U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Beijing Wednesday for talks with Chinese leaders amid a looming diplomatic row over a blind activist said to be under U.S. protection after fleeing house arrest.

Unless it can be settled swiftly, the case of Chen Guangcheng threatens to overshadow the annual meeting between leaders of the world's two largest economies on key issues ranging from North Korea's rocket launch to Syria.

Taliban bombers attacked a heavily fortified guesthouse used by Westerners in Kabul on Wednesday, in deadly defiance of U.S. President Barack Obama's call that war was ending during a visit to Afghanistan on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death.

Seven people were killed after attackers dressed in burqas detonated a suicide car bomb and clashed with guards at the "Green Village" complex of guesthouses used by foreign organizations including the European Union, the United Nations and aid groups, officials said.

The United States, South Korea, Japan and European countries have proposed dozens of North Korean firms and entities be added to a U.N. sanctions list over the isolated state's rocket launch, diplomats said Tuesday.

But with fears growing that North Korea is now about to stage a nuclear weapon test, the deadline for agreeing to new sanctions may be put back because China, the North's closest ally, has not yet agreed to the measures, diplomats said.

Five self-described anarchists were arrested in a plot to blow up an Ohio bridge but the public was never in any danger, the FBI said Tuesday.

The anarchists spent months discussing several different attacks before settling on the bridge near Cleveland.

Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn must face a civil trial over an alleged sex assault in New York, a judge ruled Tuesday, rejecting his last ditch attempt to claim diplomatic immunity.

The judge hearing the suit brought by Nafissatou Diallo ruled Strauss-Kahn had lost immunity because he'd resigned from the International Monetary Fund well before the civil action was lodged.

Hundreds of Afghan demonstrators on Tuesday accused U.S.-led NATO troops of killing four children during clashes with insurgents in a southern Afghan town, officials and witnesses said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton headed to China Tuesday as U.S. officials raced to find a solution to a sensitive row over a top dissident reportedly holed up at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had long planned to go to Beijing for the annual meeting between the world's two largest economies that now is likely to be overshadowed by the case of blind activist Chen Guangcheng.

Osama bin Laden bemoaned "disaster after disaster" inflicted by U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaida before he was killed and even mulled changing his terror group's name, a top U.S. official said Monday.

President Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan said al-Qaida was losing "badly" under a huge U.S. assault, was a "shadow" of its former self and that its core leadership would soon be "no longer relevant."

The escape of a Chinese activist championed by Washington and now said to be under U.S. protection is hugely embarrassing for Beijing and comes at the worst possible time ahead of U.S.-China talks, analysts say.

Both countries have maintained absolute silence on the whereabouts of 40-year-old blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng since his audacious flight from house arrest eight days ago, underscoring the extreme sensitivity of his case.

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton telephoned on Monday President Michel Suleiman to praise his speech at the Arab League summit that was held in Baghdad in late March.

She lauded his call to implement democracy in political practice and expressed her country’s support to such an end.