Syrian troops backed by tanks and warplanes launched an assault Sunday on a strategic rebel-held town near the Lebanese border, pounding the area with airstrikes and artillery salvos that killed at least 30 people and forced residents to scramble for cover in basements and makeshift bunkers, activists said.

Myanmar President Thein Sein began Saturday the first visit to Washington by a leader of his country in nearly 50 years as the United States throws its support behind his reforms.

Afghanistan's parliament failed to pass a law on Saturday banning violence against women, a severe blow to progress made in women's rights in the conservative Muslim country since the Islamist Taliban was toppled over a decade ago.

The United States on Friday steered clear of taking a tough stand on reports that Iran's electoral watchdog appears to have barred women from running in the June 14 presidential elections.

Two bombs near a Sunni mosque and another against a Sunni funeral procession killed 49 people in Iraq on Friday, officials said, after two days of attacks against Shiites that killed dozens.

President Barack Obama said on Thursday he reserved the right to resort to both diplomatic and military options to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but insisted that U.S. action alone would not be enough to resolve the Syrian crisis.

Bombs tore through markets in Baghdad and a suicide attacker blew himself up in a mosque in northern Iraq in violence across the country on Thursday that killed at least 25 people and extended a surge in sectarian-tinged bloodshed.

Car bombs struck Shiite neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital and a northern city on Thursday, killing 16 people, while gunmen in Baghdad shot dead the brother of a Sunni lawmaker, officials said.

An al-Qaida-linked cell broken up in Egypt at the weekend planned to bomb the U.S. and French embassies in Cairo, state news agency MENA quoted investigators as saying on Wednesday.

A suicide car bomb targeted a foreign military convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing 15 people including five Americans in the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital for nearly a year, officials said.