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Walker, 40, was a passenger in a Porsche sports car driven by a friend - who also died - when it crashed north of Los Angeles.

Walker was said to be attending a charity event at the time.

He starred in all but one of the films in the Fast & Furious franchise, the sixth of which opened in May.

Walker also starred in the suspense drama Hours, a movie that is set for release this month.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department said the crash happened in the community of Valencia.

It said deputies found a car engulfed in flames when they responded to a report of a collision. Two people found in the car were pronounced dead at the scene.

Images showed the burned-out wreckage of a red Porsche by the side of the road.

"It is with a truly heavy heart that we must confirm that Paul Walker passed away today in a tragic car accident while attending a charity event for his organisation Reach Out Worldwide," the statement on the actor's Facebook page said.

"He was a passenger in a friend's car, in which both lost their lives. We... are stunned and saddened beyond belief by this news.''

Universal Pictures also issued a statement, saying studio staff were "heartbroken" by Walker's death.

"Paul was truly one of the most beloved and respected members of our studio family for 14 years, and this loss is devastating to us, to everyone involved with the Fast & Furious films, and to countless fans.

"We send our deepest and most sincere condolences to Paul's family."

Walker played undercover agent Brian O'Conner in the Fast & Furious movies.

The first film of the franchise was released in 2001 and the seventh is in development.

Walker was one of the leading protagonists, along with Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez.

Diesel said in a post on Instagram: "Brother I will miss you very much. I am absolutely speechless. Heaven has gained a new Angel. Rest in Peace."

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday he hoped an agreement on Iran's disputed nuclear program would be signed within months and London and Tehran revived diplomatic ties, signs of a warmer atmosphere between the Islamic Republic and the West. 

In a further indication of cooperation, the United Nations nuclear watchdog reached an agreement under which Iran will grant UN inspectors access to more nuclear facilities. 

Iran and six world powers - the United States, Britain, Russia, France, China and Germany - came close to a preliminary nuclear agreement at the weekend during talks in Geneva and decided to resume negotiations on November 20 in their attempt to defuse a decade-old standoff. 

"This is not a race to complete just any agreement," Kerry told a news conference during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. However, he added: "Through diplomacy we have an absolute responsibility to pursue an agreement." 

While saying that a deal with Iran was expected within months, Kerry tried to reassure Washington's Arab allies and Israel that his country would not abandon them. 

Thumping the podium to make his point, Kerry said President Barack Obama had said "that he will continue to defend his friends and allies in this region, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, others, he will defend them against any external attack. 

"That is the promise of the United States and as I stand here as Secretary of State, as long as I'm Secretary of State, that is also our policy, my policy, representing the President of the United States in executing it." 

The fact that a deal might be within reach after a decade of confrontation between Iran and Western powers shows the shift in the tone of Tehran's foreign policy since President Hassan Rouhani was elected in June. 

Rouhani began diplomatic moves towards a nuclear deal in order to ease sanctions that have throttled Iran's vital oil industry and cut it off from the international banking system. 

On the table initially is phased, limited and reversible relief from sanctions. Iran, however, wants an early lifting of the oil and banking sanctions. 

Britain and Iran said they were reviving diplomatic ties two years after a mob of students attacked the British embassy in Tehran. Both sides said they were appointing a new charge d'affaires. 

Britain closed the embassy in 2011 after a rally against British sanctions escalated into violence and protesters scaled the walls, ransacked offices and burned buildings.

A senior leader of the feared Haqqani militant network was shot dead on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital, officials said Monday, in a new blow to the close-knit cluster of militant groups that shelter in northwestern Pakistan.

The leader, Nasiruddin Haqqani — a son of the militant group’s founder, the Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani — was gunned down outside a bread store on Sunday night by a man riding a motorcycle, witnesses told Pakistani news media outlets.

Intelligence officials believe that he was a chief fund-raiser for the Haqqani network, one of the most lethal elements of the insurgency in Afghanistan, and he was designated as a “global terrorist” by the United States in 2010. Two commanders for the group confirmed his death on Monday.

“We have received his body, and the funeral has taken place,” said one commander, Gul Hassan, who spoke by phone from North Waziristan, the main hub of the Haqqani group in Pakistan. “The mujahedeen are in shock.”

The killing added to an impression of increased turbulence for the militant groups harbored in Pakistan’s tribal belt, including Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network. Over just two months, one major leader has been arrested, two have been killed in a drone strike, and now a major financier — Mr. Haqqani — has died.

