An Indian court convicted four men Tuesday in the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a moving New Delhi bus, a case that set off waves of protests and gave voice to years of anger over the treatment of women.

The men, convicted on all the counts against them, including rape and murder, now face the possibility of hanging. The sentences are expected to be handed down Wednesday.

Hundreds of troops have been dispatched to India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh after 28 people were killed in a weekend of communal violence, police said Monday.

Authorities declared a high security alert after clashes between Muslims and Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, which has witnessed some of the country's worst religious riots in recent decades.

A U.S.-based website offering onions at heavily discounted prices in India has seen an "overwhelming" response as consumers there reel from sky-rocketing prices of the vegetable.

Groupon, which offers cut-price deals on everything from restaurant meals to shoes and watches, offered onions at nine rupees (14 cents) a kilogram on Thursday.

The Taliban on Friday denied shooting dead Indian writer Sushmita Banerjee, whose murder Afghan officials blamed on the insurgent militia fighting against the government for 12 years.

The 49-year-old was dragged out of her husband's house by masked gunmen in Afghanistan's eastern Paktika province late Wednesday and repeatedly shot.

Suspected Taliban in Afghanistan shot dead Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose book about her dramatic escape from the militants in the 90s became a Bollywood film, police said on Thursday.

Police in insurgency-hit Paktika province, in the east of Afghanistan, said they found the body of the 49 year old on Thursday morning, after the militants dragged her out of her husband's home late in the night and shot her repeatedly.

Pakistan said Thursday it was working to fix a date for a meeting between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the U.N. General Asembly.

Deadly skirmishes across the de facto border in divided Kashmir have jeopardized plans for the meeting in New York, which would come months after peace talks again stalled between the two neighbors.

An Indian oil tanker seized by Iran in August for allegedly polluting Gulf waters has been allowed to leave the port where it was held, an Iranian official said Thursday.

The Indian government-owned MT Desh Shanti was on its way back to India with a load of Iraqi crude when the Iranian navy stopped it last month for allegedly polluting the waters.

More than 200 languages have vanished in India over the last 50 years, a new study says, blaming urban migration and fear among nomadic tribes of speaking their traditional tongues.

The extensive study, conducted throughout the country over four years and released this week, has found 230 languages have "elapsed" while another 870 have survived the test of time in richly diverse but rapidly modernizing India, home to a vast number of indigenous or tribal peoples.

India on Tuesday expressed concern about the worsening violence in Syria, but said any action against President Bashar Assad's regime must be first authorized through the United Nations.

"The international legal norm against the use of chemical weapons anywhere and by anyone should not be breached. However, we would prefer to await the full results of the U.N. inspection," its foreign ministry said in a statement.

The judge in the trial of four men accused of the fatal gang-rape of a student on a New Delhi bus last December announced Tuesday he would deliver his verdicts on September 10.

The trial began in a "fast-track" court in the capital in February with the prosecution laying out evidence against the suspects, including DNA, witness statements and dying testimony from the victim.