CNN-Asia Pacific

By Anna Coren and Jessie Yeung, CNN Abdul Rashid Shirzad was quiet and nervous on the taxi ride with his family to the Kabul airport, the last American-controlled enclave in the Afghan capital. “We hope to make it, and survive,” Shirzad, 34, a former interpreter for United States Special Forces, said in a video filmed

By Hannah Ritchie, CNN Afghan folk singer Fawad Andarabi was dragged from his home and killed by the Taliban in a restive mountain province north of Kabul on Friday, a local journalist told CNN, raising fears of a return to the militant group’s harsh rule of 20 years ago — including a clampdown on music.

By Nectar Gan and Steve George, CNN The crackdown came quickly and sweepingly, wiping out some of China’s biggest stars and fan clubs in a matter of days. Over the past week, China’s entertainment industry has become the latest to fall into the crosshairs of the ruling Communist Party, following Xi Jinping’s clampdown on political

By Joshua Berlinger, Will Ripley and Jake Kwon, CNN North Korea appears to have restarted operations at a power plant capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, according to the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that clues, such as the discharge of cooling water, observed in early July indicated the

By Alex Marquardt and Jessie Yeung, CNN As many as five rockets were fired at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Monday local time, a US official told CNN. The C-RAM defense system installed at the airport engaged with the rockets, the official said. There are no reports of any casualties at this

By Sandi Sidhu, Nick Paton Walsh, Tim Lister, Oren Liebermann, Laura Smith-Spark and Saskya Vandoorne, CNN Ten members of one family — including seven children — are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, a relative of the dead told CNN. The US carried out what it

By Emiko Jozuka and Chie Kobayashi, CNN Two people have died in Japan days after receiving doses from a batch of Moderna Covid-19 vaccines whose use was suspended Thursday following concerns over a contamination risk, the country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Saturday. A causal link between the vaccine and the deaths has

By Laura Smith-Spark, Barbara Starr, Nick Paton Walsh and Sandi Sidhu, CNN The US military carried out a drone strike against what it said was an ISIS-K planner in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province, amid warnings of possible further terror attacks targeting the last-ditch US evacuation effort from Kabul. The desperate mission to airlift US citizens

By Julia Hollingsworth, CNN When New Zealand went into lockdown last week over a single Delta case, critics were quick to mock the country’s risk-averse approach. British newspapers didn’t hold back. The Times called New Zealand a “mysterious socialist hermit nation” where the public “languish in a Covid prison,” while The Telegraph slammed a once-welcoming

By Rob Picheta and Nilly Kohzad, CNN Afghans who narrowly avoided the terror attack outside Kabul airport on Thursday have described horrifying scenes and piles of victims’ bodies at the site of the blast. Muhammad, who said he assisted US forces and worked with NATO in Afghanistan, was at the airport with his family Thursday,