A powerful aftershock that rocked an area of Japan still reeling from last month's earthquake and tsunami disaster killed four people and injured around 100, reports and emergency services said Friday.

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said a 63-year-old woman in Yamagata prefecture died after her respirator failed when the power was knocked out by the 7.1 magnitude tremor.

Six members of Afghanistan's security services died in a Taliban attack on a police center near the southern city of Kandahar, officials said Thursday, raising the death toll from three.

The attack was the latest in a series of assaults on Western-backed security forces in the de facto capital of southern Afghanistan and the birthplace of the Taliban militia leading a nearly 10-year insurgency against U.S.-led troops.

Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo is still in contact with international representatives about a possible surrender even though his residence is under attack, a U.N. spokesman said Wednesday.

"Discussions continue with the U.N. using its good offices to the fullest extent possible," U.N. peacekeeping department spokesman Nick Birnback told Agence France Presse.

Backers of Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo on Wednesday accused French troops and forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara of staging an assassination attempt by attacking his residence and the presidential palace.

"Heavy weapons fire is targeting his residence with aerial and ground support from Licorne," Gbagbo's spokesman Ahoua Don Mello said, referring to the name of the French forces in the country.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's trial on charges of sex with an underage prostitute and abuse of power opened in Milan on Wednesday after a dramatic build-up that has dented his popularity.

Berlusconi himself did not attend the hearing and the judges immediately adjourned the trial to May 31. The woman at the centre of the case, Karima El Mahroug, now 18 -- better known as "Ruby the Heart Stealer" -- was not present either.

A new White House report warned Tuesday that Pakistan still had no clear path to triumph over insurgents, and said Afghanistan's Taliban was turning more and more to soft civilian targets.

The semi-annual White House report to Congress is designed to judge progress or otherwise towards key objectives of the war in Afghanistan and operations against al-Qaida in Pakistan, now nearly a decade old.

Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo hunkered down in a bunker at his home Tuesday after being cornered by his arch rival's followers, as his own forces silenced their weapons and asked for a ceasefire.

Having resisted calls to cede power to internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara for four months, Gbagbo was now trying to strike a deal to quit, according to the former colonial power France.

Michel Martelly, a carnival singer with a colorful past who seized the mantle of change, is Haiti's new president after storming to a landslide victory, preliminary results showed.

The 50-year-old faces the huge challenge of rebuilding the Caribbean nation, which was the poorest country in the Americas even before a January 2010 earthquake flattened the capital Port-au-Prince and killed more than 225,000 people.

U.S. President Barack Obama Monday formally announced his 2012 re-election bid, saying the country needed "to protect the progress" it had made.

"Today, we are filing papers to launch our 2012 campaign," Obama said in a statement.

A teenage suicide bomber struck a bus terminal in northwest Pakistan on Monday, killing seven people in the sixth bomb attack in as many days to strike the nuclear-armed country, police said.

The bomb exploded in the small town of Jandol in the district of Lower Dir, 200 kilometers from the capital Islamabad. Pakistani troops fought a major offensive to expunge the Taliban from the area nearly two years ago.