Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called on Baghdad on Friday to shut down camps run by separatist Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and to hand over guerrilla leaders.

His comments came two days after the Ankara parliament, in defiance of Washington, authorized Turkish troops to cross the mountainous border into northern Iraq to track down the rebels, who use the region as a base from which to attack Turkey.

Baghdad, backed by Washington, has urged Turkey to refrain from military action, saying this could destabilize the wider region, but has also told the rebel fighters to leave Iraq.

A bomb killed a child and wounded 13 others in a playground as they celebrated the Islamic festival of Eid on Friday in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmato, police said.

Police Colonel Abbas Mohammed said a would-be suicide bomber hid the explosives in a cart he was pushing that was filled with children's toys. The bomber was wounded and is in hospital.

The predominantly Shi'ite Turkmen town of Tuz Khurmato lies about 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad.

French police have arrested 310 people suspected of having downloaded images of child pornography on the Internet, police said on Friday.

Police said 144 of those detained across France since Monday had admitted they had downloaded pornographic videos of young girls. Some also confessed that they had raped or sexually assaulted children. Around 20 people had been cleared.

"There's no specific profile," a police spokesman said, adding that the arrests had been conducted upon a tip-off from an Italian association for the protection of victims.

Serbia is ready to pay a reward of 1 million euros ($1.42 million) for information leading to the arrest of top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, officials said on Friday.

"The decision on the award was made by the Council for National Security late last night," Rasim Ljajic, Serbia's point man for the Hague war crimes tribunal, told Beta news agency.

The arrest of Mladic, a Bosnian Serb former general who is indicted for genocide by the U.N. court, is a key condition for Serbia to sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the European Union, the first step towards membership.

Japan has extended economic sanctions on North Korea, citing a lack of progress in a row over Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang.

The measures - which ban imports from North Korea and visits by its ships - will continue for another six months.

A top official said Japan was seeking advances on both the abduction and nuclear issues.

The move comes exactly a year after North Korea carried out its first nuclear test, on 9 October 2006.

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is expected to seal a "reconciliation agreement" with President Pervez Musharraf on Friday that analysts believe could lead to power sharing within months.

Although on the verge of gaining an ally, Musharraf was uncertain if a presidential election will go ahead in parliament and provincial assemblies on Saturday, as the Supreme Court is hearing new challenges to him standing while army chief.

The court is expected to rule on Friday whether to order the postponement of a vote that General Musharraf, who came to power in a coup eight years ago, looks sure to win.

Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party dismissed the Myanmar junta's offer of talks as surreal on Friday, while China said the ruthless suppression of pro-democracy protests did not require international action.

Senior General Than Shwe, who caused international outrage by sending in soldiers to crush peaceful monk-led demonstrations, was asking Suu Kyi to abandon the campaign for democracy that has kept her in detention for 12 of the last 18 years, a spokesman said.

"They are asking her to confess to offences that she has not committed," said Nyan Win, spokesman for the Nobel peace laureate's National League for Democracy (NLD), whose landslide election victory in 1990 was ignored by the generals.

Typhoon Lekima lashed Vietnam and southern China with torrential rains and high winds, killing at least seven people, damaging hundreds of homes and disrupting air, sea and train travel, officials said on Thursday.

The storm, which killed at least five people in the Philippines last weekend, swept into central Vietnam from the sea on Wednesday night, blowing roofs off houses, sinking scores of fishing vessels and grounding flights before moving to Laos.

The typhoon raised rivers to dangerous levels in Ha Tinh and Quang Binh provinces, but the damage caused was not as serious as feared.

About 25 suspected Iraqi militants were killed in an air strike on Friday during a raid targeting a "special groups" commander working with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the U.S. military said.

U.S. troops were engaged in what was described as a heavy firefight west of Baquba, capital of volatile Diyala province north of Baghdad, during a raid around dawn against a commander it said was linked to Iran's elite Qods force.

South of the capital, the U.S. military said it was investigating the deaths of three civilians shot by U.S. troops near a checkpoint manned by local tribal police in Abu Lukah village near Mussayab on Thursday.

Rescuers are slowly bringing to the surface thousands of workers trapped for hours in a South African gold mine.

More than 3,000 men became trapped 2.2km (1.4 miles) underground when a broken pipe severed power cables to a lift on Wednesday.

More than 1,000 have been freed so far from the Elandsrand mine, 80km (50 miles) west of Johannesburg.

The miners are being brought out through a small shaft, and only 75 can be hauled clear at a time.

The accident at the mine, owned by Harmony Gold Mining, happened at about 1000 (0800 GMT).