PERTH, Australia: Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned oil company, said Thursday that it would buy a 40 percent stake in the Gladstone liquefied natural gas project from the Australian energy firm Santos for up to $2.51 billion. Petronas hopes to bolster its position as Asia's largest LNG producer.

In anticipation of a global summit on the food crisis, the United Nations called on world leaders on Wednesday to agree to urgent measures to ease demand for grains and alleviate high food prices.

The rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is influencing climate patterns and vegetation across the United States and will significantly disrupt water supplies, agriculture, forestry and ecosystems for decades, a new U.S. government report says.

The focus in Asia is now on the earthquake that killed untold thousands in China this week. It's worth pausing for a moment to consider how that country's biggest quake in 58 years offers a reason for optimism. The contrast between China's impressive relief efforts and Myanmar's shameful failure to allow the rapid delivery of international aid after this month's cyclone is as huge as it is telling. And China's response differs markedly from how it dealt with an earthquake that killed 250,000 people in 1976 in the northeastern city of Tangshan.

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China's main centers for designing, making and storing nuclear arms lie in the shattered earthquake zone, leading Western experts to look for signs of any damage that might allow radioactivity to escape. A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue, said the United States was using spy satellites and other means to try to monitor the sprawling nuclear plants. "There appear to be no immediate concerns," the official said.

CHENGDU, China: Can earthquakes be predicted, their destructive impact forewarned? Most scientists would say no. But if some insistent Chinese bloggers are to be believed, nature provided enough warning to have saved many of those who perished this week. In the days before the deadly earthquake shook much of mountainous Sichuan Province, their stories go, ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures and swarms of toads invaded the streets of a town that was later devastated by the quake.

BANGKOK: At risk of disease, abuse and forced recruitment into the armed forces, children are the most vulnerable survivors of the cyclone that hit Myanmar, many of them orphaned or lost, fending for themselves.

BEIJING: Four days after a powerful earthquake devastated a mountainous region of southwestern China, the nation's massive rescue and relief effort continued Friday, even though the hope of finding new survivors was dimming. Remarkably, relief officials said that they had rescued a child buried alive in the ruins of a middle school late Thursday, about 80 hours after the quake struck, and had also detected the sounds of several other children who could be trapped there.

BEIJING: At least three dozen villages and towns in southwest China remained cut off from the outside world Thursday as tens of thousands of soldiers and emergency workers struggled against impassable roads and mountains of concrete and brick to reach the 40,000 people that officials say are still buried in the rubble or missing after a massive earthquake Monday.