U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is looking to build military ties with Indonesia but Washington is watchful that Jakarta honors its commitment to reform its armed forces, accused of rampant rights abuses under Suharto, a U.S. official said Sunday.

In a meeting Sunday with his Indonesian counterpart Purnomo Yusgiantoro on the resort island of Bali, Panetta will discuss regional issues and Washington's growing "military relationship" with Jakarta after a decade-long hiatus, the defense official said.

The U.S. embassy in Nairobi warned Americans on Saturday of an "imminent threat" of attacks possibly targeting foreigners, one week after Kenyan forces crossed into Somalia to hunt down Shebab fighters.

The embassy cited "credible information of an imminent threat of terrorist attacks directed at prominent Kenyan facilities and areas where foreigners are known to congregate, such as malls and night clubs."

Polling stations in Bulgaria opened at 6:00 am (0300 GMT) Sunday for the first round of presidential and local elections, with eve-of-ballot polls predicting a win for the ruling right-wing GERB party of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov.

Some 6.9 million Bulgarians in the country and abroad are eligible to elect in a direct majority vote a successor to incumbent Socialist President Georgy Parvanov, stepping down after two five-year terms in office.

Riot police broke up week-long anti-capitalism protests in Sydney on Sunday, with demonstrators claiming they were forcibly evicted from their city campsite in violent dawn raids.

Police said 40 people were arrested after resisting orders to pack up their shelters outside the Reserve Bank of Australia, where they have been holding peaceful protests since last Saturday as part of the global "Occupy" movement.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday called for peace talks with the Haqqani network in Pakistan as he sought to assuage domestic fears over Afghanistan's future partnership with the United States.

Following a recent visit to the region by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai reiterated conditions for the U.S. strategic agreement due to be worked out next month, insisting that U.S. forces must stop raiding Afghan homes.

France's opposition Socialist Party officially anointed Francois Hollande Saturday as its candidate for next year's presidential elections, which opinion polls suggest he will win.

Hollande took the party's nomination over rival Martine Aubry on October 16 in the run-off of France's first ever U.S.-style open primary which galvanized the French left, drawing some 2.8 million voters.

The United States is trying to increase the flow of non-lethal supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan via Uzbekistan as it may not always be able to count on the Pakistan route, a U.S. official said Saturday.

The official spoke as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, part of the U.S. military's Northern Distribution Network (NDN), following a trip to Pakistan to discuss troubled ties there.

Turkey on Saturday kept up a major offensive against Kurdish rebels on its border and in northern Iraq on the third day of operations after rebel attacks killed 24 Turkish soldiers.

The military activity continued on both sides of the border, said an AFP photographer in the southeastern town of Cizre, less than 40 miles (70 kilometres) from the Iraqi frontier.

Russia said Saturday it had put high-ranking U.S. officials implicated in "human rights crimes" on a visa black list, saying that list would grow if Washington continued to put pressure on Moscow.

Washington had earlier outraged Moscow by banning visas for an unspecified number of Russian officials linked to the 2009 death in prison of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, which became a symbol of abuses in the Russian judicial system.

Two suspected Russian spies operating in Germany for more than 20 years have been arrested in the first case of its kind since German reunification, a report said Saturday.

Der Spiegel said the man and woman, who lived as a couple, were arrested Tuesday when police raided their home at Ballingen, between Stuttgart and Cologne in western Germany.