A teenage suicide bomber killed seven people in central Afghanistan on Wednesday when he targeted local fighters who battle against Taliban insurgents, officials said.

The attacker detonated himself in a market place in Ghazni province, two days after another bomber struck outside government buildings in the north of Afghanistan killing 14 people including a provincial politician.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Wednesday received a boost in his controversial trial for embezzlement when a witness for the prosecution testified in support of the Kremlin critic.

The testimony by Kirov region governor Nikita Belykh was the latest to undermine the prosecution case, which the opposition has denounced as a set-up ordered by the Kremlin to end Navalny's political career.

Kenya's reconciliation commission has said the president, security forces and judiciary should publicly apologize for past abuses going back 50 years, its final report seen Wednesday said.

Set up after bloody post-election violence in 2007-08, Kenya's Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) handed over its weighty four-volume report -- containing tens of thousands of testimonies gathered over four years detailing rights abuses the abuse of rights in the country -- to President Uhuru Kenyatta late Tuesday.

A man being questioned by the FBI over the Boston Marathon bombings was killed Wednesday in an altercation after becoming violent, the FBI said.

U.S. media outlets said the man knew one of the Boston bombers and was shot by an FBI agent in the early morning incident in Orlando, Florida.

France on Wednesday condemned Iran's disqualification of hundreds of would-be presidential candidates, saying the Iranian people should be allowed to "freely choose" their leaders.

Ahead of the June 14 election to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative-dominated Guardian Council winnowed the candidate field from 686 to eight, all close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang vowed to strengthen his country's partnership with Pakistan as he arrived Wednesday for a visit less than two weeks after the country's general election.

The long-time allies will look to use the two-day trip to boost trade ties, and Li will meet prime minister-elect Nawaz Sharif -- who has not yet been sworn in -- as well as holding talks with senior officials.

Japan is considering direct talks with North Korea, the government said Wednesday, adding momentum to the cause after a top level aide to the prime minister made a surprise trip to Pyongyang.

Bilateral talks are on the table as Tokyo seeks to salve the running sore of abductions of its nationals by North Korean spies in the 1970s and 1980s, an issue that inflames public opinion at home.

Pakistani politician Imran Khan left hospital Wednesday, two weeks after breaking bones in his back in a fall at a rally for the country's general election, where his party scored a major breakthrough.

The 60-year-old was ordered to remain immobile in bed after he fractured vertebrae and a rib in a dramatic tumble from a hoist lifting him to a stage just days before the May 11 general election.

Japan's parliament on Wednesday approved an international treaty on child abductions after decades of pressure from the United States and other Western nations.

Japan is the only member of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations that has not ratified the 1980 Hague Convention, which requires nations to return snatched children to the countries where they usually reside.

North Korea has appointed as its new military chief a hawkish general, widely believed to have directed the 2010 shelling of a South Korean border island, state media confirmed Wednesday.

In a brief dispatch, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) referred to Kim Kyok-Sik as chief of the Korean People's Army general staff, a notch higher in the military hierarchy than his previous post of defense minister.