A Chinese toddler who was ignored by 18 passers-by as she lay critically injured in the street after being run over by two vehicles has died, the hospital treating her said Friday.

Surveillance camera footage of people walking past the two-year-old girl, nicknamed Yue Yue, as she lay bleeding and unconscious sparked a wave of condemnation and soul-searching on China's hugely popular social networking sites.

The Somali kidnappers of a disabled Frenchwoman who died after being snatched from her home in Kenya are demanding a ransom for the return of her body, France said on Thursday.

"The hostage-takers are even trying to sell the remains, it could not be more despicable," French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet told the i-TELE news network.

African Union and Somali government troops battled Shebab rebels in the anarchic capital Mogadishu Thursday, as Kenyan troops in the south continued their assault on Islamist positions there.

Heavy fighting broke out before dawn in Mogadishu as AU-backed Somali forces advanced on holdout Islamist Shebab positions, officials and witnesses said.

NATO-led peacekeeping troops fired teargas to disperse protesters Thursday as they began dismantling a barricade erected by Serbs in northern Kosovo near a disputed border crossing with Serbia.

No injuries were reported in the incident at around 6:00 am (04:00 GMT) as an armed transporter approached to remove a truck in the center of the Kosovo Serbs' barricade, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

A major offensive is under way against Haqqani militants in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan must act to remove safe havens on its side of the border, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday.

"We are taking action against the Haqqanis. There was a major military operation inside Afghanistan in recent days," she told a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The United States said Wednesday it will hold rare direct talks with North Korea next week on ending the authoritarian state's nuclear program and announced it was replacing its chief envoy.

The State Department said that U.S. and North Korean officials will meet Monday and Tuesday in Geneva but insisted that the talks were "exploratory" and that Pyongyang needed to offer proof that it was serious about dialogue.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) said it carried out attacks that killed 24 Turkish soldiers in retaliation for losses in Turkish air strikes on PKK bases in Iraq, a Kurdish news agency reported.

The attacks were also in response to the arrest of hundreds of Kurdish politicians in urban Turkey, Firatnews quoted the PKK as saying Wednesday.

The first 200 French soldiers left Afghanistan on Wednesday, kickstarting troop withdrawals announced three months ago by Paris as part of NATO plans to wind down its combat mission by 2014.

In total, a quarter of France's current troop deployment is scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan before the end of 2012, ahead of a full drawdown of NATO's combat mission scheduled for 2014.

The Philippine military accused Muslim rebels Wednesday of killing 19 soldiers on a remote southern island in one of the worst outbreaks of violence between the two sides in years.

The fighting further complicated efforts to end one of Asia's longest insurgencies, with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the military trading accusations of breaking a ceasefire in place to promote peace talks.

Kenyan jets struck Shebab positions in Somalia Wednesday in a bid to rid the border area of Islamist rebels they blame for a spate of abductions, including that of a French woman who died in captivity.

Kenyan ground troops guided by pro-government Somali forces prepared for a fresh assault against the insurgents with the blessing of the Western-backed government in Mogadishu and its Ugandan protectors.