One person has been arrested in Ghana after a leading member of the country's biggest opposition party was attacked with acid and later died, the police said on Friday.

Police spokesman for the Upper East region, Thomas Agbanyo, said a man was detained on suspicion of carrying out the attack on Adam Mahama and another is at large.

Police arrested several anti-junta activists Friday for small protests marking a year since Thailand's generals seized power from the elected government, as the coup's leader said the country "may have collapsed" without his intervention.

The sporadic but rare acts of defiance against Thailand's generals came as self-exiled and ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra -- who sits at the heart of the kingdom's bitter political divide -- gave an interview overseas saying he was happy to bide his time to make his comeback.

Up to nine civilians, including an aid worker for a European charity, were killed after rebels withdrew from a village they had seized in northern Mali, armed loyalist and anti-government groups said on Friday.

The west African nation's main Tuareg-led rebel alliance, the Coordination of Movements of Azawad (CMA), said in a statement overnight that "the Malian army conducted the summary and public executions of nine people in the town of Tin Hama" on Thursday.

South Sudanese government tanks backed by helicopter gunships have pushed back rebels from a key oil town, state television showed Friday, as aid agencies warned of "alarming" and worsening conditions.

Tanks are shown firing as a helicopter gunship -- believed to belong to the Ugandan army which is fighting alongside government troops -- swoops over the burning town of Melut in the key northern oil state of Upper Nile.

Iraqi troops fighting Islamic State group forces have cleared a ground route into the country's largest oil refinery, the U.S. military said Friday.

"Iraqi Security Forces and Federal Police, enabled by the coalition, have successfully cleared and established a ground route" into the Baiji refinery, the U.S. military said in a statement.

A senior official in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party on Friday rejected fresh U.S. criticism of the premier as unjustified and hypocritical.

Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the influential foreign affairs and defense committee in parliament, was responding to remarks by U.S. President Barack Obama published Thursday in news magazine The Atlantic.

A priest of the Syriac Catholic Church in the western Syrian city of Homs was kidnapped Thursday along with one of his colleagues, the NGO l'Oeuvre d'Orient told AFP Friday.

Father Jacques Mourad was seized with another Christian originating from Aleppo, who was helping the priest.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said Friday the Kremlin was doing all it could to secure the release of two men that Ukraine says are captured Russian soldiers.

"These are Russian citizens who are in captivity," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, quoted by TASS state news agency.

Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti has admitted he still doesn't know if he will be retained by the club for next season.

Los Blancos end their campaign at home to Getafe on Saturday, but will do so without a major trophy to their name after Barcelona sealed the La Liga title last weekend.

Some 3,000 cases of cholera have been reported in Tanzania, mainly among Burundian refugees fleeing political violence, the U.N. said Friday, adding that up to 400 new cases were being counted daily.

So far, 31 people have died of the water-borne disease in the area around the western Tanzanian border town Kaguna, which has been flooded with refugees, the U.N. refugee agency said.