Islamist militants staged brazen twin car bomb attacks on an army base and a French-run uranium mine in Niger on Thursday, killing at least 19 people and taking several trainee army officers hostage in the impoverished west African nation, the government said. The unprecedented attacks were claimed by an Islamist group as revenge for Niger's involvement in a French-led military offensive in neighbouring Mali and come just four months after Al-Qaeda linked militants seized a desert gas plant in neighbouring Algeria in a siege that left 38 hostages dead.

The Senate on Thursday unanimously approved Srikanth Srinivasan as the most senior US judge of South Asian descent, amid speculation that he may one day be tapped for the Supreme Court. Srinivasan, who was born in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh and raised in Kansas, will serve on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered a stepping stone for justices to the top court.

Security agents in Togo on Thursday used teargas to disperse opposition members who had gathered for a demonstration in the capital despite a ban on protests, an AFP reporter saw. The demonstrations had been called by "Let's Save Togo", a coalition of opposition and civil society groups, to protest against the death in detention of an opposition member and to demand the release of others held in connection with fires at two markets in January. The market blazes caused millions of dollars in damage and led to the arrest of several opponents of President Faure Gnassingbe.

President Barack Obama set out Thursday to limit the controversial use of drones for the crackdown on terrorism and also renewed his call on Congress to cooperate to close a detention facility for terrorism suspects in Guantanamo. "Our nation is still threatened by terrorists," Obama said in a speech on counterterrorism measures he delivered at the National Defense University.