Belarus on Tuesday gave a cool reception to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's surprise announcement he favors a merger between the two countries into one state as in the days of the USSR.

The opposition raised the alarm over what it said were Russian dreams to essentially annex Belarus while sociologists said that support for re-unification with Russia was dwindling in the country year-by-year.

NATO has asked for troop reinforcements for Kosovo, a spokesman said Tuesday but denied the demand was linked to the recent unrest in the volatile north.

"We can control the situation (in the north), we have enough troops. It is not because of our inability to control the situation. Our soldiers deployed on the ground will need some relief ... and we need (new troops) to back up the soldiers," as reserves, KFOR spokesman Hans Dieter Wichter told Agence France Presse.

At least 35 people were killed in 24 hours in Karachi, officials said Tuesday, as Pakistan's interior minister described the city as enduring "a reign of terror and bloodshed".

Authorities have struggled to end nightly gun battles raging across the country's financial capital, with political, ethnic and criminal rivalries leaving more than 200 people dead last month.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has said the United States must provide "clear terms of engagement" in the battle against Islamist militants, if strained bilateral ties are to improve.

Zardari's remarks came during talks late on Monday with Marc Grossman, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, successor to late veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke who was President Barack Obama's previous point man on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The man behind the deadly twin attacks in Norway on July 22 wants a Japanese psychiatrist to carry out his psychological evaluation, his lawyer was quoted as saying Tuesday.

"My client has expressed a wish for a Japanese expert. This wish has to do with the concept of honor. He believes that a Japanese person will understand him better than someone from Europe," defense lawyer Geir Lippestad told financial daily Dagens Naeringsliv.

Two British nationals, a man and a woman, who were detained by NATO forces in Afghanistan last month have been released, the Ministry of Defense in London said Tuesday.

"We can confirm, in accordance with UK detention policy, that two individuals detained by ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) forces in mid-July were released from detention in Kandahar on 29 July," a spokesman said.

A suspected motorcycle bomb wounded five people at a drugstore in the southern Philippines on Tuesday, police said.

One of the five casualties, a seven-year-old boy, is in critical condition from the early afternoon blast, said Superintendent Roberto Badian, the police chief of the southern city of Cotabato.

Tensions ran high in China's remote Kashgar city Tuesday after authorities shot dead two men suspected of fomenting deadly ethnic unrest and vowed a further crackdown on "religious extremists".

Police killed the men, both from the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that makes up around half the population of China's northwestern Xinjiang region, late Monday as they were trying to capture the pair, Kashgar authorities said.

Three guards from a private security company were killed Tuesday after a team of suicide bombers attacked the firm's offices in northern Afghanistan, local officials said.

The attack, which triggered a firefight with security forces, happened in the city of Kunduz and also injured nine civilians and a policeman, said provincial spokesman Mahboobullah Shahedi.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday said he was in favor of Russia and its western neighbor Belarus uniting into a single state, as in the days of the Soviet Union.

"This is possible and very desirable," said Putin, when asked at a pro-Kremlin youth camp on Russia's Lake Seliger if Russia and Belarus could merge into one entity.