The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila, announced an amnesty on Wednesday for former members of the defeated M23 rebel army.

The amnesty covers "acts of insurgency, acts of war and political offences" committed in the DR Congo up to December 20, 2013, when the bill was approved by the government.

Former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr has been moved to a medium security prison, after being reclassified a lesser danger, his lawyer announced Wednesday.

Ottawa had resisted the 27-year-old's transfer from a Canadian federal penitentiary to a more comfortable provincial correctional facility for petty criminals and young offenders, calling it an attempt to lessen his punishment.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon condemned Wednesday what he said was the use of cluster bombs in the war in South Sudan.

Remnants of this kind of weapon were found last week by U.N. de-mining workers on a road from the capital Juba to Bor in Jonglei state, a U.N. statement said.

Seventy men arrested during a raid on a mosque in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa were formally charged Wednesday with being members of Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab rebels, officials said.

Kenyan police raided Mombasa's Musa mosque on February 2, detaining scores of suspects whom they accused of attending a radicalization meeting.

Nigeria on Wednesday said it would open a probe into claims of state-sponsored killings dating back to the era of military rule, raising hopes that perpetrators will finally be brought to book.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said a public inquiry would be held into complaints it had received "bordering on allegations of state-sponsored killings or assassinations".

Suspected Islamist gunmen raided two villages in Nigeria's restive northeast, torching homes and markets in attacks that killed at least four people and sent residents fleeing, witnesses and aid workers said Wednesday.

Both raids occurred late Tuesday in Borno state, a stronghold of the Boko Haram Islamist group that is waging a brutal extremist insurgency in the region.

The head of Italy's Northern League on Wednesday said he supported the autonomy bids of Catalonia from Spain and Scotland from Britain, and hoped that the Venice region "will be next on the list".

Matteo Salvini said two other regions of northern Italy -- Lombardy and Piedmont -- could also follow suit, adding that it was time to reduce the powers of the European Union and return to "national and regional sovereignty".

Iran said Wednesday it would not accept longstanding allegations that its nuclear program once had a military dimension without seeing the secret documents on which the charges are based.

"We will not accept any of the (International Atomic Energy) Agency allegations unless its documents are proven and the person who presented them clarifies on what basis we have been accused," Iran's nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

The Pakistani Taliban have announced an "armed struggle" against an indigenous tribe and Ismaili Muslims in the picturesque northern Chitral Valley, calling on Sunnis to support their cause in a video.

The valley was once dominated by moderate Ismailis and is also home to the Kalash, a polytheistic people who claim descent from Alexander the Great and who have maintained separate cultural traditions to the predominantly Muslim country.

A Turkish court on Wednesday sentenced a group of protesters to two years in jail for chanting slogans deemed insulting to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, local media reported on Wednesday.

The decision comes as Turkey is being criticized at home and abroad for adopting new Internet restrictions seen as a fresh assault on freedom of expression.