The UN secretary general says he's encouraged that Iran has become involved for the first time in international talks in resolving the conflict in Syria. The US secretary of State John Kerry has held preliminary discussions with his counterparts from Iran, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. As world powers prepare for a substantive negotiations in Vienna, Ban Ki-moon urged them to show a sense of flexibility. I'm urging all these five countries to show their global leadership rather than their own national perspectives. The longer they take their own national perspectives, the much more our people will suffer and whole world will suffer.
Men armed with knives have attacked rally held by the main opposition National League for Democracy in Myanmar's largest city Yangon. The NLD candidate for the area, a seating MP has been taken to hospital with injuries to his head and hands. The attack comes ten days before Myanmar's first openly contested election in 25 years and three days before the NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi is due to hold a large rally.
Paul Ryan has been elected as the new speaker of US House of Representatives. The 45-year-old republican from Wisconsin succeeds John Boehner who announced his retirement last month. A White House spokesman said President Obama respected the speaker Ryan despite differences on policy. In his speech accepting the role, Mr. Ryan described the house as broken. The BBC's Anthony Zurcher says he's facing a difficult task. He is generally well-respected as a charismatic young man. He comes kind of from the conservative wing of the Republican party, but they've turned on people who they think don't have their backs before. So he's going to have to try to broke or some compromises actually get legislation passed and when that happens, that's when you see this right-wing conservative Tea Party caucus started to break away and cause trouble.
A Saudi Arabia blogger Raif Badawi has been given the Sakharov human rights prize. He ran an Internet discussion forum "Free Saudi Liberals". Last year, there was an international outrage when he was sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting Islamic values. Alvilin Avidboal is the co-founder of the Raif Badawi Foundation for Freedom. She says the award may not help his cause immediately. Well, it means a lot. It's the second most important prize or the same level as the Nobel Prize for freedom and it means that his struggle is concerned for so many people around the world, for the European Parliamentarian. Of course it's a consolation for now but it doesn't mean that Raif will be released tomorrow morning. BBC news.
China has announced the end of its decades-long policy of restricting most families to having only one child. The official Xinhua News Agency said that all couples would be allowed to two children citing a statement from the ruling Communist Party.
Reports from Sudan say there's been an escalation of a border dispute with Ethiopia. Sudan's interior minister Esmat Abdel Rahman told Parliament that Ethiopian cattle rustlers had killed at least 16 farmers and stolen nearly 300 cattle in recent raids. Members of the Sudanese Parliament have asked government to send troops to the border state of El-Gadaref.
A corruption watchdog says nearly all countries in the Middle East and North Africa have opaque defense budgets with almost no parliamentary accountability. In a new report, the London-based Transparency International says secrecy across defense and security establishment remains the norm in the region and that the ensuing corruption was having a big impact on the rise of terrorism. It said only Jordan and Tunisia published their defense budgets. BBC news.