The Taliban insurgents who shot down a U.S. helicopter in Afghanistan, leaving 30 American troops dead, have been hunted down and killed in an air strike, a U.S. commander said Wednesday.

General John Allen, the new chief of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, said that "at approximately midnight on 8 August, coalition forces killed the Taliban insurgents responsible for this attack" in a bombing raid by an F-16 fighter jet.

The United States has launched a diplomatic offensive against Libya among African nations as Tripoli accused NATO of a "massacre" of 85 villagers in air strikes in support of rebels.

American diplomats are visiting several African countries as part of efforts to urge leaders to press Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi to leave power immediately, officials in Washington said on Tuesday.

The head of Iran's parliament's foreign affairs committee accused the United States of seeking to destabilize Syria after talks on Tuesday in Cairo with Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi.

Alaeddin Borujerdi's visit to Cairo was the first since former president Hosni Mubarak resigned in February after 18 days of massive streets protests.

The United States has vowed to "stay the course" in Afghanistan after 30 U.S. soldiers were killed there when, according to local officials, the Taliban shot down their helicopter.

The pledge from U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta -- and a salute from President Barack Obama -- came Saturday, after the US troops, an interpreter and seven Afghan soldiers were killed during an anti-Taliban operation late Friday.

U.S. officials and their counterparts in Bahrain, which crushed month-long protests in mid-March, have renewed a defense pact, officials said Friday.

The two countries inked a 10-year defense agreement on October 28, 1991, seven months after the Gulf War, that was renewed in October 2001 for the same duration.

The United States warned Thursday that President Bashar al-Assad had put Syria and the Middle East on a "very dangerous path," again toughening rhetoric on a crackdown by Damascus.

Washington appears to be moving towards a first direct call for Assad to go, a step it has so far resisted, and is preparing a new round of sanctions against his regime after an escalation of violence in the revolt hub of Hama.

Some 29,000 Somali children have died as famine rakes the Horn of Africa in the worst humanitarian crisis in a generation, U.S. officials said Wednesday, pleading for global partners to urgently step up aid.

Despite the dire warnings and images of starving children coming out of the region, and especially war-torn Somalia, the international community has been slow in coming forward with aid.

Seventy-two people have been charged in the U.S. with participating in an international child pornography network that prosecutors say used an online bulletin board called Dreamboard to trade tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday a 20-month law enforcement effort called Operation Delego targeted more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating in the private, members-only Internet club created to promote pedophilia.

The United States Wednesday said it had no interest in seeing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad survive simply to preserve regional "stability," hardening its line on what it termed a "grotesque" crackdown on dissent.

Some analysts have speculated that Washington has been wary of directly calling for Assad to quit because of anxiety that security chaos, civil war and a Middle East power vacuum might follow the demise of his regime.

The North Korean minister who traveled to New York for talks last week said he was satisfied with the outcome and called for more discussions on resuming a stalled nuclear forum, a report said Wednesday.

First vice foreign minister Kim Kye-Gwan held talks in New York with U.S. officials led by the U.S. special envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, last Thursday and Friday in the first high-level bilateral contact since 2009.