The top U.S. military officer told China's leaders on Wednesday that Washington is committed to defending Japan, as Beijing and Tokyo engage in intensified rhetoric over a territorial row.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is visiting China just as the dispute between Beijing and Tokyo over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea is again heating up.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tried to get Afghanistan and Pakistan on the same page Wednesday, ending their mistrust so they could work together as NATO prepares for its Afghan withdrawal next year.

After more than three hours of talks in Brussels, Kerry said he had made progress with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan armed forces chief Ashfaq Kayani.

Italian leftist Enrico Letta was nominated to be the new prime minister on Wednesday, bringing to an end a bitter two-month deadlock on forming a new government with the imminent launch of a coalition between right, centre and left.

Letta said Italy was "suffering" from the economic crisis and promised to tackle job losses, company closures, growing poverty and the lack of opportunity for young people, who are forced to leave the country.

Thousands flocked on Wednesday to a hilltop memorial above Yerevan to mark the 98th anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I which Armenia wants recognized internationally as a genocide.

In the annual ceremony broadcast by all national television channels, huge crowds headed to the memorial that commemorates the massacres to lay flowers at the eternal flame.

Seven people were killed, dozens injured and many homes destroyed when a powerful earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, officials said.

The quake, measured at a magnitude of 5.6 by the U.S. Geological Survey, sent people rushing from their homes in worst-hit areas and was felt in the Afghan capital Kabul and in Islamabad in neighboring Pakistan.

India and China are holding more talks over an alleged advance by Chinese troops into disputed territory after senior army officers failed to reach a resolution, Indian reports said on Wednesday.

Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony was quoted as telling reporters that "negotiations are going on at various levels to resolve the issue peacefully."

Darfur rebel leader Saleh Jerbo, charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, has been killed in the western Sudanese region, his defense team said.

"The defense of Mr. Saleh Mohammed Jerbo Jamus hereby notifies the trial chamber, with great sadness... that Mr Jerbo died in North Darfur, Sudan on the afternoon of 19 April 2013, and was buried the same day," said an ICC document published late Tuesday.

A delegation from the U.S. embassy in Moscow has traveled to the Russian North Caucasus region of Dagestan to interview the parents of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, an embassy official said Wednesday.

The parents of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are currently living in Dagestan, an overwhelmingly Muslim region on the Caspian Sea where the family briefly lived before leaving for the United States.

Twenty-one people, including police officers and social workers, were killed in violent clashes in China's ethnically-divided western region of Xinjiang, a local official said Wednesday.

"Twenty-one persons were killed in all... including social workers and policemen," an official surnamed Cao from the provincial government's news office said of the incident, which, he added, occurred on Tuesday.

A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Papua New Guinea on Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued and no damage was immediately reported

The strong quake hit at 09:14 am (2314 GMT Tuesday), 31 kilometers (19 miles) north of Rabaul in the the Pacific nation's east, the USGS said. It was 18 kilometers (11 miles) deep.