Divers were searching for five workers after an undersea tunnel collapsed at one of Japan's biggest oil refineries Tuesday, emergency services said.

Six people were in the partially constructed tunnel at Kurashiki, 550 kilometers (350 miles) west of Tokyo, when it caved in, but one managed to get out, a spokesman for the city fire department said.

A British judge on Monday ordered the release on bail of radical cleric Abu Qatada, allegedly a former top aide of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, despite government concerns he poses a security risk.

The interior ministry condemned the decision, saying the 51-year-old is "a dangerous man who we believe poses a real threat to our security and who has not changed in his views or attitude to the UK."

The toll from Europe's winter weather pushed past 360 Monday when snow- and rain-swollen rivers burst a Bulgarian dam and killed at least eight, while more homeless people perished on frigid city streets.

Four elderly people drowned in their homes in the southeastern Bulgarian village of Biser after a nearby dam wall broke, submerging the whole village under 2.5 meters of icy water, the interior ministry said.

Queen Elizabeth II on Monday marked 60 years since she rose to the British throne with visits to a town hall and a school, in a low-key start to five months of diamond jubilee festivities.

A small but enthusiastic crowd braved freezing temperatures to see the monarch arrive in King's Lynn in Norfolk, eastern England, 60 years to the day since she became queen following the sudden death of her father King George VI.

Two German men were jailed in Britain on Monday after pleading guilty to possessing articles from an al-Qaida magazine.

Police seized a hard drive and laptop from Christian Emde, 28, and Robert Baum, 24, both from Solingen in western Germany, when they arrived in the southern English port of Dover on July 15 last year.

Gunmen blew up a police station and shot one officer in Nigeria's flashpoint city of Kano on Monday as blasts rocked a market in Maiduguri, the base of the Boko Haram Islamists, police said.

Boko Haram has claimed a series of recent attacks in Africa's most populous nation and top oil producer, including coordinated gun and bomb assaults on January 20 in Kano, Nigeria's second city, that killed at least 185.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday ordered new sanctions into force on Iran, including its central bank, seeking to tighten a choke hold on Tehran's economy as a nuclear showdown deepens.

Obama signed an executive order implementing parts of a new sanctions regime passed by Congress late last year at a time of high tensions with Iran and rampant speculation about a possible Israeli strike against its nuclear sites.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned his officials to stop "blabbing" about the possibility of an attack targeting Iran's nuclear program, the newspaper Maariv reported on Monday.

Netanyahu is said to have directed the instruction at a number of military officials and government ministers who he believes have been speaking too freely about a potential Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Romania's justice minister Catalin Predoiu has been named interim prime minister Monday following the resignation of Emil Boc's center-right government, the president's office said.

"President Traian Basescu has taken note of Prime Minister Emil Boc's resignation and named Catalin Predoiu as interim prime minister," it said.

Four women and two children were killed, with dozens of others trapped under rubble when a factory collapsed in Pakistan's city of Lahore on Monday, officials said.

The three-storey building used to manufacture veterinary medicines came crashing down, probably the result of a boiler and a gas cylinder explosion at the premises in the congested Multan Road area, police said.