North Korea's military threatened Tuesday to retaliate against South Korea over its planned naval drills this week near their disputed sea border.

The North's official Korean Central News Agency said that the military would crush the naval drills with a powerful physical blow and warned all civilian ships to stay away from areas near the sea border.

Outbreaks of violence in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi killed at least 31 people overnight following the murder of a lawmaker in a drive-by shooting, officials said.

Lawmaker Raza Haider from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a partner in the Sindh provincial ruling coalition led by the Pakistan Peoples Party, was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles Monday.

About 130 Kurdish rebels have been killed since March in military operations inside Turkey and neighboring Iraq, where the militants take refuge, a Turkish military official said Friday.

Intelligence obtained after a May 20 air raid on Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) hideouts in northern Iraq indicated that more than 100 militants of the group were killed, General Fahri Kir told reporters.

The EU's refusal to accept Turkey as a member swiftly has partly caused Ankara's foreign policy shift and the deterioration in its relations with Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.

"The deterioration in the relationship between Turkey and Israel over the past year or so is a matter of concern," Gates told reporters in London.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led a chorus of defiant Iranian criticism of new U.N. sanctions imposed on the Islamic republic on Wednesday, saying they deserved to be "thrown in the trash bin."

"These resolutions are not worth a dime for the Iranian nation," he said.

NATO blamed the Taliban on Thursday over an attack on an Afghan wedding that killed more than 40 people in an area U.S.-led troops are massing to dislodge insurgents from their fiefdom.

The cause of the carnage has been unclear, but the government said initial reports indicated that a suicide bomber strapped with explosives had walked into the party reportedly attended by members of an anti-Taliban militia.

Russia is freezing a contract to deliver S-300 air defense missiles to Iran after the adoption of the new UN sanctions against Tehran, a Russian source told the Interfax news agency on Thursday.

"It is compulsory to fulfill a decision by the U.N. Security Council and Russia is not an exception here," said the source in the Federal Service for Military Technical Cooperation, which supervises Russian arms sales.

North Korea's military said Thursday it is scrapping a pact aimed at preventing accidental armed clashes with South Korea, as tensions rose sharply over the sinking of a warship.

The general chiefs of staff, in a notice to the South's armed forces, also warned of an immediate attack if the South violates the disputed Yellow Sea border, Pyongyang's official news agency reported.

At least 44 civilians have been killed in an assault by Jamaica's security forces on a slum to capture an alleged drug kingpin, a senior official said Wednesday.

The government had ordered a political ombudsman and a public defender to visit the area of western Kingston to assess casualties and damage after accusations by residents of civilian deaths.