Even Kim Jong-Un's threats of nuclear war can't divert world attention from the main event on the Korean peninsula this week -- the launch of Psy's hugely anticipated follow-up to his global hit "Gangnam Style".

Frail, her memory failing her, and with few visitors for company, Margaret Thatcher's final months were a marked contrast to her zenith striding the global stage.

Undeterred by North Korea's apocalyptic threats of nuclear war, a daily convoy of tour coaches still happily wends its way to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) which separates the two Koreas.

In a brown friar's robe and sandals, Tomas Gonzalez doesn't look like a death threat-defying, government-challenging, hardcore migrants' rights activist. But appearances can be deceptive.

From smiling family man with a common touch to hardened military leader ready for all-out war: North Korea's propaganda machine has given leader Kim Jong-Un a visual makeover in the past month.

Tears roll down Heitaro Matsumoto's face as the 72-year-old businessman talks of an uncle who died on Guam as a Japanese soldier in the hopeless final weeks of World War II.

As China scrambles to contain a deadly new strain of bird flu, Cambodia is battling a spike in the better known H5N1 strain that is baffling experts a decade after a major outbreak began in Asia.

With tensions on the Korean peninsula soaring to include threats of nuclear war, frustration is mounting at what US policy experts see as the failure of all efforts to rein in North Korea.

Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation before it was buried for centuries under the dust of the Kara Kum desert in remote western Turkmenistan.

Sandra Zaimovic, a Catholic Bosnian Croat and her husband Rusmir, a Bosnian Muslim, are looking forward to celebrating both Eid and Christmas with their new baby this year.