Japan will sack three top energy officials over their handling of the Fukushima atomic disaster and scandals that have fueled public mistrust in the country's nuclear policy, the government said Thursday.

Banri Kaieda, the minister of economy, trade and industry, told a press conference that he was planning a sweeping staff changes at his powerful ministry, which both promotes and regulates the nuclear industry.

Seventy-two people have been charged in the U.S. with participating in an international child pornography network that prosecutors say used an online bulletin board called Dreamboard to trade tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday a 20-month law enforcement effort called Operation Delego targeted more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating in the private, members-only Internet club created to promote pedophilia.

A bomb attack killed an Afghan intelligence agent and wounded three girls in the country's north on Thursday, a provincial spokesman said, with the Taliban claiming responsibility.

Payenda Mohammad, a junior official in the Kunduz branch of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS), died when the blast destroyed his car near his home, provincial spokesman Mahboobullah Sayedi told Agence France Presse.

A manhunt was under way Thursday for a suspect who attached what turned out to be a fake bomb to a terrified Sydney teenager in a drama described as "like something out of a Hollywood movie script.”

Madeleine Pulver, 18, a member of one of Sydney's wealthiest families, endured a horrifying 10-hour ordeal after a masked male intruder strapped a device around her neck at her home in the exclusive suburb of Mosman.

A helicopter crash in central Indonesia killed 10 people including at least two Australians employed by Melbourne-based Newcrest Mining, officials said Thursday.

The company said two South Africans were also killed but Indonesian officials insisted all four foreigners who perished in the accident were Australians, citing the passenger list.

Famine has spread to three new regions of Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu and the world's largest camp for displaced people, owing to a harsh drought ravaging the Horn of Africa, the United Nations said Wednesday.

The new areas include two sites where hundreds of thousands of Somalis have fled in desperate search of food as internally displaced people (IDP).

The North Korean minister who traveled to New York for talks last week said he was satisfied with the outcome and called for more discussions on resuming a stalled nuclear forum, a report said Wednesday.

First vice foreign minister Kim Kye-Gwan held talks in New York with U.S. officials led by the U.S. special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, last Thursday and Friday in the first high-level bilateral contact since 2009.

France confirmed Wednesday that it has issued an extradition order to send Panamanian ex-strongman Manuel Noriega -- currently serving a French jail term for laundering drug money -- back home.

Noriega has three convictions for human rights violations in Panama, dating to his military rule there from 1983 to 1989. Each conviction carries a 20-year prison sentence.

The center-right Diko party in Cyprus said on Wednesday it was pulling out of the government after talks with President Demetris Christofias collapsed.

"The dialogue has terminated, Diko's cooperation with the president has ended," Diko leader Marios Garoyian told reporters.

Bomb squad officers were Wednesday working to defuse a "suspicious device" at a Sydney house that media reports said was strapped to a terrified teenager.

Police were alerted by an 18-year-old woman in the exclusive suburb of Mosman and were in the house with fire crews and paramedics on standby.