More than 2,000 people have fled their homes in the restive Indian state of Assam after separatist rebels killed dozens of villagers, some of them children.
A Chinese city has banned schools from holding Christmas events, highlighting official suspicions about the increasingly popular festival because of its foreign origins.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his "concern" over a Jordanian pilot captured by the Islamic State jihadist group after his plane went down in Syria.
Hong Kong police said they had arrested a dozen pro-democracy protesters after a night of clashes in the first sizeable rally since the last protest camp was cleared last week.
Japanese Prime Minister is set to resume office with a broadly similar cabinet tasked with re-igniting the world's number three economy following his election triumph.
A Turkish parliamentary commission unexpectedly delayed until January a decision on whether four former Turkish cabinet ministers will stand trial on accusations of corruptionю
AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd described allegations he tried to hire a hitman as "ludicrous" and said he wanted to keep his job with the top-selling rock band.
Christmas has exploded in the atheist nation in recent years, with marketeers using everything from saxophones and Smurfs to steam trains to get shoppers to open their wallets.
Life is a constant throw of the dice for farmer Nilo Dilao and other residents of the Philippine island of Samar, the ground zero for many of East Asia's deadliest storms.
The devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures could see the Hollywood studio lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and incur massive recovery costs.
Israeli air planes struck targets in the southern Gaza Strip, witnesses and the army said, hours after a rocket from the Palestinian enclave hit the Jewish state.