At least 18 people died and five others were badly burnt on Tuesday when a helicopter crashed in northeast India close to the border with China, a local police chief told Agence France Presse.

"The numbers of those killed are 18 and five people badly burnt have been taken to hospital in Tawang," said S.B. Singh, police inspector general of Arunachal Pradesh state, amending the earlier death toll of 20.

Fidel Castro confirmed he had resigned from the top leadership of the Cuba Communist Party in an article published on Tuesday, after the party approved a raft of economic reforms.

"Raul knew that I would not accept a formal role in the party today," Castro said in an article on the Cuba debate.cu portal, referring to his brother Raul and his own absence from the party's new Central Committee, elected on Monday.

Deadly riots erupted across Nigeria's north on Monday as results from presidential elections showed incumbent Goodluck Jonathan had won the contest that reflected deep regional tensions.

Results from all of Nigeria's states announced by the electoral commission showed Jonathan had handily beaten his northern rival, ex-military ruler Muhammadu Buhari. The electoral commission was yet to officially declare him the victor.

Ten Iranian engineers and five of their Afghan colleagues were kidnapped by Taliban gunmen on Monday in a remote western region of Afghanistan near the border with Iran, an official said.

The men, who were working on a road construction project, were snatched at gunpoint in the Post-i-Road district of Farah province, which borders Iran, provincial government spokesman Naqibullah Farahi told Agence France Presse.

Twenty-five years after the Chernobyl disaster, Europe is still divided on the use of nuclear energy. But the Fukushima crisis stirred new fears that could slow down nuclear expansion.

"The accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant will upset the development of nuclear power in the coming years", including in Europe, French-based market research Company Xerfi Global said in a study published after Japan's quake.

Suspected Taliban militants shot dead two soldiers and injured seven others Monday in an audacious attack inside the Afghan defense ministry which the militia said was aimed at France's defense minister.

A suicide bomber wearing army uniform was killed inside the building before he could detonate, the ministry's spokesman said following the assault which struck at the heart of the embattled Kabul government.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged full support for quake-hit Japan on Sunday as the operator of its stricken nuclear plant said it expects to achieve "cold shutdown" in six to nine months.

Japan's embattled Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) offered the timeline more than five weeks after a giant quake and tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has since leaked radiation into the air, soil and sea.

Silvio Berlusconi will seek reelection in 2013, Justice Minister Angelo Alfano -- the man recently identified as the Italian prime minister's political heir -- said Saturday.

At a private dinner with foreign journalists on Tuesday, Berlusconi, 74, told reporters off the record that he would not contest the next election, and named Alfano as a possible successor, according to a press leak.

Vicious storms smacked the Deep South and toppled trees like dominoes as tornadoes howled through towns, tossing a mobile home in Alabama nearly a quarter of a mile across a state highway, killing the man inside.

Combined with fatalities in Arkansas and Oklahoma, the death toll had risen to 10 by early Saturday — the deadliest storm of the season so far.

Five international troops and four Afghan soldiers died in a suicide attack claimed by the Taliban at the Afghan army's headquarters in the war-torn country's east, officials said.

The attack is the worst single incident since December against foreign forces in Afghanistan, and comes amid a wave of suicide attacks on security targets, three months before foreign forces are to start a limited pullback.