The U.S. Navy has announced that it assisted an Iranian fishing vessel in distress in the Gulf, the fourth such incident this year in an area marked by tension between Washington and Tehran.

The Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet said in a statement late Tuesday that forces from the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group responded to a "distressed Iranian fishing dhow" that had nine crew members on board.

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il raised uncertainty but also opened a window for change in the communist state, South Korea's top official for cross-border ties said Wednesday.

"Chairman Kim Jong-Il's death heightened uncertainties," Unification Minister Yu Woo-Ik said in a speech to a forum.

Pakistani warplanes pounded militant hideouts in the northwestern tribal area before dawn on Wednesday, killing at least 20 Taliban insurgents, as Baluch rebels attacked Pakistani security forces overnight killing at least 11 soldiers, officials said.

The jets targeted hideouts in the tribal Orakzai district and at least four compounds were hit, they said, in the latest surge of fighting between government security forces and Islamist militants in the Afghan border areas.

A man in an Afghan army uniform shot dead a soldier with NATO-led forces in southern Afghanistan, a spokesman said Wednesday, just days after four French soldiers died in a similar shooting.

The latest incident happened on Tuesday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said, without giving further details or the nationality of the victim.

Supporters of Vladimir Putin Tuesday called on people to attend a "counter-revolutionary" rally in Moscow on the same day as Russia's opposition holds its third mass protest in the Russian capital.

Organizers called on "anti-Orangist forces" to mount a show of strength against Saturday's opposition rally, in a reference to Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution that ousted its old order from power and infuriated the Kremlin.

Turkish police arrested an Iranian passenger on a domestic flight after he attacked cabin crew because he was angered by a six-hour delay, the Anatolia news agency reported on Tuesday.

The passenger, identified only as S.R.I., was scheduled to fly from Istanbul to Antalya in southern Turkey on Monday evening on an Onur Air plane, but heavy snowfall in Istanbul caused long delays.

A group of French senators said Tuesday they had asked the constitutional council to examine a new law that punishes denial of the Armenian genocide, effectively suspending the legislation.

Turkey reacted furiously last week when the Senate approved the law which threatens with jail anyone in France who denies that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces amounted to genocide.

Dozens of heavily armed Taliban militants attacked a Pakistani military post on Tuesday, sparking clashes that killed seven soldiers and wounded another 10, the military said.

Helicopter gunships were mobilized when the fighting broke out in the same Jogi area as clashes killed six soldiers on January 25 in the district of Kurram, part of Pakistan's lawless tribal belt along the Afghan border.

President Barack Obama downplayed a recent report about the use of U.S. drones in Iraq, indicating that the unmanned aircraft are mainly used for embassy surveillance.

Obama said during an online event on Monday that a New York Times story citing Iraqi officials as expressing outrage over the use of U.S. drones following last year's troop withdrawal was "a little overwritten."

None of the 29 Chinese workers abducted after an attack in a volatile region of Sudan have been freed, Chinese state media said Tuesday, dismissing reports that some of the workers had been released.

The workers were abducted Saturday by militants in a remote region in the country's south. Sudanese state media reported Monday that 14 of them had been freed, but the official Xinhua News Agency and China Daily newspaper said all 29 were still being held.