Pervez Musharraf (file photo)

PAKISTAN: Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, says all of the 80 people killed in an attack on a religious school near the Afghan border were militants undergoing terror training. In his first comments since Monday's air strike in the Bajaul tribal district, General Musharraf said today (Tuesday) that the militants had been under close surveillance for the last six or seven days before Pakistan's helicopter gunships attacked at dawn Monday.

IRAQ: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has

Nouri al-Maliki

ordered the removal of U.S. and Iraqi army checkpoints around Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City district. Iraqi and U.S. troops threw a cordon of checkpoints around Sadr City last week as part of an operation to search for a kidnapped American soldier. Shi'ite activists have been protesting what they call a U.S. military siege of Sadr City, a sprawling enclave that is home to two million people.

NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR: China's Foreign Ministry says North Korea has agreed to return to stalled multilateral talks aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear program. The ministry said the decision to restart the six-nation talks was reached at an informal meeting in Beijing between North Korea, China and the United States. The ministry says the talks would resume "soon," but it did not specify a date.

Avian Flu

BIRD FLU-NEW STRAIN: Scientists in Hong Kong and the United States have detected a new strain of bird flu in China, and they say this variety of the virus could start a new wave of illness. The discovery by researchers from the University of Hong Kong and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, (in the southern U.S. state of) Tennessee, appears in a scientific journal published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

A passenger bus overturned at Bacnotan, La Union province in northern Philippines by typhoon Cimaron, Monday, Oct. 30, 2006

ASIA TYPHOON: Vietnamese authorities have begun evacuating residents of coastal areas to prepare for the expected arrival of Typhoon Cimaron later this week. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has also instructed local officials to recall fishing boats from the sea and ban other vessels from leaving port.

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