United States-led coalition forces killed 30 militants, including a Taliban commander, in an air strike in west Afghanistan.

The United States military freed a Reuters television cameraman on Thursday after holding him for three weeks in Iraq without charges.

Controversy surrounding the United States military's new Africa Command has forced the Pentagon to put plans for establishing a headquarters in the continent on a slow track.

Burma's ruling military junta took diplomats on a tour of the storm-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Saturday as its toll of dead and missing soared above 133 000 people, making Cyclone Nargis one of the most devastating ever to hit Asia. An estimated 2,5-million people are clinging to survival in the delta.

Burma will accept foreign aid but distribute relief itself, an official newspaper said on Friday, after a disaster rescue team from Qatar that arrived in Rangoon on an aid flight was turned back. Outside frustration is mounting at delays by the generals in giving visas to aid workers and landing rights for flights.

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the clubhouse and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel.

The United States military fired rockets at a target near a hospital in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, wounding 20 people. No patients were wounded at the hospital in the Sadr City stronghold of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but 20 people at the scene of the blasts were wounded.

Somali Islamist militants on Friday promised to avenge the killing of a man said to be an al-Qaeda's chief, warning citizens from countries they considered hostile to stay away from the war-torn country. The United States military on Thursday killed Moalim Aden Hashi Ayro and 11 others when it bombed a house in Somalia's central town of Dhusamareb.

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of mourners in northern Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 50 people, a police officer said. The man detonated an explosives vest in the crowd in the Sunni Arab village of Bu Mohammed, 120km south of the oil city of Kirkuk, at about 11am local time, Captain Abdullah Jassim said.

Gunmen kidnapped 42 university students near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, police said, in one of the biggest mass abductions in the country in many months. "Gunmen stopped two buses in a village south of Mosul," said Khalid Abdul-Sattar, police spokesperson for Nineveh province. The group was freed hours after being kidnapped.