Baghdad  - A seven-year-old child was among three Iraqis killed in three separate bombings on Wednesday in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police said.

The child was killed by an explosion that targeted a police convoy in eastern Mosul's al-Akha district, police told the German Press Agency dpa.

In a second bomb attack, this time targeting the Kharzaq district in the south of the city, two brothers died, police said.

Islamabad  - A suspected US missile strike killed 12 Taliban militants Wednesday in Pakistan's restive tribal region, while suspected rebels ambushed a police patrol and killed five law enforcers in the neighbouring North Western frontier Province, officials said.

Two missiles believed to have been fired by a US drone hit a compound in Khadezai village of the Orakzai Agency, one of seven semi-autonomous tribal districts known to serve as sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and Taliban rebels.

Johannesburg  - Football fans applied for over 1.6 million tickets for the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa in the first phase of ticket sales that ended Tuesday night, world football body FIFA announced Wednesday.

The biggest chunk of the 1,635,136 applications - 30 per cent - came from the host nation, followed by the US, the UK, Germany, Italy and Australia, FIFA said in a statement. Some 740,000 tickets were up for grabs.

Washington/Brussels - Albania and Croatia formally joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Wednesday, raising its member states to 28.

The announcement came shortly after the ambassadors of the two Central European countries handed over the "instruments of accession" during a ceremony at the US State Department in Washington.

The bureaucratic act completed a year-long process involving the ratification of their accession by existing NATO allies.

Jerusalem  - New Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally took office Wednesday, with his predecessor and the country's president urging him to continue the peace process with the Palestinians.

But Netanyahu's controversial choice for foreign minister , Avigdor Lieberman, later said Israel was not bound by the so-called Annapolis process which paved the way for the Israel-Palestinian peace talks that entered a hiatus when Israel headed for elections late last year.

Hamburg  - Users of YouTube, the online video service, lost access Wednesday to a vast array of contemporary music in Europe's biggest nation after a dispute with a German fees agency escalated.

"This video is not available in your country," said a message when computers connected to the internet in Germany tried for example to open YouTube's Viva la Vida clip by British rock bank Coldplay.