Two former British soldiers who firebombed a mosque in a bid to avenge the grisly murder of a soldier by Islamic extremists were jailed for six years each on Friday.

Stuart Harness, 34, and Gavin Humphries, 37, made petrol bombs and hurled them at the Islamic Cultural Center in the eastern English fishing town of Grimsby on May 26. Terrified worshipers were trapped inside.

Istanbul prosecutors Friday began charging some of the prime minister's closest allies in a huge graft scandal which he has responded to with a spectacular purge of the police.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he was battling "a state within a state" and described the corruption probe, which comes ahead of crucial March polls, as a smear operation.

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo approved on Friday a plan for giving amnesty to some former M23 rebels whose insurgency was crushed by the army last month.

The amnesty plan would apply to ex-rebels who are not found guilty of committing serious crimes, according to the minutes of a cabinet meeting.

Five Bulgarian right-wing parties, whose supporters have largely backed anti-government protests since mid-June, set up on Friday a joint coalition, hoping to become the third biggest political force in the country ahead of possible elections next year.

"Our objective is to unite the citizens in order to eliminate the mafia in power and put in place rapid measures to overcome the political, economic and demographic crisis," the parties from the new Reformist bloc said.

A 5.3-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Japan in the early hours of Saturday -- causing buildings in Tokyo to shake -- but there was no risk of a tsunami, seismologists said.

The 67-kilometer deep quake hit the southern part of Honshu's Ibaraki prefecture, north east of the capital Tokyo, at 01:10 am (1610 GMT Friday), the United States Geological Survey reported.

A bomb blast targeting police in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi killed two people and wounded at least 15 others on Friday, an official said.

The bomb injured a policeman as it destroyed his vehicle and damaged the front of his house in the city's eastern neighborhood, police added.

U.S. and British spy agencies eavesdropped on an Israeli prime minister, energy firms, aid agencies and an EU official overseeing anti-trust cases, the New York Times reported Friday.

In surveillance of more than 1,000 targets in more than 60 countries between 2008 to 2011, the National Security Agency and Britain's General Communications Headquarters spied on the communications of foreign leaders, including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, according to secret documents revealed by intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Canada's Supreme Court on Friday struck down key portions of a law that effectively criminalized prostitution by banning brothels and soliciting on the streets, declaring this disproportionate.

But it stayed its unanimous nine to zero ruling for one year to allow Parliament to consider whether or not impose other limits on where and how prostitution may be conducted.

U.S. President Barack Obama Friday gave the Pentagon a year to fix the scourge of sexual assaults that have sparked calls for commanders to lose the power to adjudicate such crimes.

The military in August launched a raft of new measures to combat sexual assaults but their action did not appease some lawmakers who want much stronger measures to deal with hundreds of alleged offenses from harassment to rape.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed Friday a role played "behind the scenes" by former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in helping to secure the release of Kremlin critic and Russian ex-oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

"The German government appreciates the efforts of former federal minister Genscher who worked intensively on the case behind the scenes," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.