Amnesty International on Wednesday called on Bahraini authorities to release leading Shiite activist Nabil Rajab sentenced to three months in jail for posting tweets deemed insulting to Sunnis.

"Like many others in Bahrain, Rajab is a prisoner of conscience, jailed solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression," said Ann Harrison of Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa program.

The kidnapping of two Libyan journalists as they covered elections in the town of Bani Walid, a last bastion of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, has raised tensions in the North African nation.

The country's interim authorities have called for their release but so far without any result.

Hamas' prime minister in the Gaza Strip Ismail Haniya called on Egypt on Wednesday to keep the Rafah border crossing open around the clock.

At a ceremony to inaugurate a new hall at the border crossing, Haniya urged the Egyptians "to open the door of the Rafah crossing wider by allowing it to work around the clock and increasing the number of travelers."

A suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of a police academy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Wednesday, killing 20 people and wounding dozens more, a security official told Agence France Presse.

Iran is "100 times stronger" today than 30 years ago despite the multitude of Western sanctions imposed since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday.

"Westerners are making much hype about sanctions against Iran but they don't understand that they have vaccinated the Iranian people themselves by imposing sanctions over the past 30 years," Khamenei said, quoted by state television.

A separatist from Yemen's southern movement was killed and four other people were wounded, including two women, in clashes with police in the port city of Aden on Wednesday, a local activist said.

"The police came into the Mansoura district and opened fire after residents came out to protest the police presence," Nizar al-Saeedi told Agence France Presse, adding that "one person was killed and four others were wounded."

Israeli President Shimon Peres has warned of the demographic consequences on the Jewish state of ongoing settlement in the occupied West Bank.

"Israeli settlements in densely populated Arab areas could bring about a demographic change about which we would do well to think hard about before acting," he said in remarks broadcast on both army radio and Israel public radio.

Syria's main exiled opposition group on Wednesday slammed Russia for giving a green light to violence after failing to convince Moscow to drop its support for President Bashar Assad.

Syrian National Council (SNC) chief Abdel Basset Sayda met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in rare talks at the Russian foreign ministry but could not detect any shift in the Russian policy that has angered opponents of Assad.

Iran has warned the media against the publication of reports concerning the impact of Western sanctions, urging it to cooperate so that "the country is not hurt," local newspapers reported on Wednesday.

"Our country is not in a position to allow the media to publish (any) news or analysis which is not compatible with the regime's and national interests," said Mohammed Hosseini, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, whose ministry oversees the Iranian print media and official news websites.

Fifty-four migrants trying to reach Italy died of thirst when their inflatable boat ruptured in the Mediterranean, according to testimony from the sole survivor, the U.N. refugee agency said.

The rescued man, who drank sea water to survive, was spotted clinging to a jerry can and the remains of the stricken boat off the Tunisian coast on Monday night by fishermen who alerted the coast guard, the UNHCR said.