Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview published Monday he did not see any progress on his country's nuclear standoff with the West before the U.S. presidential election in November.

"Experience has shown that important and key decisions are not made in the U.S. leading up to national elections," Ahmadinejad said in an interview with the Washington Post newspaper.

Israel is trying to thaw the frosty relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House, and set up a meeting with President Barack Obama, an Israeli newspaper said on Friday.

A report in the Maariv daily said National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror was in Washington and had been "meeting senior White House officials for the past two days in an attempt to reach certain understandings regarding the red lines that must be set for the Iranian nuclear program."

Last week's deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi was a "terrorist attack," the White House confirmed Thursday.

"It is self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One. "Our embassy was attacked violently and the result was four deaths of American officials. That's self-evident."

The co-chairman of White House challenger Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, Tim Pawlenty, stepped down on Thursday to become a lobbyist for the banking industry.

The campaign issued a joint statement by the two men -- former rivals for the Republican candidacy until Pawlenty dropped out late last year -- in which Romney expressed regret that Pawlenty will not stay with the campaign.

The United States warned its citizens Thursday to avoid travel to Pakistan amid ongoing protests in the Muslim country against a U.S.-made anti-Islam film.

The warning from the State Department updates an August 27 advisory, which warned of the "risks of travel to Pakistan" but stopped short of recommending Americans avoid traveling there.

More than a dozen inmates were wounded when a massive riot broke out at a maximum-security prison in California, with guards shooting one prisoner as they put down the melee, officials said.

The fighting, which involved around 60 inmates, some wielding crude blades, erupted Wednesday at the California State Prison-Sacramento, prompting guards to use "less-than-lethal force."

Egypt and Jordan could annul their peace treaties with Israel if it carries out a preemptive strike against Iran, U.S. officials have warned the Jewish state, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday.

Quoting a high-level Israeli official, Yediot Aharonot said Washington had warned the Jewish state that Arab leaders would not be able to control an angry public backlash if Israel were to mount an attack on Iran.

Up to 200 people protested without incident in front of France's embassy in Tehran on Thursday over a French satirical weekly's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

The protesters chanted "Death to France," as well as Iran's arch-foes Israel and the United States, as dozens of police deployed around the embassy compound in central Tehran prevented the crowd from approaching.

Hundreds of Afghans on Thursday protested for the first time against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in France and staged fresh rallies against a U.S.-made anti-Islam film.

About 300 students chanted "death to France, death to America" in a western neighborhood of the capital Kabul, an Agence France Presse photographer said.

North Korea on Thursday lashed out at a U.S. plan to build a new radar base in Japan, saying it would escalate an arms race and leave Pyongyang no option but to develop "more powerful nuclear weapons".

During a visit to Tokyo on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said an agreement had been reached on deploying another U.S. missile defense radar in Japan.