Fighters trying to install Ivory Coast's democratically elected president months after the disputed vote descended Thursday on the country's largest city, aiming to unseat the nation's entrenched ruler as gunfire broke out across Abidjan.

The regular army put up almost no resistance during an offensive that began Monday, allowing the forces backing internationally recognized leader Alassane Ouattara to take over about 80 percent of the country in a matter of days.

A letter bomb exploded at the offices of the Swiss nuclear energy association Thursday, injuring two people, police said.

The letter exploded at the offices of Swissnuclear in the northern town of Olten, a police spokesman said. Both victims suffered superficial wounds.

A bomb blast targeting an Islamic party chief killed at least 10 people and wounded 20 others in a northwestern Pakistani town Thursday, police said.

The bombing took place in the town of Charsadda, close to the convoy of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) party -- the second attack against the politician and his supporters in as many days.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said that the stricken nuclear plant at the centre of the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986 must be scrapped, Kyodo news reported on Thursday.

Kan told the Japanese Communist Party leader Kazuo Shii that the whole of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power station should be decommissioned, Kyodo said.

North Korea told South Korea Thursday to choose between dialogue or war, as Seoul made its first concession on aid since the North's deadly bombardment of a border island last November.

The communist state accused Seoul "warmongers" of whipping up hysteria and confrontation over two deadly frontier incidents last year.

A court on Wednesday ordered the race hate trial of Dutch anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders to go ahead.

The trial opened in October last year, but was abruptly halted three weeks later when the judges trying him were ordered to step down by a panel of their peers who upheld the politician's claims of bias.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up near a police checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday killing seven people and wounding 16 others, police said.

"The bomber came on a motorbike and detonated himself close to Ambar check post near Swabi town," local police chief Abdullah Jan said.

Radiation levels in the sea off Japan's stricken nuclear plant hit their highest reading yet, officials said Wednesday, amid a struggle to deal with large amounts of radioactive water at the site.

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crippled by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami, said levels of radioactive iodine-131 were 3,355 times the legal limit in the sea near the plant, according to a reading taken Tuesday.

An alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people has been arrested in Pakistan, an Indonesian counter-terrorism official said Wednesday.

"Umar Patek was arrested in Pakistan," the official told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity, without giving details about where or how Tuesday's arrest was made.

Afghan authorities on Tuesday arrested a senior adviser to President Hamid Karzai on embezzlement charges, the office of the attorney general said Tuesday.

The arrest of Noorullah Delawari, who is a former governor of the Afghan central bank, comes a day after police in Kabul detained a former minister in Karzai's government over the misuse of public funds.