US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a landmark nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia on Saturday, a showpiece of Washington's "reset" of ties with its former Cold War enemy.

The new START nuclear arms reduction treaty officially came into force when Clinton and Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov exchanged ratification documents at a security conference in the German city of Munich.

An Italian woman tourist traveling with a driver and a tour guide has been kidnapped in the Sahara desert region of, security sources said Friday.

The 56-year-old Italian who has not been identified was abducted Wednesday around 6:00 pm (1700 GMT) in Alidem, an area 130 kilometers south of Djanet, the main town in southeastern Algeria, the security official in the region contacted by Agence France Presse said.

DR Congo's army repulsed an assault by gunmen on Lubumbashi airport in the south of the country Friday in which one member of the security services was killed, witnesses said.

The security agent died after gunfire erupted between the army and the unidentified attackers who launched their assault on the airport around 4:00 am (0200 GMT), said an Agence France Presse journalist at the scene.

Australia marshaled 4,000 troops and sent a supply ship with tons of food to its cyclone-stricken northeast coast Friday, as awe-struck residents in wrecked towns confronted debris that included boats tossed into neighbors' yards.

Authorities confirmed the first death from the storm that slammed into the coast early Thursday and said a search was under way for two missing people.

A 48-year-old Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo Bay collapsed and died, apparently from natural causes, after exercising inside the jail, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Awal Gul fell in the shower Tuesday night after working out on an elliptical machine in Camp 6, a communal section of the Guantanamo reserved for well-behaved prisoners, said military spokesman Army Col. Scott Malcom. The prisoner was taken to the base hospital, where he later died.

Australia's biggest cyclone in a century shattered entire towns, pummeling the coast and churning across the country Thursday, terrifying locals but causing no confirmed fatalities.

Shaken residents emerged to check the damage after Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi hit land at around midnight, packing winds of up to 290 kilometers per hour in a region still reeling from record floods.

A court on Thursday convicted a 29-year-old Somali man of attempted terrorism and attempted murder for attacking a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Mohammed.

The court in the central Danish town of Aarhus ruled that Mohamed Geele not only tried to kill Kurt Westergaard when he broke into his home on January 1, 2010, wielding an axe and a knife, but that the attack also amounted to an act of terrorism.

Its concrete-laden town center looks an unlikely spot for a clash of civilizations, but Luton has emerged as the battlefield for tensions between radical Islam and Britain's far-right.

Efforts by this drab commuter town north of London to shed its image as an extremist hotbed suffered a setback in December when local resident Taymour Abdelwahab blew himself up in a botched suicide attack in Stockholm.

Afghan and Pakistani troops exchanged fire across their border on Wednesday, officials from both sides said, blaming each other for starting the incident.

General Almar Gul Mangal, commander of the border police's fourth battalion in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost confirmed the exchange of fire and accused Pakistani troops of sparking the battle.

The United States is conducting a manhunt for a previously unknown group believed to be involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, according to a US cable published in Wednesday's Telegraph newspaper.

In the memo, leaked by the WikiLeaks website, a US official in Qatar told the Department for Homeland Security in Washington that three Qatari men were under suspicion of conducting surveillance operations on the attack sites.