Police in Bellingham, Washington, say a man who walked into a medical clinic with his right arm severed indicated he cut his own limb off with a homemade guillotine.

Officers checked a wooded area near the urology clinic Thursday and found the severed arm and guillotine in a transient camp. The victim and the arm were taken first to St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham.

A roadside bomb targeted an anti-Taliban militia member in northwest Pakistan on Tuesday, ripping through his vehicle and killing four people, police said.

The blast badly damaged the militiaman's car in a remote village in the district of Lower Dir, where Pakistan launched a major operation designed to dislodge a Taliban insurgency in 2009.

Iran's intelligence minister on Friday dismissed as "stupid" a U.S. charge that Tehran planned to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

Minister Heydar Moslehi, quoted by the state television website, pointed to the reasons he termed the alleged plot as "too mediocre to be believed."

The Yemeni opposition called on the United Nations on Thursday to force President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down unconditionally, rejecting his request for international guarantees.

The opposition Common Forum dismissed as a sham Saleh's announcement on Wednesday that he was ready to sign a Gulf-brokered deal for him to quit office in return for a promise of immunity from prosecution if it was backed up by European and U.S. guarantees.

The United States said Wednesday it will hold rare direct talks with North Korea next week on ending the authoritarian state's nuclear program and announced it was replacing its chief envoy.

The State Department said that U.S. and North Korean officials will meet Monday and Tuesday in Geneva but insisted that the talks were "exploratory" and that Pyongyang needed to offer proof that it was serious about dialogue.

U.S. Ambassador Maura Connelly has said Lebanon should be kept away from the “negative repercussions” of the situation in Syria stressing on the importance of Lebanese stability.

In remarks to al-Balad daily on Wednesday, Connelly said the U.S. agenda on Lebanon hasn’t changed. It calls for a stable, independent and sovereign Lebanon.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday voiced deep concern over a U.S.-alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington and said the West should harden sanctions against Tehran.

"The Americans have given us extremely precise information which shows the credibility of this information and the drift of the Iranian leaders is extremely worrying," he said in an interview to Agence France Presse and French radio stations RCJ and Radio J.

Exactly a month after a few hundred anti-capitalism activists set up camp in New York, the Occupy Wall Street movement has gone international and won the attention of the White House -- even if no one knows where it will go next.

Protesters sheltering under plastic tarps in the well organized camp at Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, began their second month Monday with plans to follow up on big demonstrations that swept through the popular Times Square area over the weekend.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dismissed Saturday U.S. allegations of a Tehran-sponsored assassination plot as "absurd," in his first direct reaction to the claim.

"It's a meaningless and absurd accusation regarding a number of Iranians," he told a crowd in the western city of Gilangharb in a speech carried by state television.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati denied on Saturday that he held talks with Special Tribunal for Lebanon Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare during his visit to New York last month.

“No meeting took place between the premier and Judge Bellemare,” said a statement issued by Miqati’s press office.