At least seven civilians were killed Friday in a suicide attack in Kolofata, northern Cameroon, a region where Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamists are highly active, local officials said.

"We've registered eight deaths at the site, including the suicide bomber," a regional security source said without saying if the attack on a food stall was carried out by a man or a woman.

Russian investigators on Friday charged ex-oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky with organizing the 1998 murder of a mayor in Siberia, ratcheting up their campaign against the exiled former Yukos boss.

"As a result of investigative work, we managed to obtain new information and in light of this, it was decided on December 11, 2015, to prosecute Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a defendant for... the organization of murder," Russia's powerful Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Geneva remained on high alert Friday as police carried out further searches in the western Swiss city for several suspected jihadists believed to have links to the Islamic State (IS) group, officials said.

Geneva, which borders France and is home to the U.N.'s European headquarters, ratcheted up its security Thursday after receiving information from the Swiss government about suspicious individuals in the area.

Pakistan test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile on Friday, the military said, two days after the government confirmed it would resume high-level peace talks with arch-rival India.

The test is the latest in a series carried out by India and Pakistan since both demonstrated nuclear weapons capability in 1998.

Security services in ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan said Friday they had killed two members of what they claim was the cell of an international terror group during a nightime raid in the capital Bishkek.

The Kyrgyz State Committee for National Security (SCNS) refused to name "the international terror group" but said the two dead terror suspects were responsible for "particularly serious crimes" in the Central Asian state.

An inferno in one of Manila's huge shanty towns has killed nine people, authorities said Friday, the third blaze to have struck the city's slums in as many weeks.

Residents grabbed clothes, furniture and appliances as they fled the burning Damayang Lagi shanty town shortly after midnight, survivor Arman Altoveros told AFP.

Heavily-armed gunmen launched coordinated assaults on two army barracks in the Burundi capital on Friday leaving dozens dead, mostly attackers, in the worst unrest since a failed May coup, a senior military officer said.

The fighting began at around 4:00 am (0600 GMT) when "heavily armed men" attacked a base at Ngagara in the north of Bujumbura as well as a military training college in the south, according to the officer, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.

Germany's Social Democrats are struggling at a party congress this week to emerge from Angela Merkel's shadow, where they've languished for a decade and been unable to exploit her current weakness in the polls.

Chancellor Merkel's junior partners in her left-right "grand coalition" government have long been stuck in the doldrums, currently tallying only about 25 percent support among the electorate.

Hillary Clinton took aim at fellow White House hopeful Donald Trump over his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, saying: "I no longer think he is funny."

Appearing on NBC's "Late Night with Seth Meyers" later Thursday, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination said Trump had overstepped the mark with his latest comments.

Tensions between Washington and Moscow gave way to a fiery exchange at the State Department Thursday, with a spokesman accusing a Russian television journalist of asking "absolutely crazy" questions.

Spokesman John Kirby chided Gayane Chichakyan of state-backed RT for posing "absolutely ridiculous" questions as she persistently queried him about the U.S. position on Turkey's military deployment in Iraq during the State Department's usually cordial daily briefing.