Turkish police shot dead one suspect and wounded another after a rocket attack on a police headquarters in the capital Ankara late Friday, officials said.

During the Friday attack, two rockets hit the police building in the Dikmen suburb and another device that did not explode was found in a neighboring garden, Interior Minister Muammer Guler said.

Kenyan troops and Somali militants were locked in a hostage stand-off inside an upmarket Nairobi shopping mall early Sunday, after the Islamist gunmen stormed the complex and massacred 39 people and wounded 150.

Kenyan officials said "major operations" were underway with police and soldiers engaged in an apparent final bid to put an end to the 17-hour-long battle. The Kenyan government said an unknown number of hostages were trapped in several locations in the Westgate mall.

The U.S. Air Force came dramatically close to detonating a huge atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961, according to a newly declassified document published by Britain's Guardian newspaper on Saturday.

Two hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over the city of Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 23, 1961 when the B-52 plane carrying them broke up in mid-air, according to the file.

Police in Tajikistan arrested 10 people suspected of planning a series of attacks to destabilize the country ahead of the presidential polls this year, an official said Saturday.

The suspects, mostly young men who "received training in Pakistan", were seized and disarmed in the capital of Dushanbe, a representative of the Tajikistan interior ministry told Agence France Presse.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa met Friday with Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his younger brother, President Raul Castro, the leftist South American leader said.

Correa was in Cuba to inspect homes being built by Ecuadoran military engineers in Santiago de Cuba, 900 kilometers (560 miles) south-east of Havana, part of an aid package for the island following the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012.

The Philippines urged its citizens on Saturday to send more aid for 100,000 people who had fled heavy fighting between troops and Muslim rebels in the country's south, calling their plight a "humanitarian crisis".

The conflict has claimed more than 100 lives since hundreds of rebels from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) entered the key trading center of Zamboanga in a bid to derail peace talks with a rival group.

Pakistan on Saturday released its most senior Afghan Taliban detainee Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior official told Agence France Presse, in a move welcomed by Kabul who hope it will encourage peace talks with the insurgents.

Baradar, a one-time military chief often described as the militants' former second-in-command, was the most high profile detained Taliban commander in Pakistan.

British police arrested two men on suspicion of endangering an aircraft after a Sri Lankan Airlines plane was forced to make an emergency landing at Stansted Airport, officials said Saturday.

The Airbus A330, which was carrying 267 passengers and crew, was due to land at London Heathrow Airport but was diverted to Stansted, eastern England, just after 1830 GMT on Friday, a Stansted spokesman said.

The FBI's new director says he supports the government's electronic surveillance program as a useful, "legal" tool, even though he opposed eavesdropping activities under ex-president George W. Bush.

Two weeks after taking over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey said in an interview with Agence France Presse and several other news outlets that President Barack Obama's controversial spying policies were needed to counter a "metastasizing" threat from al-Qaida.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said he had arrived in Beijing on Saturday after accusing the United States of refusing his plane access to its airspace for the journey.

"I have just arrived in China to strengthen friendship and cooperation between our two countries," said Maduro, successor to deceased former leader Hugo Chavez, on a newly created weibo microblog, China's equivalent to Twitter.