Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was traveling to Caracas on Thursday for the funeral of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, state television reported.

Ahmadinejad "will shortly leave Tehran for Venezuela to attend the funeral" of Chavez who died on Tuesday, the broadcaster announced in the early afternoon.

An Italian court on Thursday sentenced former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to a year in prison over the publication of leaked transcripts from a police wiretap in a newspaper that he owns.

Berlusconi, who faces two more verdicts this month for tax fraud and having sex with an underage prostitute, can appeal the conviction which would suspend the sentence under Italian law.

Malaysia said clashes between intruding Filipino militants and its security forces had left 60 people dead as of late Thursday, as it rejected a ceasefire offer from the fighters' leader.

Police chief Ismail Omar said 32 followers of a self-proclaimed Philippine sultan had been killed in two confrontations since Wednesday near the scene of a three-week standoff in Sabah state, after a military assault to dislodge them.

France is carrying out DNA tests to determine whether top Islamist militant leaders were among those killed in recent fighting in Mali, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Thursday.

"We know that there were a fair number of leaders among the several hundred terrorists killed" in recent days, Fabius said on RTL radio.

Osama bin Laden's son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was seized by CIA agents and taken to the United States after Turkey deported him to Jordan this month, a Turkish newspaper reported on Thursday.

Abu Ghaith, the former spokesman of the Al-Qaida network, was seized last month at a luxury hotel in Ankara after a tip-off from CIA and was held there by the police despite a U.S. request for his extradition.

Two women have been kidnapped and gang-raped near Delhi, police told Agence France Presse on Thursday, in two separate incidents that highlighted the persistent risk of sexual assault in India.

In one case, three men abducted and attacked a 19-year-old woman, who hailed an auto rickshaw carrying two male passengers near a popular shopping center in Delhi's satellite city of Ghaziabad last weekend, a police official said.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was in Mali on Thursday to meet French troops fighting Islamist rebels, the ministry said.

He was to visit several cities, including the capital Bamako, and was due in the northern city of Gao at mid-day.

North Korea on Thursday vowed to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, amplifying its threatening rhetoric hours ahead of a vote by U.N. diplomats on whether to level new sanctions against Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test.

An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for "pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the headquarters of the aggressors" because Washington is pushing to start a nuclear war against the North.

Malaysia's defense minister on Thursday rejected a ceasefire offer by a self-styled Philippine sultan unless his fighters who launched a deadly incursion "surrender unconditionally.”

"A unilateral ceasefire is not accepted by Malaysia unless the militants surrender unconditionally," Defense Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said on his Twitter feed.

The United States and China will on Thursday seek to tighten the U.N. sanctions screws on North Korea after its widely condemned nuclear bomb test last month.

After weeks of closed-door talks, the U.N Security Council will vote at 1500 GMT on a resolution proposed by the two key powers that targets North Korean diplomats, finances and access to luxury goods, and blacklists its accused weapons dealers.