Taliban armed with guns and explosives struck a U.S.-run base in Kandahar on Thursday, where blasts and gunfire reverberated in the southern Afghan city, police and witnesses said.

A group of "three to four" armed men, possibly with suicide vests, had taken up positions in an empty compound that was once used by the USAID development agency and were firing on the base, according to police.

Snow blanketed eastern Turkey Thursday, complicating rescue efforts and bringing more misery for the thousands left homeless by a devastating earthquake as the death toll surged past 500.

Ninety-one hours after disaster struck in the eastern province of Van, rescuers pulled a 19-year-old from the rubble in the town of Ercis but the prospects of finding more people alive were fading fast.

The polls opened Thursday in Ireland's presidential election, with more than three million voters eligible to cast their ballots to choose the republic's ninth president.

Polling stations opened at 7:00am (06:00 GMT) and were to close at 10:00pm (21:00 GMT). Seven candidates are standing, representing the largest-ever field for the post.

A U.S. drone strike on Thursday killed the brother and a close relative of a Pakistani Taliban commander in the badlands of South Waziristan along the Afghan border, officials said.

Four militants were killed when four missiles slammed into a pick-up truck travelling through Azam Warsak, 20 kilometers west of Wana, the main town of the tribal district synonymous with Taliban, the officials told Agence France Presse.

Seven people were wounded when a small bomb fitted with a timer exploded outside a grocery shop in a busy market in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Thursday, police said.

The bomb was packed in an oil canister and placed outside the shop in the city's popular Rampura Market, local police officer Javed Khan said.

A senior U.S. official said Thursday there was some progress made but "no breakthrough" at this week's meeting with North Korea aimed at restarting long-stalled nuclear disarmament talks.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was speaking after briefing South Korea about the talks in Geneva on Monday and Tuesday.

Residents poured out of the Thai capital by bus, plane and train Thursday, heeding government warnings to use a special five-day holiday to evacuate parts of the flood-threatened metropolis before a weekend deluge rushes through the city.

The evacuation warning applied to only three of Bangkok's 50 districts, but the government acknowledgement the entire city could flood in coming days meant many residents were leaving the city of 9 million people before the floods come.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that Iran was "morphing into a military dictatorship."

Clinton said confusion about who is calling the shots in Tehran has also complicated U.S. efforts to communicate with the Iranian leadership.

Desperate survivors of Turkey's devastating earthquake looted truckloads of aid supplies as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged failures Wednesday in the relief effort.

As night-time temperatures dropped to below zero and snow was forecast to fall overnight, authorities were in a race against time to provide some form of shelter for the thousands of people who faced another night out in the open.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta began a visit to South Korea Wednesday, pledging to keep a "nuclear umbrella" in place over Washington's close ally to deter threats from North Korea.

Panetta, on the last leg of an Asian tour which also took him to Indonesia and Japan, was to meet troops at the huge Yongsan U.S. army base in central Seoul later in the day.