A passenger bus collided with a fuel tanker in Afghanistan before dawn Friday, killing at least 30 people, many of them heading for the poppy harvest, officials said.

The accident happened in the Maiwand district of Kandahar province as passengers on the packed bus were traveling to join "neishtar".

South Korea called Friday for the withdrawal of all remaining workers from its joint industrial complex with North Korea, after Pyongyang shunned an offer for talks on the zone's future.

"The government has made the inevitable decision to withdraw all the remaining people for their protection," the South's Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-Jae told reporters.

Gunmen killed 13 people in an ambush on a Philippine mayor, police said Friday, in the deadliest of a string of violent incidents that have marred campaigning for May elections.

The attackers opened fire on a truck carrying Mayor Abdulmalik Manamparan and his supporters late Thursday, killing 12 on the spot with another dying later, and leaving 10 wounded, including the mayor, police said.

At least 38 people died in a fire in a psychiatric hospital outside Moscow late Thursday night.

Police said the fire, which broke out at about 2 a.m. local time (6 p.m. Eastern, 2200 GMT) in the one-story hospital in the Ramenskoye settlement, was caused by a short circuit, the RIA Novosti reported on Friday.

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles vowed Thursday to take his challenge of this month's presidential vote to court and repeated his demand for a do-over of the contested election.

Capriles had demanded that Venezuela's National Electoral Board begin reviewing the balloting procedures for the April 14 election he narrowly lost.

Bangladeshi rescuers pulled dozens more people alive from a razed garment factory building Friday as the U.S. pressed for a crackdown on deadly negligence of safety norms in the clothing industry.

The overnight rescue of 45 people provided new hope to thousands of anguished relatives at the scene, on Dhaka's outskirts, but the death toll crept up to 273 as emergency workers battled against the stench of decaying bodies.

A special court in Sudan on Thursday jailed seven members of the powerful state security service for up to eight years over a coup attempt last year, the service said.

Their conviction follows the sentencing earlier this month of several army officers, who were jailed for the same plot but then walked free under a presidential amnesty.

The brothers accused of staging the Boston Marathon bombings planned a new attack in Times Square as they were being hunted by police, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev confessed the plan to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in his hospital bed, Bloomberg said, calling it a "horrific reminder that we remain targets for terrorists."

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian arrived Thursday in the Malian capital Bamako on the first leg of a tour of several countries to prepare for a post-war Mali, according to an Agence France Presse journalist.

Le Drian, who was greeted by his Malian counterpart Yamoussa Camara, made no comment but his ministry released a statement from Paris saying the trip was preparation for the period after the French withdrawal.

Pakistan's former military ruler Pervez Musharraf was on Thursday formally arrested over the murder of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, prosecutors said.

The Bhutto case is the second of three cases dating back to his 1999-2008 rule for which Musharraf has been arrested. The latest arrest came a day after a Pakistani court refused to extend his bail.