At least four people were killed Monday when a suicide bomber blew himself up in his car in an attack aimed at a senior police officer in Somalia's central Galkayo region, police said.

"There are at least five people dead, including the bomber," said Mohamed Abdullahi, a police officer in the town, which straddles the border between the northern breakaway state of Puntland and the self-proclaimed region of Galmudug.

At least 16 miners were killed Monday when a methane explosion tore through a coal mine in the remote Russian Far North within the Arctic Circle, in the latest disaster to hit the country's mining industry.

Two miners were still missing after the explosion at the Vorkutinskaya mine controlled by Russian steel-making giant Severstal in the Komi region town of Vorkuta, the emergencies ministry said in a statement.

A terrifying stampede at a railway station left at least 36 people dead after the main day of India's Kumbh Mela religious festival, which drew record crowds of 30 million, officials said Monday.

Dozens more were injured in the crush on Sunday evening at Allahabad, marking a tragic end to the most auspicious day of the 55-day Hindu festival in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the world's largest gathering of humanity.

A bus carrying pilgrims to Bangladesh's beach resort town of Cox's Bazaar plunged into a dried up river Monday, killing at least 17 people and injuring another 26, police said.

The bus crashed onto the Matamuhuri's parched river bed after the driver lost control of the vehicle which then smashed through railings on a bridge.

France bombed Islamist targets in northern Mali on Monday following a string of guerrilla attacks by the extremists a month after Paris launched an offensive to drive them from its former colony.

In a pre-dawn attack, witnesses said a French army helicopter destroyed a central police station in the northern city of Gao from where rebels from the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) had opened fire from the station on Malian troops Sunday, sparking an hours-long street battle.

Relief supplies began trickling into tsunami-hit communities in the Solomons Islands Monday, as another powerful aftershock rattled the Pacific nation in the wake of last week's 8.0-magnitude earthquake.

The aftershocks had slowed but not halted aid operations in the remote Santa Cruz islands, where at least 10 people died in the tsunami triggered by the quake last Wednesday, the Red Cross said.

Los Angeles on Sunday announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the capture of an ex-cop accused of "domestic terrorism" in a murder spree that has claimed three lives.

Investigators have been combing the snow-blanketed California mountains for Christopher Dorner, 33, a disgruntled former LA Police Department (LAPD) officer who had threatened to murder police in a chilling online manifesto.

U.S. President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address on Tuesday to call for dramatic cuts in nuclear arsenals around the world, The New York Times reported late Sunday.

Quoting unnamed administration officials, the newspaper said that in recent months Obama had secured agreement with the U.S. military that its nuclear force can be cut by roughly a third.

The northeast of the United States crawled out from under a mammoth blizzard Sunday that caused at least nine deaths and paralyzed the region with high winds and heaps of snow.

More than 300,000 customers were still without power in the wake of the storm that struck a slew of states and dumped as much as three feet of snow across New England before battering three Canadian provinces.

The rebels France is battling in northern Mali are some of the very same fighters it helped arm in Libya, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Sunday.

"In Mali, France is fighting against those it armed in Libya against (Moammar) Gadhafi's regime in violation of the U.N. Security Council (arms) embargo," Lavrov said in extracts of a television interview published by Russian news agencies.