Desperate survivors of one of the most powerful storms ever recorded begged for help and scavenged for food, water and medicine in the central Philippines four days after an estimated 10,000 people were killed by a Typhoon Haiyan.

Thousands of people were believed to be missing in the ruins of towns and villages in the southeast Asian island country hit by the typhoon on Friday. By the early hours of Tuesday morning, some areas had not yet been reached by relief workers, according to humanitarian group CARE.

"People are becoming quite desperate. Some officials just came and told us that there has been looting in the area, people trying to get rice for their families," Sandra Bulling, CARE's international emergency communications officer, said in her blog written on Monday from Jaro, a small town on the way to Tacloban.Tacloban in Leyte province bore the brunt of the storm.

Aid groups and corporations in the United States were working to provide help.

Additional US military forces arrived in the Philippines on Monday to bolster relief efforts, officials said, with US military cargo planes transporting food, medical supplies and water for victims. Other US aircraft were pre-positioning to assist the Philippines, with US forces operating out of Villamor Air Base in the capital Manila and in the coastal city of Tacloban.

FedEX Corp, the Memphis, Tennessee-based global courier delivery company, said in a statement it was "working closely with disaster relief organizations ( American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Direct Relief and Heart to Heart) to donate transportation of equipment and relief supplies to impacted areas."

CEBU, Philippines — Three days after one of the most powerful storms ever to buffet the Philippines, the scale of the devastation and the desperation of the survivors were slowly coming into view.

The living told stories of the dead or dying — the people swept away in a torrent of seawater, the corpses strewn haphazardly among the wreckage. Photos from the hard-hit city of Tacloban showed vast stretches of land swept clean of homes, and reports emerged of people who were desperate for food and water raiding aid convoys and stripping the stores that were left standing.

As Monday dawned, it became increasingly clear that Typhoon Haiyan had ravaged cities, towns and fishing villages when it played a deadly form of hopscotch across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday. By some estimates, at least 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban alone, and with phone service out across stretches of the far-flung archipelago, it was difficult to know if the storm was as deadly in more remote areas.

Barreling across palm-fringed beaches and plowing into frail homes with a force that by some estimates approached that of a tornado, Haiyan delivered a crippling blow to this country’s midsection. The culprit increasingly appeared to be a storm surge that was driven by those winds, which were believed to be among the strongest ever recorded in the Philippines, lifting a wall of water onto the land as they struck. By some accounts, the winds raged ashore at 190 miles per hour.

As Commonwealth leaders prepare to meet at a summit in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, allegations of rape and torture by the Sri Lankan security forces have emerged, some of them occurring four years after the civil war ended.

"When the lady left and that man closed the door, I knew what was going to happen," says Vasantha. "They raped me."

One evening earlier this year, Vasantha says, she was going back to her home in northern Sri Lanka when a white van drew up and two men asked for her identity card.

She says she was thrown into the back of the vehicle and blindfolded.

Vasantha says she realised the authorities had finally caught up with her, four years after the war and just as she was about to leave for Britain on a student visa.

Her story is one of a number given to the BBC, horrific accounts of torture carried out long after hostilities ended.

During the civil war, Vasantha had helped Tamil Tiger rebels pass messages and set up safe houses in the capital, but she says she never took part in the fighting or held a gun.

Like other women I have interviewed, Vasantha never saw the outside of the building where she was held or met another detainee, but she said she did hear female voices, screaming in Tamil.

She describes being photographed and fingerprinted and then kicked, beaten with batons and pipes, burned with hot wires and cigarettes, submerged in a barrel of water until she thought she would drown, suffocated by having a petrol-soaked plastic bag put over her head, before being repeatedly raped by men in army uniform.

She says she signed a confession in a language she could not understand - Sinhala - but the torture and rape went on for 20 days before a relative could find her and pay a bribe for her release.

For the last three days, she remembers her skin itching terribly in a filthy cell as she was kept completely naked.

The cries of outrage over the drone strike killing Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Hakimullah Mehsud on November 1 have been replaced with horror over the choice of Maulana Fazlullah, the new leader for the banned terror outfit who has reportedly ruled out any chance of peace talks with the government.

Last week, after Mehsud’s death Pakistan Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan accused the U.S. of foiling the peace process and called for a review of all aspects of the country’s ties with the U.S. However, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has no intention of doing this and official sources said the matter was not discussed at all. The rhetoric of one minister cannot become a policy statement, the sources said adding it would be business as usual with the U.S.

