More than 700 Swedes staged a protest against extremism outside the Stockholm synagogue Friday following the Copenhagen shootings earlier this month in which two people died.

The protest aimed to show that Muslims "strongly condemn all types of extremism and reject all types of hatred and hatred of Jews," organizers wrote on Facebook.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame got a mixed reception from protesters in Paris Friday as he visited the U.N. cultural agency on his first trip to the city since accusing France of "participating" in genocide.

He is not due to meet with French officials during his visit for a meeting of the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N.-specialized agency for information and communication technologies, where he is co-chair of the broadband commission.

International monitors said Friday the conflict in Ukraine was at a "crossroads" as further losses among government forces rattled a two-week-old truce just as it seemed to be gaining traction.

The deaths of three Ukrainian soldiers after a two-day lull in clashes with pro-Russian separatists highlighted the fragility of the ceasefire.

Thousands of supporters of former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed marched in the honeymoon islands' tiny capital Friday, protesting his detention on terror charges which have sparked international condemnation.

Crowds streamed onto Male from early Friday for the two and a half hour rally, angered by news that Nasheed had been given just three days to prepare his defense for his latest court appearance.

Exiled Russian former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky warned on Friday that Vladimir Putin's policies in the Ukraine conflict will bring Russia to ruin, much as the Afghan war helped bankrupt the Soviet Union.

A year after annexing Crimea in Ukraine, Russia finds itself isolated and on a path to self-destruction, said Khodorkovsky, one of Putin's most outspoken critics, who spent a decade in prison on what he said were politically motivated charges.

A gunman killed seven people and wounded an eighth in an overnight house-to-house rampage in a small Missouri town before apparently committing suicide, authorities said Friday.

The victims were found in four homes in Tyrone, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of the Arkansas line. The 36-year-old gunman was discovered in a neighboring county, dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Missouri Highway Patrol Sgt. Jeff Kinder said.

A 6.6-magnitude undersea earthquake hit central Indonesia on Friday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but there was no tsunami alert and no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The quake struck in the Flores Sea at a depth of 547 kilometers (340 miles), 151 kilometers northeast of Maumere, the largest town on Flores island, the USGS said.

The United States rebuffed a Cuban demand to be taken off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror Friday as they opened a second round of historic talks to restore long severed diplomatic ties.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the terror designation, in place since 1982, would be reviewed separately but was not a matter for negotiation.

More than 250 people have been killed in a series of avalanches triggered by heavy snowfall around Afghanistan this week, provincial authorities said Friday.

The bulk of the deaths have come in Panjshir province, north of Kabul, where at least 186 people were killed, acting provincial governor Abdul Rahman Kabiri told AFP.

Italy's coastguard on Friday called on the government to change its status so that its 11,000 seamen can carry weapons, amid mounting concern over the possibility of attacks by people traffickers or terrorists.

The demand is a long-standing one but has been renewed following a recent incident in which traffickers armed with Kalashnikovs threatened coastguards engaged in an operation to rescue thousands of migrants in danger of drowning close to Libya.