Gunmen have attacked a police station in northern Nigeria's Jigawa state, killing a teenage girl and wounding an officer in the first such incident since the president's state of emergency decree.

"The gunmen shot indiscriminately into the police station and engaged our men in a shootout, killing a teenage girl trying to flee and wounding a policeman," Jigawa state police commissioner Hashimu Argungu said of the attack late Tuesday.

South Korea and the United States will soon sign a new plan on countering any North Korean attacks, Seoul said Wednesday, amid international wariness over the abrupt leadership transition in Pyongyang.

"We believe there remains a possibility of provocations by the North during the power succession to Kim Jong-Un," deputy defense minister Lim Kwan-Bin told reporters.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said Tuesday he would reassess his White House bid after suffering a heavy defeat in Iowa's first vote of the 2012 U.S. presidential elections.

"With the voters' decision tonight in Iowa, I have decided to return to Texas, assess the results of tonight's caucus, determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race," Perry told supporters.

The Taliban announced on Tuesday that they had come to an "initial agreement" to open their first political overseas office, possibly in Qatar, as part of peace talks with the United States.

In a statement on their purported website "Voice of Jihad,” the Islamists said they had held "preliminary talks with relevant sides including Qatar" to open an office outside Afghanistan, without confirming where it would be.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike struck a crowded bazaar in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Tuesday, killing four children and a policeman, a police commander told Agence France Presse.

The attacker detonated his explosives near a mobile police post as officers ordered him to stop, Kandahar police chief Abdul Raziq told AFP.

Turkey will compensate the families of 35 civilians mistakenly killed in an airstrike meant for Kurdish rebels, the deputy prime minister said, even as he insisted that military officials followed proper procedures, including firing warning shots.

The airstrikes, guided by intelligence from drones and fired by Turkish F-16 jets, hit a group of Kurdish smugglers in northern Iraq last week. The loss of life was one of the highest single-day civilian death tolls in Turkey's decades-old conflict with the rebels.

Iran and the European Union each said Tuesday they were waiting on the other to take steps on resuming long-stalled negotiations over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said "we are waiting for a date and venue of the next meeting to be declared" by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who sent a letter last October proposing renewed talks.

A threat by Iran to unleash the "full force" of its navy if a U.S. aircraft carrier is redeployed to the Gulf, and an immediate American dismissal of the warning, sent tensions and oil prices soaring on Tuesday.

The unprecedentedly sharp rhetoric raised the possibility of conflict breaking out between arch-foes Tehran and Washington, pitching a long standoff over Iran's nuclear program into dangerous new territory.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday that Iran was continuing to develop nuclear weapons and called for stronger sanctions against Tehran.

"Iran is pursuing the development of its nuclear arms, I have no doubt about it," he told French television I-Tele. "The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency is quite explicit on this point."

Iran has no long-range missiles, a Russian defense official said Tuesday in Moscow's first response to a series of tests conducted by Tehran near the vital Strait of Hormuz oil supply route.

"Iran does not have the technology to create intermediate or long-range inter-continental ballistic missiles," defense ministry spokesman Vadim Koval told the Interfax news agency.