The race for Iran's highest elected office was revitalized on Saturday when former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili officially registered for the June 14 election.

Rafsanjani, who was president between 1989 and 1997, registered at the interior ministry in the closing minutes of the five-day registration process for the presidential vote which wrapped up on Saturday.

Turkish police have boosted security around Patriarch Bartholomew I after an alleged plot to assassinate the Orthodox Christian leader, his office said Saturday.

A spokesman at the patriarchate in Istanbul said they had been informed that one person had been arrested and that others were being sought.

Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide and war crimes Friday in a landmark ruling stemming from massacres of indigenous people in his country's long civil war.

Rios Montt thus became the first Latin American convicted of trying to exterminate an entire group of people, in a brief but particularly gruesome stretch of a war that started in 1960, dragged on for 36 years and left around 200,000 people dead or missing.

Russia withheld "crucial" information from the United States on one of the suspects of last month's deadly Boston Marathon bombings, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday.

Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the Journal said on its website that the information consisted of text messages between the mother of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and a Russian relative.

An accidental explosion at a coal mine in southwest China killed 22 miners on Saturday, state media said, in the latest deadly incident to hit the country's troubled industry.

Nine others were trapped after the blast at the Taozigou coal mine in Sichuan Province, Xinhua reported, citing the country's work safety authorities. At the time of the accident at 2:00 pm, 108 miners were underground, the report said.

Nawaz Sharif declared victory for his center-right party in Pakistan's landmark elections Saturday, as unofficial partial results put him on course to win a historic third term as premier.

The result represented a remarkable comeback for a man who was deposed as premier in a 1999 military coup and came after millions of people defied polling day attacks that left 24 dead to participate in the high-turnout vote.

A lawyer for the notorious Venezuelan militant Carlos the Jackal is in Caracas seeking President Nicolas Maduro's backing in an appeal against his client's conviction starting Monday in Paris.

Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, was found guilty in France two years ago of a series of bombings that killed 11 people and wounded around 150 others between 1982-1983.

Human Rights Watch on Friday urged the Central African Republic's new government to reign in its rebel forces, accusing them of "horrific abuses" such as pillage, summary executions, rape, and torture.

The rights watchdog said that after the Seleka rebel coalition seized power on March 24 in a bloody coup, its militants "went on a looting spree, killing civilians, raping women, and settling scores with members of the Central African Armed Forces."

French President Francois Hollande said Friday that elections scheduled in troubled Mali for July must be held nationwide, as instability in the north and a refugee crisis have raised doubts this will be possible.

"We must make sure that Malian civil administration can be put in place everywhere for the organisation of these elections. And France, through its military presence and other armies, will contribute to this," he said during a press conference in Paris.

Authorities in Texas said Friday they have launched a criminal probe in the April 17 explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas that claimed 14 lives.

"This disaster has severely impacted the community of West, and we want to ensure that no stone goes unturned and that all the facts related to this incident are uncovered," said Steven McCraw, director of Texas Department of Public Safety, in a statement.