A local staff member with the U.N.'s peacekeeping force in the Abyei region contested by Sudan and South Sudan has been killed in an incident that followed a tribal dispute, a U.N. official told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

The employee, a member of the Dinka tribe, "was shot and killed" on Tuesday, Damian Rance, a public information officer with the U.N.'s humanitarian agency in Khartoum, told AFP.

Taliban insurgents on Wednesday dragged two young Afghan men from their car and shot them dead because they worked for NATO troops as interpreters, police said.

The bloodied bodies of the men were found next to their car on the side of a road in Logar province, less than 80 kilometers south of the capital Kabul.

A four-star general who headed U.S. Africa Command has been demoted amid charges he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on pricey travel, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta demoted General William "Kip" Ward, who was asked to reimburse $82,000 for having inappropriately used Pentagon travel funds, a senior defense official said.

Republican and Democratic senators on Tuesday called for scandal-plagued CIA ex-director David Petraeus to testify about the deadly September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

"I believe he will (testify). I think he's a responsible person, and I believe he will come," Democrat Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on CNN.

President Barack Obama gave his backing to the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan on Tuesday after the top general was dragged into the sex scandal that brought down CIA director David Petraeus.

General John Allen was placed under investigation after FBI agents probing email threats sent by Petraeus' mistress stumbled upon a vast trove of "flirtatious" messages Allen sent to another woman at the heart of the scandal.

President Barack Obama has delayed General John Allen's nomination as NATO's supreme commander pending a probe into his email correspondence with a woman at the center of a sex scandal, a White House spokesman said Tuesday.

"At the request of the secretary of defense, the president has put on hold his nomination of Gen Allen as SACEUR pending the investigation of Gen Allen's conduct by the Department of Defense IG (inspector general)," National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

He was wrongly reported dead last year, and his political influence was said to have faded as a younger generation assumed control of China, but former President Jiang Zemin has made a surprise comeback.

As the Communist Party readies to unveil its new leadership line-up on Thursday, Jiang's fingerprints -- or at least those of the faction for which he serves as an eminence grise -- seem increasingly clear on the transition.

A British Royal Navy submariner pleaded guilty in court Tuesday to meeting two men he believed were Russian spies to pass on secret codes and details of submarine operations.

Petty officer Edward Devenney, 30, from Northern Ireland, contacted a foreign embassy to try to pass the materials to Russia, a judge heard at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court.

Britain on Tuesday released terror suspect Abu Qatada from prison on bail after judges ruled that the man dubbed Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe should not be extradited to Jordan.

The radical Islamist preacher, who is in his early 50s, was driven out of the high-security Long Lartin prison in central England in a black van at high speed, television pictures showed.

A bicycle bomb apparently targeting security forces killed two people and injured nine others in Pakistan's troubled southwestern province of Baluchistan on Tuesday, police said.

The device exploded on the road from Baluchistan's provincial capital Quetta to the airport as a convoy of the government paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) passed nearby.