A suspected member of al-Qaida was killed when a bomb he was trying to plant at a checkpoint run by a local militia in Yemen's restive Abyan province exploded, a tribal source said on Tuesday.

The explosion took place late on Monday in Mudia, one of only two towns in Abyan -- along with Loder -- that has not yet fallen under the control of the extremists.

U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs pledged Monday to work together on cyber threats and forge a dialogue on security as both sides steered clear of a diplomatic dispute over a top Chinese dissident.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and China's Defense Minister Liang Guanglie struck a positive note at a joint press conference at the Pentagon, announcing a joint counter-piracy naval exercise in the Gulf of Aden later this year and tentative plans to cooperate in the sensitive realm of cyber security.

The United States said Monday Syria's parliamentary election "borders on ludicrous" as the regime of President Bashar Assad continues its violent crackdown on its people.

"It's not really possible to hold credible elections in a climate where basic human rights are being denied to the citizens and the government is continuing to carry out daily assaults ...on its own citizens," State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said.

The White House said Monday that the alliance between France and the United States remained as strong as it had been before the election of new Socialist president Francois Hollande.

Hollande will meet President Barack Obama next week in one of the first acts of a presidency framed by conflicts with Washington over Afghan war policy and other European leaders over how to tackle the euro crisis.

One of the accused 9/11 plotters shouted "You are going to kill us" Saturday during a chaotic proceeding before a military court charging them with the deadliest attack ever on the United States.

"Maybe you're not going to see us anymore," Ramzi Binalshibh told the judge, Colonel James Pohl, shouting "You are going to kill us."

Facebook already assured of becoming one of the most valuable U.S. firms when it goes public later this month, now must convince investors in the next two weeks that it is worth all the hype.

Top executives at the world's leading social network have kicked off their all-important road show on Wall Street -- an intense marketing drive ahead of the company's expected trading launch on the tech-heavy Nasdaq on May 18.

The self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and four co-accused appeared in a Guantanamo Bay court Saturday to be arraigned, all facing the death penalty if convicted.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants -- being seen in public for the first time in three years -- were to be formally charged with planning and executing the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,976 people in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Deputy Head of Hizbullah's Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq slammed on Saturday U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman for interfering in the elections, considering it as a “violation of sovereignty and dignity.”

“His discussions that focused on the elections confirm that he is the actual leader of the March 14 forces in Lebanon,” Qaouq said.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to respect differences between the two countries, as U.S. officials scrambled to resolve a row over a dissident.

Wen welcomed Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the ornate Purple Light Pavilion of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership's compound in the heart of Beijing.

The United States released letters Thursday from Osama bin Laden's compound that reveal a divided al-Qaida and an anxious leader worried about his network's image among Muslims, even as he yearned to strike again at American targets.

A year after bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs at his Pakistani hideout, the White House released 17 documents from among a vast trove of files recovered at his home in Abbottabad.