Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated Wednesday his support for ongoing nuclear talks with world powers, while insisting that Tehran's atomic program would carry on.

He spoke as negotiators for Iran and the so-called P5+1 group started a second day of talks in Vienna aimed at hammering out a final deal over Tehran's contested nuclear program by a July 20 deadline.

The chairman of a new German parliamentary panel probing mass surveillance by the NSA abruptly quit on Wednesday, rejecting opposition demands that the body question fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.

Lawmakers from the opposition Greens and far-left Linke parties had demanded that the committee seek testimony from Snowden, the former contractor with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) now living in Moscow.

Nine people were killed Wednesday in a fourth day of fighting between two feuding factions of the Pakistani Taliban in the restive northwest, intelligence and militant sources said.

A total of 43 people have now died in clashes which erupted on Sunday between supporters of Khan Said Sajna and followers of the late Hakimullah Mehsud group.

The United Nations on Wednesday hit back at criticism of its mission in South Sudan after a leading international aid agency accused it of "shocking indifference" towards thousands of displaced people living in squalor.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) launched a stinging attack on U.N. officials in the country, accusing them of leaving terrified civilians in a section of camp acknowledged as a "death trap" because of its potential exposure to diseases.

Sudan has expelled the country chief of a United Nations agency and accused her of interfering in domestic affairs, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

The incident is the latest involving foreign aid workers in the restive African nation where millions need humanitarian assistance.

Maoist rebels killed three soldiers guarding polling officials in central India on Wednesday, highlighting security concerns in the world's biggest elections as the second phase of voting got under way.

The rebels staged the attack in Chhattisgarh state in the country's insurgency-racked center one day before polling is held there, as voters in the restive northeast of the country cast their ballots.

Chinese police said Wednesday they are investigating the death of an elderly man, after reports that he died following a beating by city enforcement officers triggered outrage online.

The urban management personnel known as "chengguan" enforce local regulations and have a poor reputation in China, where stories of their brutality regularly spark outcries.

Italy has rescued about 4,000 immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean by boats to reach its shores in the past two days, the interior minister said Wednesday, calling the crisis "increasingly glaring".

"The landings are non-stop and the emergency is increasingly glaring. Right now two merchant ships are rescuing two boats with 300 and 361 people aboard. It appears there's at least one corpse on board," Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told public radio Rai Uno.

A longtime aide to Chinese political heavyweight Zhou Yongkang has been sacked from his post and expelled from the ruling Communist Party for corruption, a party body said Wednesday.

The move is the latest sign that authorities are targeting Zhou, the former domestic security chief who amassed huge power before his retirement from the party's all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee in late 2012.

More than 50 people held "hostage" by pro-Russian militants who seized a security building in eastern Ukraine have been released, the state security service said on Wednesday.

Ukraine's SBU security agency said on Tuesday that separatists who had seized its regional headquarters in Lugansk on Sunday had mined the building and were holding 60 people "hostage."