ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistani security forces have killed 20 militants near the Afghan border, a security official said on Thursday, as tensions over how to tackle the Taliban and al Qaeda surfaced with the United States.

KABUL (Reuters) – A bomb planted on a bicycle went off near the governor’s office in the southern Afghan province of Ghazni on Thursday, wounding seven people, an official said.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli authorities and settlers have seized large tracts of land in the occupied West Bank for security zones around Jewish settlements beyond an Israeli-built barrier, a human rights group said on Thursday.

Russia has urged the United Nations’ highest court to dismiss a case brought by Georgia, accusing Moscow of human rights violations in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Israel has annexed thousands of hectares of West Bank land beside the barrier it is building, according to an Israeli rights group.

Two Israeli rights groups have accused their government of tearing Palestinian families apart by curtailing the right to live in the West Bank.

A member of the pro-Syrian opposition in Lebanon has been killed in a car bombing south-east of the capital, Beirut, security officials have said.

TEHRAN (FNA)- An earthquake measuring 6 on the Richter scale jolted the port city of Bandar Khamir in Iran’s southern province of Hormozgan on wednesday.

TEHRAN (FNA)- A rebel group has released one of a group of Iranian policemen it said it kidnapped in southeastern Iran in June, a police commander said on Tuesday.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran’s Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said Tehran is engaged in talks with Chinese and Indian oil and gas companies to develop energy reserves in the Caspian Sea in northern Iran.