U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has urged Japan to improve relations with neighboring countries after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to a controversial war shrine, an American official has said.

Abe enraged China and South Korea when on December 26 he made his first visit as premier to Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan's war dead including several high-level officials executed for war crimes after World War II.

Thousands of protesters firebombed polling stations and at least 18 people were killed as Bangladesh's ruling Awami League cruised to victory Sunday in an election boycotted by the opposition.

Police said they had opened fire at protesters as they torched more than 200 polling stations and stole and burnt ballot papers to try to sabotage the poll.

A small plane traveling to Connecticut after taking a tour of the Statue of Liberty made an emergency landing Saturday on a New York City interstate highway, startling drivers but touching down safely with no serious injuries to anyone aboard or on the ground, officials said.

The aircraft, a Piper PA-28, set down at around 3:20 p.m. on the northbound side of the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx borough, in an area where the highway passes through Van Cortlandt Park.

One person was wounded Saturday when an improvised bomb exploded in the Kenyan capital, police said, in a shop in Nairobi's mainly ethnic Somali district Eastleigh.

The attack is the latest of a series of bomb or grenade blasts in Kenya.

South Sudan's warring parties on Saturday met in Addis Ababa for the first time since fighting erupted three weeks ago and formally opened talks to strike a ceasefire deal.

"South Sudan deserves peace and development not war," Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom said at an opening ceremony attended by the government and rebel negotiating teams.

United States authorities warned residents to stay indoors and stock up on food after a fierce winter storm killed at least 11 people, with forecasters saying Saturday that the Arctic blast could hit record lows.

A state of emergency was declared in New York and New Jersey after heavy snow fell on Thursday and there was no sign of respite from the brutal chill that has struck since the start of the year in parts of the northeast U.S. and Canada.

A bomb exploded in central Kabul on Saturday evening in a district housing several embassies and NATO's military headquarters, but no casualties were immediately reported, officials said.

The apparent insurgent strike was the second of the day in Afghanistan after a NATO soldier was killed when six Taliban suicide attackers tried to storm a joint Afghan-NATO base in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Former first lady Barbara Bush went home Saturday after six days in hospital for pneumonia, a statement from the office of her husband, former president George H.W. Bush, said.

The 88-year-old thanked the doctors and nurses at the Texas hospital where she was admitted "for making sure I got the best treatment and got back to George and our dogs as quickly as possible," the brief statement said.

Back-to-back blasts on Saturday killed one and injured 11 others, including a senior politician, in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran, officials said.

In first attack, an explosives-packed motorcycle detonated at a taxi stand in the Sibi district of Baluchistan, killing one person and injuring nine others.

India's new anti-graft party announced Saturday it would contest most of the seats in upcoming general elections after its stunning poll showing in the nation's capital earlier this month.

One of the Aam Aadmi ("common man") Party's top leaders, Prashant Bhushan, announced the decision after the first day of a two-day meeting of the party's top decision-making body in New Delhi to plan strategy for the elections, due in May.