The Argentine government on Friday declassified its files on an unsolved 1994 bombing at a Buenos Aires Jewish center that is at the center of a new political firestorm.

In a decree published in the Official Bulletin, the government declassified "all documents in their entirety" from the probe into the bombing.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held talks Friday with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and the leaders of Egypt and Jordan on the stalled Middle East peace process, officials said.

Kerry was attending an investment conference in Egypt's Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh along with hundreds of prominent figures to jumpstart its economy.

Iraqi forces Friday battled Islamic State jihadists making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit, but the group responded by vowing to expand its "caliphate".

Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred IS holdouts, pounding their positions with helicopter and artillery strikes but treading carefully to avoid the thousands of bombs littering the city center.

Head of the Mustaqbal Movement MP Saad Hariri stressed that the March 14, 2005 “independence intifada” will be remembered as a day when the Lebanese achieved a victory in the name of “their freedom, sovereignty, and national dignity,” while remarking that “protecting tyranny is not the right way to combat terrorism.”

He said in a statement on the tenth anniversary of the uprising: “Dragging Lebanon towards neighboring civil wars is the easiest way to ruin the lives of the Lebanese, who will not accept to become a part of the Iranian empire.”

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday criticized Republican senators for sending a letter to Iran over the nuclear talks, fearing that the political stunt could undermine Tehran's confidence in the ongoing negotiations.

"This is not just an issue of American domestic politics, but it affects the negotiations we are holding in Geneva," Steinmeier told journalists in Washington before meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The Iranian negotiating team will not allow Tehran to be duped in any nuclear deal with world powers, the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday.

After the fallout from an open letter sent to Iran by Republican senators, Khamenei appeared before the Assembly of Experts, Iran's highest clerical body, to praise Iran’s "trustworthy" team negotiating with the "deceitful" world powers.

Around 200 Assyrian Christians protested outside the U.N. building in Iran's capital Thursday to demand action to halt the Islamic State jihadist group's victimization of their community in Syria and Iraq.

IS has "destroyed Assyrian monuments in Syria and Iraq. We ask the international community, especially the U.N., to hold a Security Council meeting" to decide on military intervention, Hovik Behboud, an  organised, told Agence France Presse.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hit out Wednesday at a letter by Republican senators to Iran against the nuclear talks he is leading, saying it threatened global trust in America.

"This risks undermining the confidence that foreign governments in thousands of important agreements commit to," Kerry told U.S. lawmakers.

Iran's top general said Wednesday his country has reached "a new chapter" towards its declared aim of exporting revolution, in reference to Tehran's growing regional influence, while hailing the role of Hizbullah in resisting Israel.

Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the nation's powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said: “Hizbullah and its resistance against one of the armies in the world -- that is to say the army of the Zionist regime.. is one of the Islamic revolution's miracles," he said.

Iran's Assembly of Experts, the clerics who appoint and can dismiss the country's supreme leader, picked an ultraconservative as their new chairman in a surprise appointment on Tuesday.

Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, 83, was a deputy speaker of parliament after the 1979 Islamic revolution and headed the judiciary for a decade until 1999.