At least 17 people, including children, have been killed by regime forces in a shelter in the town of Nabuk, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

Citing activists inside the town north of Damascus, the watchdog said the bodies of the civilians were found in Nabuk's Al-Fatah district.

A group of nuns reportedly abducted from Syria's Maalula appeared Friday in a video broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, in which they reassured that they are in good health and would be released “in two days.”

“We are fine. We're staying at a beautiful villa and we'll leave in two days,” says one of the nuns in the video.

Demonstrators calling for democratic reform clashed with police Friday in Shiite villages near Manama ahead of an international forum on Middle East security, witnesses said.

A Shiite-led uprising to demand changes in the Sunni-ruled kingdom was crushed in March 2011 but almost weekly protests against the authorities have been since staged in Shiite villages around Manama.

A Moroccan court Friday acquitted three teenagers accused of public indecency after pictures of two of them kissing were posted on Facebook, but reprimanded the couple, their lawyer told Agence France Presse.

The teens had risked possible prison sentences of five years under the kingdom's penal code, in a case that drew strong criticism from international rights groups and sparked a storm of online protest in socially conservative Morocco.

Jordan was Friday elected to a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council, taking the seat that Saudi Arabia won and then rejected in a protest over Syria's civil war.

Jordan, which will take up the seat on January 1, won 178 votes from among the 193 members of the U.N. General Assembly and was the only candidate put forward for the vacant post.

An Egyptian prosecutor on Friday ordered the detention for two weeks of a Coptic Christian activist and journalist arrested on suspicion of inciting religious strife, state media reported.

Bishoy Armia, a convert to Christianity, made headlines in 2008 when he lobbied to have his religion changed from Islam on his national identification card.

Palestinian leaders on Friday drew on the legacy of Nelson Mandela, a high-profile supporter of their cause, likening his fight against apartheid to their own struggle to end Israeli occupation.

Tributes to the late South African leader, whose death was announced Thursday, flooded in from Palestinian leaders.

Germany said Friday it was temporarily reducing its embassy staff in Yemen and told its aid workers to leave after an attack claimed by al-Qaida killed 52 people, including two Germans.

All German employees of government-funded aid and development organizations must leave Yemen "as quickly as possible", a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters.

A Jordanian TV reporter who was held for 18 months by Islamic militants in the Philippines said on Friday his ordeal would be added to a book he is writing on global 'hotspots'.

Al-Arabiya reporter Bakr Atyani, who walked free from the hands of the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf group on Wednesday, also said he hoped to return to the Philippines despite his harrowing experience.

Gunmen shot dead a magazine editor investigating corruption in the autonomous Kurdistan region, the latest in a series of attacks on journalists in Iraq, media rights groups and police said Friday.

Kawa Ahmed Germyani, the editor-in-chief of Rayal magazine and a correspondent for Awene newspaper, was gunned down on Thursday night, said Rahman Ghareeb, an official from Kurdish media rights watchdog Metro Center.