The U.N. Security Council has split the international sanctions regime for the Taliban and al-Qaida to encourage the Taliban to join reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan.

The council unanimously passed two resolutions on Friday, setting up one new blacklist of individuals and organizations accused of links to al-Qaida and a second for those linked to the Taliban militia.

Four people, including two children, were killed and 28 wounded Saturday in a bomb blast and a militant attack on Pakistani troops, security officials said.

The children and one civilian were killed by a remote-control motorcycle bomb targeting security forces in Punjgur district of the insurgency-hit southwest province of Baluchistan.

The United States is holding talks with the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Saturday, in what is thought to be the first official confirmation of such contacts.

"Talks with the Taliban have started... the talks are going on well," Karzai said, addressing a conference in Kabul.

Authorities in China have arrested 19 people suspected of "provoking incidents" during three days of riots in the country's southern industrial heartland, state media said Saturday.

The violence in Guangdong province was the latest in a series of flare-ups in the country, which analysts say highlight resentment towards an unresponsive government.

At least two members of the Venezuelan National Guard and an inmate were dead Friday after security forces launched a massive operation to retake control of the El Rodeo prison, where 22 people have been killed in rioting.

Some 1,300 inmates were backed into a part of the prison and refused to surrender late Friday after a day-long raid involving thousands of National Guard troops managed to take over most the facility, gaining control of 70 percent of the prison population, estimated at around 4,700 inmates, officials said.

South Korean troops fired at a passenger jet flying from China with 119 people on board after mistaking it for a North Korean aircraft, amid increasingly fraught relations on the divided peninsula.

Soldiers manning a guard post on Gyodong Island, just 1.7 kilometers south of the North Korean coast, fired their K-2 rifles on Friday towards the plane, descending as it approached Seoul's Incheon International Airport.

An Egyptian boat seized with its 22-member crew by pirates off the coast of Somalia in August 2010 has been freed, an Egyptian foreign ministry official said on Friday.

The Pakistani government helped Egypt secure the release of the Suez which docked in Oman, the official news agency MENA reported quoting Mohammed Abdel Hakam.

Police blocked off roads around the Pentagon on Friday and searched the surrounding area after arresting a man with a suspicious backpack in nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

Police later identified the suspect as 22-year-old Marine Corps reservist Yonathan Melaku.

Indian security forces defused a powerful bomb found on a train carrying about 1,000 passengers in the northeastern state of Assam on Friday, a police official told Agence France Presse.

"Security forces were conducting a routine search when they found an unattended small but heavy bag and on suspicion they checked and detected the bomb neatly concealed," Assam's inspector general Bhaskarjyoti Mahanta said.

The Philippines said Friday it would send its ageing navy flagship into disputed South China Sea waters amid rising tensions with Beijing over their competing claims.

However defence department spokesman Eduardo Batac insisted the deployment was a routine assignment and had nothing to do with an announcement by China on Thursday that one of its maritime patrol vessels would pass through the area.