Pakistan is willing to hold peace talks with Islamist militants if they surrender their weapons first, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Tuesday.

"We have received messages from banned outfits and militant organizations for reconciliation and we have conveyed these messages to our leadership," Malik told reporters in Quetta, the capital of troubled Baluchistan province.

France's opposition on Tuesday called for the resignation of the head of the country's domestic intelligence agency, a friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy, after he was charged over spying on a journalist.

DCRI spy agency boss Bernard Squarcini was charged Monday with violating confidential correspondence, illegally collecting data and violating the confidentiality of sources of a journalist with the daily Le Monde.

A car bomb exploded in Mogadishu Tuesday near a meeting involving two Kenyan ministers after Shebab rebels promised Nairobi all-out retaliation for its unprecedented military operation inside Somalia.

Two days after declaring war on Somalia's Islamist insurgency, which it blames for a string of kidnappings, Kenya's forces advanced on a strategic rebel-held town deep inside southern Somalia.

A Swedish court on Tuesday convicted 23 women of possessing child pornography in a case that has drawn widespread attention because child pornography perpetrators are usually men.

The Falun district court in central Sweden handed the women, who are aged between 38 and 70, suspended sentences and ordered them to pay fines ranging from 2,500 kronor to 18,000 kronor ($375 to $2,691, 273 to 1,965 Euros).

Britain's Treasury said Tuesday it had frozen the assets of five men in connection with the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States.

The finance ministry confirmed that it had acted under the Terrorist Asset Freezing Act, after ministers pledged action in response to the purported plan to kill Saudi envoy Adel Al-Jubeir in a bomb attack.

Kenyan troops using aerial cover advanced Tuesday on a strategic rebel-held Somali town, even as Nairobi police stepped up security for fear of reprisal attacks by Islamists.

"Our forces will be concentrating on operations in Afmadow region today, they started moving there late on Monday," said Kenyan army spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir.

Soldiers, civil servants and families worked frantically Tuesday to add more than 1 million sandbags to Bangkok's vulnerable northern flood defenses after the city's governor warned they were needed to keep waters from swamping the capital.

Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra said late Monday that a 6-kilometer (3.7-mile) flood wall on the edge of the city's suburbs was vulnerable from massive pools of runoff flowing down from the north, signaling the threat to the city was still grave. He said the wall needed to be reinforced by Wednesday night.

Heavy rains pounded Central America on Tuesday, where more than 80 people have died in mudslides and flooding over the past week as swollen rivers destroyed bridges and submerged roads.

Authorities have gone on high alert across the mountainous region, home to 42 million people, as the rains have shown no sign of abating.

Two Britons have been arrested in Kenya near the border with Somalia, police in Wales said Tuesday.

The pair, believed to be from the Welsh capital Cardiff, were detained on Sunday, according to the Foreign Office in London, which said it was ready to provide consular assistance if required.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanked Malta for evacuating U.S. nationals from Libya at the start of the rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi during a visit to the island state on Tuesday.

The Maltese government "went the extra mile" to evacuate foreign nationals, Clinton said following talks with Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi.