Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Friday denied the United States had plans to base B-1 bombers in the country, saying an American official had "misspoken" on the issue.

Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs David Shear spoke this week of the deployment of the aircraft at a hearing on safeguarding US interests in the East and South China Seas.

In the moment the Amtrak train that derailed at a curve this week was supposed to be slowing down, it was accelerating, investigators said Thursday.

How that came to happen has emerged as the central question surrounding the derailment, which killed eight people and sent more than 200 to hospitals Tuesday night in the deadliest U.S. train wreck in nearly six years.

Rescuers on Wednesday combed through the mangled wreckage of a derailed train in Philadelphia after an accident that left at least six dead, as the difficult search for possible survivors continued.

Mayor Michael Nutter said the death toll could rise from the derailment on the busy northeast U.S. rail corridor as some of the 243 people on the train had not been accounted for.

French President Francois Hollande called Monday for an end to the US embargo on Cuba, during the first visit by a Western leader to the island since Washington and Havana moved to restore ties.

Addressing the half-century-old trade embargo ahead of meetings with Fidel and Raul Castro, the brothers who have ruled Cuba since its 1959 revolution, Hollande said France will do whatever possible to see that "the measures that have so badly harmed Cuba's development can finally be lifted, repealed."

French President Francois Hollande called Monday for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba during a historic visit to the island, the first by a Western leader since Washington and Havana moved to restore ties.

Speaking on the half-century embargo at the start of his Cuba trip, the first ever by a French leader, Hollande said France will do whatever possible to see that "the measures that have so badly harmed Cuba's development can finally be lifted, repealed."

Sweden's Supreme Court said Monday it had rejected an appeal by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange against his arrest warrant for alleged rape and sexual assault.

Sweden issued the arrest warrant in 2010 following allegations from two Swedish women, one who claimed rape and another who alleged sexual assault.

The United States defended its supplies of cluster munitions Sunday, pointing to restrictions on the transfers, after Human Rights Watch said the bombs had been used by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

HRW said it had gathered photographs, video and other evidence indicating that cluster munitions had been used in coalition air strikes against the Huthi rebel stronghold of Saada province in Yemen's northern mountains in recent weeks.

Vietnam's premier on Thursday hit out at the "barbarous crimes" of its wartime American foe as the nation marked four decades since the fall of Saigon, an event that delivered a communist victory and a painful blow to U.S. moral and military prestige.

The central streets of southern Ho Chi Minh City -- formerly Saigon -- were filled with a forest of hammer and sickle flags of the Communist Party, as regiments of goose-stepping soldiers filed past the country's top leaders.

Thousands of people demonstrated in major U.S. East Coast cities Wednesday demanding equal treatment for all by police, after a young African American died of injuries sustained in custody in Baltimore.

The biggest show of people power was in Baltimore itself -- epicenter of the latest racially tinged unrest to convulse the United States -- where several thousand mostly young demonstrators paralyzed city blocks in a major rally through downtown to City Hall.

Al-Mustaqbal Movement leader ex-PM Saad Hariri has blamed Hizbullah for the proliferation of terrorist groups in Lebanon and vowed to stop the eruption of a new civil war in the country.

“Hizbullah’s involvement in defense of the Assad dictatorship in Syria has imported terrorism to Lebanon,” Hariri said at the Wilson Center in Washington on Monday.