A senior Iranian official has denied reports the Islamic republic has temporarily stopped enriching uranium to the 20 percent level, the state news agency IRNA said on Saturday.

"Iran's nuclear activities are unchanged and enriching uranium to 20 percent continues," IRNA quoted Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads the Iranian parliament's influential foreign policy committee, as saying.

A Greenpeace activist Saturday staged a protest in a tent suspended from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower against Russia's detention of 30 members of the environmental lobby group.

The activist also unveiled a banner with the slogans "Free the Arctic 30" and "Militants in prison, climate in danger", forcing authorities to close the French monument to tourists in the morning.

Typhoon Francisco weakened Saturday and veered away from Japan's Pacific coast after forcing more than 1,000 people to take shelter on an island where rain-triggered mudslides left 43 dead or missing last week.

The center of the storm, packing winds of up to 144 kilometers (90 miles) per hour, was located some 400 kilometers (250 miles) southeast of Tokyo at noon (0300 GMT) as it moved eastwards at 45 kilometers per hour, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Torrential rains have claimed as many as 48 lives in eastern India, which this month saw the worst cyclone to hit the country in over a decade, the Press Trust of India reported Saturday.

The downpour has seen rivers spill their banks in India's eastern coastal states of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh, forcing thousands to flee their homes and seek refuge in shelters, two weeks after India's most severe cyclone in 14 years lashed the coastline.

The Iranian authorities on Saturday hanged 16 "rebels" following overnight clashes in which 14 border guards were killed on the frontier with Pakistan, a judicial official said.

"Sixteen rebels linked to groups hostile to the regime were hanged this morning in the prison of Zahedan in response to the death of border guards in Saravan," Mohammad Marzieh, the attorney general of Sistan-Baluchestan province, was quoted as saying by Fars news agency.

Diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iran nuclear standoff gather pace next week with a series of meetings in Vienna ahead of crunch six-party talks in Geneva on November 7-8.

On Monday U.N. atomic watchdog head Yukiya Amano will meet Abbass Araqchi, deputy foreign minister and Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator in Iran's fresh diplomatic push under new President Hassan Rouhani.

The widow of the former Yugoslav leader Tito will be buried in a Belgrade mausoleum on Saturday with full state honors as the last symbol of the communist federation that broke up in the 1990s.

Jovanka Broz, who died of heart failure at the age of 88 on Sunday, will be buried next to her husband Josip Broz in the House of Flowers, where the communist strongman was laid to rest in 1980.

The United Nations has expressed serious concern for hundreds of Myanmar civilians, many of them children, trapped in a conflict zone in northern Kachin state amid renewed clashes between the army and rebels.

It said over a thousand displaced people are thought to be running short of food after being caught in a new bout of fighting between troops and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Mansi township in recent days, despite ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

Leaks from Edward Snowden have helped America's adversaries and represent the most serious breach of classified information in U.S. history, the CIA's former number-two ranking official said in an interview Friday.

Michael Morrell, who served as deputy director and acting director of the CIA, told CBS television's "60 Minutes" program that the former intelligence contractor's disclosures have damaged efforts to track possible terror threats.

Germany and Brazil are working on a U.N. General Assembly resolution to highlight international anger at U.S. data snooping in other countries, diplomats said Friday.

The resolution would not mention the United States but would call for extending the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to Internet activities.