Islamabad - Gunmen on Thursday ambushed a car carrying an Iranian diplomat in north-western Pakistan and kidnapped the official after killing his guard, police and media reports said.

The diplomat was seized when he was travelling to the Iranian consulate in Peshawar, the capital of the troubled North West Frontier Province.

A police officer said the kidnappers intercepted the vehicle in the upscale Hayatabad neighbourhood and shot dead a police guard before whisking the official and his driver away.

Singapore - In the wake of the world-wide financial crisis consumer confidence has turned pessimistic across the Asia Pacific region, according to a survey released Wednesday by MasterCard.

From India to China, and Japan to New Zealand the urban middle class were more pessimistic for the first half of 2009 than six months ago, according to the latest bi-annual Consumer Confidence survey by MasterCard Worldwide released in Singapore.

MasterCard found that only Vietnam, China, India and Singapore of the 14 markets surveyed are optimistic about the first half of next year.

Bangkok - To reduce carbon dioxide emissions - blamed for global warming - Asian cities of the future should grow vertically instead of horizontally, a leading transport expert said Wednesday.

"In many Asian cities, people are building new housing developments 20, 30, 40 or 60 kilometres out of town and this means people are taking longer to get to work," said Charles Melhuish, technical director with the UK government's Transport Knowledge Partnership.

Bangkok - Shi Han Min, who led the Beijing's effort to clean up its air for the 2008 Olympic Games, on Wednesday won the first Kong Ha Award for excellence in air quality management.

The award, which included a 10,000-dollar purse, was granted to Shi at the Better Air Quality 2008 workshop in Bangkok, which has drawn 900 delegates from the region.

Shi, director of Beijing's Environment Protection Bureau, was credited for introducing many initiatives to clean up the Chinese capital's notorious air pollution for the Olympics which were later institutionalized and replicated in other Chinese cities.

Peshawar, Nov 12: The tribesmen in Pakistan living in villages along the Afghan border are caught between the devil and the deep sea, as, one the one hand, the Government wants them to form Lashkars to fight back the Taliban, and, on the other hand, they continuously run the risk of being beheaded by the Taliban, as happened around three weeks ago when a couple of tribal leaders beheaded and their bodies tossed on the roads setting an example for others.

Tokyo - Asian stock markets staged strong rallies Monday, with Japan's key Nikkei 225 Stock Average closing above the 9,000-point threshold, following the announcement of an economic stimulus packa