Morocco's Islamist-led government has unveiled a charter outlining a raft of long-awaited judicial reforms including a strengthening of the judiciary's independence that have been a priority of the ruling party.

The charter was presented late Thursday by the justice ministry, some two years after the kingdom adopted a new constitution in the face of sweeping Arab Spring protests with key provisions for judicial reforms.

Around 3,300 Syrians have arrived in Italy by boat over recent weeks, many fleeing troubled Egypt where they had first found a haven from war, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said that the bulk of the refugees were families, and arrived over the past 40 days, mostly in Sicily. Some 670 landed in the past week.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Jerusalem Sunday to hold talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the progress made in the Middle East peace talks and on Syria, a U.S. official said.

The two men will discuss "the final status negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, following on the secretary's meeting with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in London last Monday," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

A Tunisian journalist was detained Friday for accusing the public prosecutor of fabricating evidence implicating a cameraman in an egg-throwing attack on a minister, a case stoking fears about curbs on free speech.

"The committal order was given even before our statements and the questioning of Zied el-Heni... This detention is illegal," the journalist's lawyer Moufida Belghrith told Agence France Presse, after he was summoned to the central courthouse in Tunis.

The U.N.'s top human rights body Friday urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to help a team probing rights' violations in Syria get access to the war-torn country.

Kerry and Lavrov, in Geneva to discuss how to neutralize Syria's chemical weapons and avert U.S.-led military strikes, should also consider how to help U.N. investigators enter the country, U.N. Human Rights Council president Remigiusz Henczel wrote in a letter to the two diplomatic heavyweights.

Two nearly simultaneous bombs targeted worshipers streaming out of joint Sunni-Shiite prayers north of Baghdad Friday, killing at least 30 people in latest deadly surge in violence.

Unrest elsewhere left three others dead, as authorities grapple with Iraq's worst bloodshed since 2008. The country is stuck in a prolonged political deadlock as Syria's 30-month civil war causes regional instability.

Egyptian military helicopters on Friday carried out air strikes on Islamist militant positions in Sinai, two days after suicide bombers killed six soldiers in the restive peninsula, security sources said.

Apache helicopters targeted hideouts and vehicles used by the militants near the town of Sheikh Zuwayid in northern Sinai, the sources said.

Syria's opposition National Coalition said Friday it was "deeply skeptical" about the government's decision to join a chemical weapons ban and urged a tough U.N. resolution to enforce the measure.

Its statement came a day after Damascus filed documents at the United Nations seeking to join the international convention banning chemical weapons.

State news agency SANA said on Friday it and other government websites in conflict-plagued Syria have come under attack by hackers, complicating access to their sites.

It did not specify the origin of the attacks.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday he would meet again with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in New York later this month to try to set a date for a long-delayed peace conference for Syria.

"We both agreed... to meet again in New York around the time of the U.N. General Assembly around the 28th in order to see if it is possible then to find a date for that conference," Kerry told reporters at a joint press briefing in Geneva with Lavrov and the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi.