Pakistan and India have wasted "massive resources" on a nuclear arms race, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said Friday ahead of a landmark meeting with his Indian counterpart.

Sharif said he was looking forward to meeting India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and told the U.N. General Assembly: "Our two countries have wasted massive resources in an arms race."

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday toned down expectations for his planned meeting with Premier Nawaz Sharif this weekend at the U.N., saying Pakistan remained an "epicenter of terrorism."

Singh, making what will likely be a farewell visit to the White House after a decade in power, told President Barack Obama that India still faced "difficulties" because of the activities of its neighbor and bitter rival.

A minibus swerved off a mountain road into a deep gorge in northern India killing 20 passengers on Friday, police said.

A 12-year-old boy was the lone survivor, after the bus rolled down into the 500-foot (152-meter) deep gorge in the state of Himachal Pradesh, a senior police officer said.

Militants stormed a police station and an Indian army base in Kashmir on Thursday, killing at least nine in an attack the state's chief minister said was aimed at derailing peace talks between India and Pakistan.

The militants, all wearing army fatigues, lobbed grenades and opened fire at the Hiranagar police station near the border with Pakistan, around 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the main Kashmiri city of Srinagar, police said.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed Wednesday he will meet his Pakistani counterpart this weekend in a major step towards better relations following rising tensions.

Singh said he will hold talks with Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, the first such meeting in three years, amid heightened friction over a string of deadly military attacks across their border in disputed Kashmir.

The U.S. National Security Agency targeted the Indian embassy in Washington and the Indian U.N. office in New York with sophisticated surveillance equipment that might have resulted in hard disks being copied, a report said Wednesday.

The Hindu newspaper, which has been collaborating with the Guardian newspaper reporter Glenn Greenwald, said the Indian offices were on a top-secret list of countries chosen for intensive spying.

Suspected militants shot and killed a paramilitary soldier and critically wounded another on Monday in a busy market in Indian Kashmir's main city of Srinagar, police said.

The rebels, armed with a pistol, shot the soldiers from the Central Industrial Security Force while they were buying vegetables at the market, a senior police officer said.

Mumbai police formally charged five male suspects in court Thursday over the gang-rape of a young photographer in the city last month, a case that reignited anger about women's safety in India.

Four adult accused, arrested within days of the attack, appeared at the Esplanade Court in Mumbai, barefooted and looking disheveled. One wore a T-shirt and jeans while the rest were in shirts and trousers.

In a country where many girls are still discouraged from going to school, Sushma Verma is having anything but a typical childhood.

The 13-year-old girl from a poor family in north India has enrolled in a master's degree in microbiology, after her father sold his land to pay for some of his daughter's tuition in the hope of catapulting her into India's growing middle class.

Indian police on Monday were interrogating a school bus cleaner after his arrest on suspicion of raping a four-year-old in the vehicle on the outskirts of Mumbai earlier this month.

The 26-year-old was arrested at the weekend after the girl told her parents of the incident more than a week after it occurred on September 6, police said.