King Abdullah II of Jordan reappointed Abdullah Nsur as premier and tasked him with forming the new government after talks between his chief of staff and parliamentarians, the royal palace said.

"The king has accepted the resignation of the (previous) government and charged Abdullah Nsur to form a new government," the palace said.

Terror suspect Abu Qatada was on Saturday sent back to jail by a British judge, just two days before the government was due to make a fresh bid to deport him to Jordan.

The radical cleric was found to have breached the conditions of his bail granted last November.

The Vatican installed a special chimney on the Sistine Chapel from which white smoke will signal the election of a new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics as cardinals prepare for the centuries-old tradition starting on Tuesday.

The conclave of 115 cardinal electors will be held under Michelangelo's famous frescoes to choose the 266th pope, after the aging Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign since the Middle Ages saying he wanted to be "a simple pilgrim" again.

A protester was shot dead on Saturday in fresh clashes with the police in central Cairo, an Agence France Presse reporter and medics said.

An AFP correspondent saw the protester being brought to a mosque in Tahrir Square with gunshot wounds, with medics confirming he was dead.

U.N. envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar met on Saturday those leaders from the separatist Southern Movement who aim to join in a national dialogue this month to end the country's political crisis, participants said.

Among those at the meeting in Dubai were representatives of secessionist Ali Salem al-Baid, who later withdrew after handing over their list of demands.

Thousands of angry protesters on Saturday set ablaze more than 100 houses of Pakistani Christians over a blasphemy row in the eastern city of Lahore, officials said.

Over 3,000 Muslim protesters turned violent over derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed allegedly made by Sawan Masih, a 28-year-old Christian, three days earlier, police official Multan Khan said.

Nigeria's army said Saturday it had launched an operation in the northern city of Maiduguri, the bastion of Islamist group Boko Haram, that led to the deaths of 20 suspected militants and two soldiers.

The soldiers Friday stormed a location where some Boko Haram men were found and "we exchanged fire with them and about 20 of them died in the crossfire. We also lost two of our soldiers while three were injured," said army spokesman Lt Colonel Sagir Musa.

A Saudi court on Saturday dissolved a human rights group and handed down heavy jail terms to two of its members, Agence France Presse reported.

The judge at the criminal court in Riyadh, in delivering his verdict ordered "the dissolution of the Saudi Association of Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA), for failing to obtain authorization, and the seizure of its assets."

Russian scientists on Saturday dismissed initial reports that they had found a wholly new type of bacteria in a mysterious subglacial lake in Antarctica.

Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics had said Thursday that samples obtained from the underground Lake Vostok in May 2012 contained a bacteria bearing no resemblance to existing types.

A filthy oil painting locked away in a museum in the northeast of England was on Saturday revealed to be an original masterpiece by Van Dyck.

The portrait was spotted when it was photographed for an ambitious project to catalogue every single one of Britain's oil paintings in public ownership in an online museum.