By making an international issue of drone strikes — supported by parties like Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) — the government has taken away the real issue of terrorism from the public eye. Yet, terrorism has claimed over 40,000 lives already and the government says that Pakistan is its worst victim. When the first ever democratic transition took place, the new government under Mr. Sharif vowed to end terrorism and to this end called an All Parties Conference in September for a consensus on fighting terror. The army chief of staff too was on the same page as the government and keen on a dialogue to end terrorism. Six days after the conference, two senior army officers were killed in Upper Dir, a deed attributed to the Taliban. This was followed by five blasts in Peshawar, three of them in a week, starting with the suicide bombing at All Saints Church which caused a setback to the peace talks. Later, the Law Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was killed, making him the third member of the provincial assembly to be fatally targeted.

While the Interior Minister says the government worked behind the scenes for seven weeks to reach a stage when Mehsud was going to be handed a formal letter of invitation for talks, politicians and the media are raising questions on whether the government had a plan. For instance Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad of the Awami Muslim League has told the National Assembly that he had spoken to all the interlocutors named by the government and none of them had been engaged in talks with the Taliban. Members of the National Assembly staged walkouts on Friday and insisted the Prime Minister who rarely attends the session, take them into confidence and clarify matters on the peace talks, failing which they too would launch a boycott of the proceedings.

Manila One of the world’s strongest typhoons was feared to have killed more than 1,000 people in the Philippines, where it displaced hundreds of thousands and caused widespread devastation before blowing out towards Vietnam on Saturday.

Typhoon Haiyan tore through the eastern and central Philippines on Friday, flattening homes, toppling power lines and knocking out communications. Fierce winds ripped roofs off buildings as raging floodwaters swept debris and left vehicles piled on top of each other on the battered streets.

The official death toll was 138, according to the national disaster relief agency. But its spokesman, Reynaldo Balido, said the toll was expected to jump as reports trickle in from badly hit areas where communications have been destroyed.

Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross, said it was “estimated (that) over a 1,000 people died” in the eastern provinces of Leyte and Samar.

Red Cross chairman Richard Gordon confirmed that estimate, but added: “There are a lot of dead bodies. We haven’t counted them yet.

We are too busy to count. We are managing the dead bodies; we don’t want them scattered there.” Bodies were lying on the roads of Leyte’s capital city of Tacloban, according to Captain John Andrews, a deputy director-general of the civil aviation authority. Soldiers were also working on retrieving the dead, officials said.

Balido, of the disaster agency, said: “Yolanda brought massive damage and almost no houses were left standing,” referring to the typhoon’s Philippine name.

“Many were reported killed and we are trying to get initial numbers so we don’t get shocked by the increase.” Balido said nearly 800,000 people were forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in emergency shelters, some of which were also damaged by the storm in Leyte.

“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of a United Nations disaster assessment coordination team said. “This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweeds and the streets are strewn with debris.”

The Philippine military has been ferrying relief supplies, medicines and medical teams and rescue workers to the devastated areas via C130 planes and navy ships.

The shipments also included body bags.

“We have sent body bags so we can properly handle the cadavers on the streets,” said Eric Tayag, the under secretary for health. “We are looking for a place to bury the dead, maybe somewhere suitable for mass burials.”

In Taiwan, a rogue wave believed to have been triggered by Haiyan killed eight people and injured eight on Saturday in Gongliao township in New Taipei county on the north-eastern coast, Central News Agency reported.

Meteorologists said Haiyan is the largest typhoon in the world since Typhoon Tip in October 1979, which killed nearly 100 people in Japan and Guam.

Sandy tracks, that have not been paved in years, snake their way through the paddy fields and lush valleys of this remote corner of southwest China.

The slightest drops of rain, villagers say, can render these roads impassable, leaving the small towns and villages of Guizhou frequently isolated - and, as a result, cut off from the rest of the country's growth story.

Earlier this year, as the new leadership took over in Beijing, Central authorities sanctioned funds to unleash a wave of construction across the poorest parts of western China, building roads, bridges and airports. In Guizhou alone, 4,000 km of roads are being constructed.

Outside Dimen, a small village of 520 households, construction workers from nearby Hunan province hurriedly wheeled crates of stones and rocks, as hammering and drilling echoed through the green valleys and rice fields.

“The new roads will change the village’s fortune,” said one Dimen resident hopefully, as he sat in the village square on a recent afternoon.

