Syrian President Bashar al-Assad insisted he will not resign before the end of his mandate in 2014 as a car bomb exploded in the capital Damascus on Saturday killing at least three people. "To resign would be to flee," Assad said in an interview with the Argentine newspaper Clarin when asked if he would consider stepping aside as called for by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

A senior Mali army officer accused France Saturday of picking favourites among the country's warring militias after its troops attacked Arab rebels who had captured a village from armed Tuaregs. The intervention came on Friday after the Arab Movement of Azawad (MAA) took the northern desert settlement of Anefis from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a Malian and another African military source said. But the Malian source, a senior member of the war-torn west African nation's army, described the French intervention as "a bit of a mess".

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's party on Saturday pledged to trim the army and ensure a free society if it wins upcoming general elections. "The size of the army must be rationalised taking into account the fact that we are in peace and chances of us going to war are nil," Tendai Biti, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) secretary general, said at a conference in the capital Harare to unveil the party's post-election plan.

A bomb exploded Saturday in a Tripoli street housing the Algerian, Greek and Saudi embassies, lightly damaging a car, hours after a soldier was wounded in a bombing in Libya's second city Benghazi. A security source said the homemade bomb, locally known as "gelatina", had been placed near a car on a street in the central district of Dahra where the three embassies are located. The car, parked outside the Greek embassy, was slightly damaged and there were no reports of casualties.