WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel and Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke in a call on Saturday about efforts to quickly resolve one of the most vexing issues in the two countries' relations, the delayed transfer to Afghan control of a key detention centre. The Pentagon said the two men "agreed to use the next week to conduct intensive work with a view to concluding an agreement," spokesman George Little said in a statement.

A person in the northeastern state of Maryland who recently died of rabies was found to have contracted the illness from an organ transplant done over a year ago, US health officials said Friday. The patient died in early March. Subsequent tests on the deceased donor's tissue and the organ transplant patient's tissue confirmed that both had a type of rabies usually linked to raccoons. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said such cases are extremely rare -- in the United States there are typically one to three cases of human rabies diagnosed yearly.

SEOUL, March 14 (Yonhap) -- South Korea will mark the first anniversary of a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States on Friday. After years of hard negotiations and ratification procedures, the free trade agreement, dubbed the "KORUS FTA," went into effect on March 15 last year, following a similar deal with the European Union that took effect in July 2011.

Iran could not produce enough highly-enriched uranium for an atomic bomb without being detected, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Tuesday. While Iran has made strides in its nuclear program, "we assess Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of WGU (weapons-grade uranium) before this activity is discovered," Clapper said in an annual report to Congress on global threats.