A roadside bomb killed nine civilians including women and children when it struck the vehicle they were traveling in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, provincial police said.

The civilians were driving into Khost city, capital of Khost province, when the blast hit their van, deputy provincial police chief Mohammad Yaqoub Mandozai told AFP.

New Zealand warned frantic relatives to brace for the worst Friday as toiling rescuers failed to find any more survivors after a devastating earthquake left at least 113 dead.

As rain hampered the painstaking search of the wreckage in Christchurch's city center, Foreign Minister Murray McCully admitted: "The rescue focus is drawing towards a conclusion."

Militants in northwestern Pakistan blew up at least 11 tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in neighboring Afghanistan Friday and shot dead four people, police said.

The rebels struck at a terminal on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, which runs into Pakistan's lawless tribal belt.

A Saudi man has been arrested for allegedly buying chemicals and equipment to make a bomb and researching U.S. targets, including the Dallas home of former president George W. Bush, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, 20, a Saudi national who came to Texas on student visa in 2008, was arrested late Wednesday and faces charges of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

A suicide car bomb attack killed an intelligence agent and wounded 26 other people in an Afghan town on the Pakistan border Thursday, officials said, in the latest in a wave of blasts.

The explosives-packed vehicle with two bombers inside blew up in Spin Boldak after intelligence agents acting on a tip-off opened fire in a bid to stop it, Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for Afghanistan's national spy agency, said.

Senegal has cut diplomatic ties with Iran, accusing it of delivering weapons to separatist rebels in its restive southern Casamance region where 16 soldiers have been killed since the end of December.

A cache of Iranian weapons concealed as building material intercepted in Nigeria in October 2010, was found to be one of several shipments passing through Gambia and destined for the Casamance rebel movement.

Hundreds of rescuers swarmed over twisted and smoking buildings Wednesday in a frantic search for survivors after New Zealand's catastrophic earthquake left nearly 400 dead or missing.

Emergency services cordoned off central Christchurch, which was devastated by Tuesday's shallow, 6.3-magnitude tremor, to hunt for anyone still alive along with an unknown number of bodies buried in the rubble.

Somali pirates killed four Americans Tuesday, including a retired couple onboard their hijacked yacht in a sudden violent turn to efforts to end a hostage drama, the U.S. military said.

Four Somali pirates also died, two of them killed by U.S. special forces in one of the deadliest endings to a raft of hostage-takings off the coast of Somalia that are often resolved through ransom payments.

A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake Tuesday killed 65 people and trapped dozens more under flattened buildings in New Zealand's most devastating tremor in 80 years.

Frantic rescuers and bystanders dug for survivors and thousands of panicked residents rushed into the streets of Christchurch, just six months after a 7.0 quake weakened buildings in the southern city of 340,000.

Germany stressed Monday its policy towards Iran had not changed after its foreign minister held a controversial meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the weekend.

"Our international partners know perfectly well that nothing at all has changed in terms of our attitude to Iran," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular government news conference.