Three Turkish soldiers have been killed in clashes with Kurdish rebels in the southeast of the country, the Anatolia news agency reported on Thursday.

The fighting with members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) erupted during an operation in a rural area near the town of Dortyol in Hatay province, the provincial governor's office said, Anatolia reported.

Seven people were killed and 12 others wounded in a suicide attack on the governor's compound in Afghanistan's western Farah province on Thursday, police said.

"Seven people -- six policemen and one civilian -- were killed and 12 others were wounded, including nine civilians and three police," regional police spokesman Abdul Raouf Ahmadi said.

Iran rejects Western pressures over its nuclear activities and will never give up its rights, Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator said Thursday ahead crunch talks with world powers in Baghdad next week.

"If we participate in the negotiations... it is because of our resistance (to Western powers). Thanks to our resistance, we have defended the rights of the Iranian people," Saeed Jalili said in a speech broadcast on local television.

Twenty-nine Chinese fishermen have been kidnapped at sea by unidentified North Koreans who have demanded 1.2 million yuan ($190,000) in ransom, fellow sailors and media said Thursday.

The men were fishing in three separate vessels on May 8 when a group of gunmen boarded their boats and forcibly took them over, locking up those on board, said a boat owner surnamed Sun who has been in touch with them.

Turkey accused Israel on Thursday of violating the airspace of Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus in a controversial oil and gas exploration area.

The Israeli aircraft violated the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus's airspace five times in Monday's incident which saw Turkish fighter jets chase out the intruder, the army command said in a statement.

South Korea, the United States and Japan will hold high-level talks in Seoul next week about developments in North Korea following its failed long-range rocket launch, a report said Thursday.

Lim Sung-Nam, South Korea's chief nuclear envoy, his Japanese counterpart Shinsuke Sugiyama and the U.S. special envoy on the North Glyn Davies will meet on Monday, Yonhap news agency quoted a foreign ministry official as saying.

Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

Mladic's trial opened at the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague, also watched in a live broadcast in Sarajevo by widows and other relatives of victims of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica where almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were allegedly murdered by Mladic's forces.

A U.S. Army Apache helicopter accidentally dropped an inactive missile over central Texas, forcing dozens of homes to be evacuated, officials said Wednesday.

No one was injured in the incident in which residents in Killeen told police they saw an object falling from an AH-64 attack helicopter into a field late Tuesday, according to a statement from the army's Fort Hood base near Killeen.

Rwandan rebels have killed at least 50 civilians in May in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Twenty-two of them died in an attack Monday in the village of Kamananga in Sud-Kivu province, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said, blaming the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group.

A senior judge was sworn in Wednesday as Greece's caretaker prime minister with the sole task of holding new elections in June after an inconclusive ballot on May 6.

Panagiotis Pikrammenos, the 67-year-old head of the Council of State, the country's top administrative court, will name his cabinet on Thursday, when the new parliament is also scheduled to convene.