Three Chinese government ships sailed into waters around disputed islands controlled by Tokyo for about five hours on Saturday, the Japanese coastguard said.

The maritime surveillance vessels entered the 12-nautical-mile zone off Uotsurijima, one of the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyus, in the East China Sea shortly after 9:30 am (0030 GMT).

At least three people were killed by floodwaters that devastated much of southern Alberta, leading authorities to evacuate the western Canadian city of Calgary's entire downtown. Inside the city's hockey arena, the waters reached as high as the 10th row.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Friday called the level of flooding "stunning" and said officials don't know yet if it will get worse, but said the water has peaked and stabilized and noted that the weather has gotten better.

A DEA agent has died in an apparent robbery attempt in Colombia, U.S. Ambassador Michael McKinley said Friday. Colombian authorities said the American agent was stabbed four times.

McKinley told local Radio Caracol that the robbery attempt occurred after the anti-drug agent left a meeting with friends at a Bogota restaurant and got into a taxi.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff spoke about her generation's struggles in battling a dictatorship during a prime-time speech meant to connect with the nation's youth who have energized widespread and at times violent anti-government protests.

The 10-minute address ended Rousseff's much-criticized silence in the face of the protests. She promised to make improvements in urban transportation and to battle corruption, but offered few details as to how that will happen.

Relief teams were racing against time Saturday to rescue tens of thousands of stranded people in rain-ravaged northern India as the death toll from flash floods and landslides neared 600.

Rescuers have recovered scores of bodies from the swollen Ganges river with nearly 63,000 people, mainly pilgrims and tourists, still stranded or missing after torrential monsoon rains struck the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, officials said.

A 43-year-old woman killed in the September 11 attacks in New York has been identified, bringing the total number of identified victims to 1,636, authorities said Friday.

"The identification was made by retesting of remains recovered during the original recovery" in World Trade Center debris, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The Justice Department has charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property in the NSA surveillance case.

Snowden, believed to be holed up in Hong Kong, has admitted providing information to the news media about two highly classified NSA surveillance programs.

A treaty intended to clear the way to deporting radical cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan has passed into law in Britain.

The agreement, announced by Home Secretary Theresa May in April, aims to allay fears that evidence extracted through torture will be used against the terror suspect at a retrial.

A top North Korean envoy said Friday that U.S. hostility could lead to war at any time, but reaffirmed a government offer of talks with Washington that could include the nuclear weapons issue.

At a rare but typically combative news conference, the isolated state's U.N. ambassador Sin Son-Ho accused the United States of driving up tensions and appealed for an end to U.N. and U.S. sanctions against Pyongyang.

EU foreign affairs head Catherine Ashton said early Friday that the premiers of Serbia and Kosovo made some headway towards normalizing ties, during overnight talks in Brussels.

In a statement issued after a six-hour meeting into the wee hours, Ashton said the Serbia and Kosovo prime ministers, Ivica Dacic and Hashim Thaci, "agreed a number of open issues, in particular in the field of justice, police and upcoming municipal elections."