Egypt's spy master revealed his service recruited agents in Iraq and Syria to counter Iranian support for militants in his country, according to U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.

Omar Suleiman told U.S. top military commander Admiral Michael Mullen in a 2009 meeting that Iran had tried to recruit Bedouins to smuggle weapons into Hamas-controlled Gaza and that Egyptian security had rounded up a cell of Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hizbullah.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez Monday called on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to resign after the leak of embarrassingly candid U.S. diplomatic correspondence by WikiLeaks.

"The empire stands naked... Mrs. Clinton should resign," Chavez said in a speech, using his favorite description of the United States. "It's the least you can do: resign, along with those other delinquents working in the State Department."

Authorities on three continents are investigating whether suspicious packages shipped from Yemen to Chicago religious sites are part of a terrorist plot.

Officials were investigating whether two packages — one described as containing a toner cartridge with wires attached and powder — were mailed as part of an attempted attack or a dry run for a future attack.

EU chief diplomat Catherine Ashton said on Friday that Iran had accepted the principle of re-starting talks on its disputed nuclear drive "after" November 10.

Iran's negotiator with the West, Saeed Jalili, "is willing to agree a date and a time after the 10th of November to begin the dialogue," Ashton said on her arrival at a European Union summit in Brussels.

A Pakistani-American was arrested Wednesday for plotting to cause carnage on Washington's subway system by carrying out bomb attacks with people he believed were tied to al-Qaida, officials said.

Farooque Ahmed, 34, had been allegedly observing, videotaping and photographing Metro stations in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, including stations at the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, since April to plan the attacks, which would have been carried out next year.

The death toll from a tsunami and a volcano rose to more than 300 Wednesday as more victims of Indonesia's double disasters were found and an official said a warning system installed after a deadly ocean wave in 2004 had broken from a lack of maintenance.

Hundreds were still missing after Monday's tsunami struck the remote Mentawi islands off western Sumatra, where officials were only beginning to chart the scope of the devastation.

Gunmen opened fire on a car wash in western Mexico on Wednesday, killing at least 13 people, an official said. It was the third massacre in Mexico in less than a week.

The gunmen drove up to the car wash in the city of Tepic and opened fire without provocation, said the official with the attorney general's office of Nayarit state, where the city is located.

Queen Elizabeth II formally welcomed the emir of Qatar to Britain on Tuesday for a trip aimed at boosting growing trade links and both countries' bids for the football World Cup.

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani shook hands with the British monarch upon their meeting in Windsor, west of London, as the military sounded a gun salute.

Iran began loading fuel into the reactor core of its Russian-built nuclear power plant on Tuesday, a move which brings the facility closer to generating electricity after decades of delay.

In a report from the plant in the southern city of Bushehr, the Arabic-language Al-Alam channel of public television said engineers "started loading the core of the Bushehr power plant with the nuclear fuel today".

A bomb attack killed six Pakistani soldiers in one of the most lawless parts of the country's northwestern tribal belt on Friday, security officials said, the third deadly attack this week.

The spate of killings of paramilitary troops in the tribal belt follows a relative lull in violence as the military and government focused on relief efforts for 20 million people hit by catastrophic floods.