Its concrete-laden town center looks an unlikely spot for a clash of civilizations, but Luton has emerged as the battlefield for tensions between radical Islam and Britain's far-right.

Efforts by this drab commuter town north of London to shed its image as an extremist hotbed suffered a setback in December when local resident Taymour Abdelwahab blew himself up in a botched suicide attack in Stockholm.

Afghan and Pakistani troops exchanged fire across their border on Wednesday, officials from both sides said, blaming each other for starting the incident.

General Almar Gul Mangal, commander of the border police's fourth battalion in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost confirmed the exchange of fire and accused Pakistani troops of sparking the battle.

The United States is conducting a manhunt for a previously unknown group believed to be involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, according to a US cable published in Wednesday's Telegraph newspaper.

In the memo, leaked by the WikiLeaks website, a US official in Qatar told the Department for Homeland Security in Washington that three Qatari men were under suspicion of conducting surveillance operations on the attack sites.

A series of spectacular eruptions from a volcano in southern Japan fired columns of ash and smoke thousands of meters in the air early Wednesday, with the cloud delaying some international flights to Tokyo.

The 1,421-meter (4,689-feet) Shinmoedake volcano in the Kirishima range, featured in the 1967 James Bond film "You Only Live Twice,” continued the series of deafening blasts which began with the start of its first major eruption for 52 years last week.

A car bomb tore through a packed Pakistani market on Wednesday, killing nine people in the sixth attack in the northwestern city of Peshawar in less than a week, officials said.

Police said the bomb was planted in a car and exploded near a police station, destroying shops and vehicles as civilians thronged the congested area at the start of the working day in the Taliban-hit city.

The United States on Monday urged Iran to halt executions with the US State Department saying it was "particularly troubled" by the hanging of a Dutch-Iranian woman after she was denied consular access.

"The United States is deeply concerned that Iran continues to deny its citizens their human rights," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement late Monday.

Military helicopters evacuated hospital patients Tuesday as authorities ordered thousands of people to flee a powerful, "life-threatening" cyclone roaring toward waterlogged northeast Australia.

Cyclone Yasi was forecast to directly hit the far northern city of Cairns late Wednesday with wind gusts up to 155 mph, the Bureau of Meteorology said. Up to three feet (one meter) of rain could fall on communities in Queensland state already saturated from months of flooding.

U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman resigned Monday, amid reports that he may seek the Republican nomination in 2012 and try to deprive his boss, President Barack Obama, of a second term.

Huntsman, a smooth former Utah governor, wrote to Obama to announce he would resign effective from April 30, after the White House noted he had told several officials he planned to leave in the first part of this year.

South Korea's president pressed North Korea on Tuesday to change its pattern of provocations and take responsibility for two deadly attacks last year, saying that could lead to a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

President Lee Myung-bak's appeal came as the rival Koreas are to hold a preliminary meeting next week to lay the groundwork for high-level defense talks — the first in more than three years — to ease months of hostility on the Korean peninsula that have raised fears of war.

Six people including four police officers were killed and 14 people wounded in two bomb blasts in Pakistan's northwest on Monday, the first detonated by a teenage suicide bomber.

The suicide attack, which killed five people and left 11 injured, was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, saying it targeted the police in the troubled city of Peshawar.