Israel sent teams of firefighters and planes Thursday to contain a blaze near Jerusalem as record temperatures fueled wildfires across the country.

The World Food Program has reached an agreement in principle with Yemen's Huthi rebels to resume food aid to areas they control, the agency's chief said on Thursday.

The United States is sanctioning two Iraqi militia leaders and two former governors for human rights abuses and corruption, the U.S. Treasury Department announced on Thursday.

Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday urged Saudi Arabia to free Raif Badawi, a blogger jailed and publicly whipped for insulting Islam, in a rare criticism of the U.S. ally as he vowed to champion religious freedom worldwide.

Algerian authorities on Thursday placed in preventive detention a former cabinet minister under ousted president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the latest in a crackdown on corruption, the official APS news agency said.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak says he has "cut all ties" with Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier jailed on sex-trafficking charges.

Barak held a press conference on Wednesday and called Epstein's deeds "horrible" and said he thought they were a one-time incident.

A suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State group in North Sinai killed two people including a civilian Thursday, a day after the extremists beheaded four people there, medical and security sources said. 

The death toll from Wednesday's  attack on Turkish consular employees in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region has risen to three after one victim died of his wounds, his family told AFP.

The US House voted Wednesday to block $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other allies, a rebuke of Donald Trump that will likely lead to a veto by the president.

Verdicts are expected Thursday for 24 suspected jihadists accused over the murder of two Scandinavian women beheaded while on a hiking trip in Morocco.

Winding up an 11-week-long trial in an anti-terrorist court in Sale, near the capital Rabat, the defendants are to make their final statements before judges withdraw.