Surging food prices could push millions of people in Asia into extreme poverty and threaten the durability of the region's world-leading economic recovery, the Asian Development Bank said on Tuesday.

The gunfire exchange between Cambodian and Thai troops over the disputed border area at the 13th century Ta Moan temple and Ta Krabei temple in Oddar Meanchey province still continued as of 9:40 p.m. on Tuesday, said Pich Sokhin, the governor of Oddar Meanchey province.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) for the first time has released a map of radiation levels at Fukushima nuclear plant No.1, which was devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

European countries have called for "strong measures" to halt repression in Syria, as its government steps up a campaign against peaceful protests.

Taliban militants attacked two buses carrying navy officials in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi on Tuesday, killing four people and wounding 56, officials said, the first major attack on the military in the city in seven years.

Ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and three other former state leaders arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, hoping to defuse tensions on the divided Korean peninsula and kick-start long-stalled nuclear talks.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has approved the use of his country's air force in Nato's Libya mission.

A tornado destroyed 50 to 80 houses and killed at least one person in an Arkansas town on Monday and floods caused at least three deaths in the state as storms continued to lash the region, authorities said.

The world on Tuesday marked a quarter century since the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine, haunted by fears over the safety of atomic energy after the Japan earthquake.

Security forces have arrested some 500 'pro-democracy' sympathizers across Syria after the government sent in tanks to try to crush protests in the city of Deraa, the Syrian rights organization Sawasiah said on Tuesday.