In his thirties, the villager – and his three companions – had all returned home, after they failed to land permanent jobs in nearby cities, to help their parents tend the rice fields, where farmers practice subsistence agriculture on small plots of land.

But more than the newly paved road, the future of Dimen – and that of thousands of similar villages across China – will likely rest on the outcomes of a meeting taking place this weekend more than 2,000 km away.

On Saturday, China’s top leaders – the 376 members of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) Central Committee – will gather in a west Beijing hotel for a key meeting to push forward far-reaching economic reforms.

The meeting – the third sitting, or plenum, of the new Central Committee that came to power in November last year – has been framed by State media as being as significant as the key third plenum of 1978, which heralded China’s “opening up” and market reforms under Deng Xiaoping.

The current leader, Xi Jinping, has himself raised expectations by repeatedly invoking Deng in the months since has taken over, most notably during a trip, shortly after assuming power, to Guangdong – the same southern province from where Deng kick-started reforms.

Among the policy measures that will be discussed during a four-day, behind-closed-doors, meeting are: allowing farmers, such as those tied to their plots in Dimen, to sell their land for the first time, rather than only lease land under current rules of collective ownership; overhauling social security restrictions that deny rural residents access to social welfare benefits when they move to cities; liberalising interest rates to give households fairer returns on their savings; and considering moves to curtail the influence of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) to allow greater competition and bring efficiency.

The first two reforms, economists say, are essential for addressing inequality between cities and the countryside, and between the prosperous coastal east and the western hinterland - inequality which is currently the widest in China’s history.

The common pressing challenge underlying all the proposed measures is taking forward the rebalancing of the Chinese economy, away from State investment-led growth, which has driven China’s growth story over the past three decades, to growth led by domestic demand, consumption and innovation.

In the villages of Guizhou, local officials are banking on a state-wide spurt in spending to drive growth, by unleashing construction projects and developing half-a-dozen tier-two cities that officials hope will drive consumption. Zhao Kezhi, the CPC chief of Guizhou, said the province saw “urbanisation” as the “solution to the problem”, with the government targeting achieving a 50 per cent urbanisation rate by 2020 to address the income inequality problem. To do so, the province is spending billions in building new semi-urban economic zones and expanding 12 tier-two cities to create “regional hubs”.

While the government hopes that urbanisation will drive growth, many economists warn that such projects may end up as bridges to nowhere – and result in worsening an already serious debt problem among local governments – without accompanying structural reforms.

The central issue, according to Michael Pettis, an economist at Peking University, is how to transfer wealth from the State sector to households. One proposed measure is liberalising interest rates, which have been kept low by the government to subsidise capital costs of State-run enterprises and manufacturers. Another measure is land reforms that would, for the first time, allow farmers to hold titles and sell their land, which is, at present, held collectively by village committees - a last vestige of China's Socialist past.

Both measures have faced opposition from special interest groups: the former from entities such as SOEs that have benefited from access to easy capital; and the latter from local governments who derive most of their revenue from land sales.

GENEVA

Nuclear diplomacy with Iran is moving into unprecedented realms today, with unexpected prospects of striking a first-step deal in Geneva prompting US Secretary of State John Kerry to change travel plans and join the talks, along with British, French, and German foreign ministers.

That sudden development – after nearly two years of fruitless talks to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions – also prompted opponents as varied as Israel’s prime minister and Iran’s hard-line Friday prayer leader to raise loud voices of complaint.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told The Christian Science Monitor today that a joint text was being prepared, but that “a very difficult task” lay ahead.

“The only way that we can create confidence and sustain this process is to have balance in the first step, about each side trying to alleviate the most immediate concerns of the other side,” Mr. Zarif said in an interview as the day’s diplomacy began.

“We are still far from reaching an agreement, because we still have to nail them down and put them on paper, and in the best of circumstances we can finish it,” said Zarif.

US Secretary of State John Kerry will fly on Friday to Geneva to take part in talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, the State Department confirmed on Thursday.

Word of Mr. Kerry’s trip comes after Iran and six world powers moved closer to agreeing on initial concessions in a first step to settling the long nuclear standoff.

Mr. Kerry will travel at the invitation of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in an effort to help narrow differences in negotiations, the State Department said.

The development comes after positive signs at Thursday’s round of talks. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said during a break in the talks between Iran and six world powers that it was quite possible an agreement would be finished by the end of Friday.

Ms. Ashton is leading the talks with Mr. Zarif on behalf of Britain, China, France, Russia, the US and Germany, which sent top foreign ministry officials to Geneva.