the governing Congress party chief, and her son and lawmaker Rahul Gandhi, on Sunday and demanded a speedy trial of the suspects.

Popular yoga guru Babar Ramdev stood on the roof of a bus and pledged support to the protesters. "The government must set up fast-track courts to punish the offenders in rape attacks," he said.

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"It [the rocket] has been launched,'' a spokesman for the South Korean defense ministry told AFP.

North Korea said a satellite had successfully been put into orbit in space, a claim US military officials said appeared to be true.

The rocket had followed its planned trajectory, with stages falling in expected areas, the BBC wrote.

The White House, which is concerned the launch is covering for ballistic missile activity, denounced the move as a "highly provocative act that threatens regional security," said the AP.

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"Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds," issued by the National Intelligence Council, said Asia would overtake North America and Europe combined — in terms of global economic power — by the year 2030, according to Reuters.

"Meanwhile, the economies of Europe, Japan, and Russia are likely to continue their slow relative declines," the report said.

The report attributed the shifts in global power to economic and political changes triggered by emerging technologies, dwindling resources and population booms over the next few decades, according to Bloomberg.

Analysts isolated four "megatrends" that they said are transforming the world: the end of US global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class, and water, food and energy shortages, Bloomberg reported.

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The blaze broke out at the seven-story factory operated by Tazreen Fashions late Saturday. By Sunday morning, firefighters had recovered 100 bodies, fire department Operations Director Maj. Mohammad Mahbub told The Associated Press.

He said another 12 people who had suffered injuries after jumping from the building to escape the fire later died at hospitals.

The death toll could rise as the search for victims was continuing, he said.

Bangladesh has some 4,000 garment factories, many without proper safety measures. The country annually earns about $20 billion from exports of garment products, mainly to the United States and Europe.

Mahbub said firefighters recovered 69 bodies from the second floor of the factory alone. He said most of the victims had been trapped inside the factory, located just outside of Dhaka, with no emergency exits leading outside the building.

Many workers who had taken shelter on the roof of the factory were rescued, but firefighters were unable to save those who were trapped inside, Mahbub said.

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But it is indeed occurring in the United States, and “it is a growing problem,” according to Manon DeFelice, executive director of the New York-based AHA Foundation, which protects and defends the rights of women and girls in the West from oppression committed in the name of religion and culture.

Hidden behind the closed doors of urban apartments and suburban houses around the country, hundreds of girls and women are believed to be forced into marriage every year, often too frightened to protest and coerced in ways difficult for authorities to detect.

For some girls nearing high school graduation, the summer school holidays are the most dangerous time of the year. A young woman is sent to visit relatives in her ancestral homeland and arrives to find not only that she’s been engaged to a man she’s never met, but that she is expected to sponsor a U.S. visa for him.

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Obama was wrapping up four days in Southeast Asia on Tuesday and starting the long journey home, where fiscal deadlines and decisions await.

On the margins of the East Asia Summit here, Obama met with two Asian leaders, outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who is likely to be replaced. The president is devoting attention to the region to broaden U.S. influence in a part of the world long dominated by China.

But talk of trade was overshadowed by discussions over how to prevent violence over South China Sea territories. Southeast Asian leaders meeting here in the Cambodian capital decided to ask China to start formal talks "as soon as possible" on crafting a binding agreement on how to resolve such disputes.

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Days after the 57-year-old novelist thrilled his country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature, China’s central censorship organ issued a directive to media companies instructing them to strictly police online discussion for anti-party chatter or mentions of two other Chinese-born Nobel winners.

China Digital Times has a translation of the leaked directive:

“To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.”

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Wei Guangbiao said prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China.

Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him as saying: "In primitive times, people wouldn't kill animals that were useless to them," and therefore the pandas must have been used as food. But he said pandas were much smaller in prehistoric times.

Wei said wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains 10,000 to 1m years ago.

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Presidential aide Zaw Htay said Thursday that the U.S. move was the result of efforts by both reformist Myanmar President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Wednesday that the Obama administration will ease import restrictions implemented against Myanmar's previous repressive military regime. She met Wednesday with Thein Sein on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Aung Win, deputy chairman of the Myanmar Garment Association, said his industry was also happy with the move and expects to benefit from it.

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Thousands of elated supporters greeted Suu Kyi with cheers, tears and a standing ovation as she took to the stage at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Ind., the fourth stop on her 17-day U.S. tour.

Sixty-seven-year-old Suu Kyi, who was recently elected to parliament after spending 15 years under house arrest for opposing Myanmar's military rulers, voiced optimism for democracy in her Southeast Asian home.

"The important thing is to learn how to resolve problems. How to face them and how to find the right answers through discussion and debate," the Nobel Laureate told the more than 5,000 people who gathered to hear her speak. Fort Wayne is home to one of the largest Burmese communities in the United States.

Myanmar's half century of military rule made the country something of a pariah in the international community, inviting crippling sanctions. But President Thein Sein has introduced political and economic reforms in recent years and the U.S. administration is considering easing the main plank of its remaining sanctions, a ban on imports.

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Throughout 2012, these Fijian villagers have been in the process of moving from their current home village – a tract of land overlooking Natawa Bay, the largest bay in the South Pacific, to their new home which they named Kenani, Fijian for Canaan, the biblical “promised land.” Last month, I visited both sites - the seaside village that is now uninhabitable and the mountaintop site of their intended new home. I talked with the villagers about their feelings, hopes, and fears, as they become one of the very first villages in the world to be wholly relocated as a result of the effects of climate change.

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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were presented a plant with white-and-purple blooms that's jointly named for them. The royals also saw orchids named for Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth II at the Singapore Botanical Gardens on Tuesday.

Kate wore a pale floral dress to the event. She was carrying an orchid bouquet when she and William greeted staff and spectators at the historic Raffles hotel later in the evening.

Singapore is the first stop on the couple's nine-day tour of the Far East and South Pacific.

They will also visit the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu in honor of the queen's Diamond Jubilee marking her 60 years on the throne.

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In Mandarin, it’s called gǎnlǎnqiú (literally, ‘olive ball’) but back in the West, it's better known as American football and what had just taken place on the grounds of the Shanghai High School was its team’s inaugural fixture.

A relatively error strewn game of flag football between the high school team and their teachers might not have been pleasing to the eye but it is symbolic of the growth of the sport within China. The school’s football programme is almost certainly the first of its kind in a Chinese-run school and only came about after students hassled a couple of American teachers into coaching them.

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The quake set off car alarms, shook items off shelves and sent manycoastal residents fleeing for high ground before the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center lifted all tsunami alerts it had issued for the Philippines and neighboring countries from Indonesia to Japan, and for Pacific islands as far away as the Northern Marianas.

"It was very strong. My house was making sounds," Bemruel Noel, a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, said in atelephone interview from Tacloban city on the eastern coast of Leyte island, where the quake set off a small stampede of residents.

"You talk to God with an earthquake that strong," he said.

Tacloban resident Digna Marco said the quake toppled a figurine on top of her TV set and that her son had to hold their desktop computer to prevent it from falling to the floor. The lights over her dining room were swinging, she said.

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Kaling is poised to become the highest-profile member of a small but rapidly growing fraternity: actors of South Asian (primarily Indian) ancestry finding success in mainstream Hollywood. For much of the 1990s, there was precisely one South Asian character on a prime-time American television show: Apu, the convenience store owner on "The Simpsons." A true cartoon character, his satirically stereotypical voice was, and is, provided by a white actor, Hank Azaria.

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